Ambassador Susan Rice:
[Added: text of the vetoed resolution.]
"Our opposition to the resolution before this Council today should therefore not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity. On the contrary, we reject in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity. For more than four decades, Israeli settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 has undermined Israel’s security and corroded hopes for peace and stability in the region. Continued settlement activity violates Israel’s international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace."An abstention would have sent a far stronger and far more appropriate message to Israel. Rice's statement will cause some indigestion, but the resolution would have facilitated additional sanctions.
[Added: text of the vetoed resolution.]
2 comments:
Just because a pack of hyenas says that the settlements are illegal doesn’t make it so, because in fact they are not. Israel has the right to annex the entire West Bank if it wants to since its seizing of that territory resulted from a war of aggression launched by the Arabs. The real obstacle to peace is the refusal of the Palestinians to sit down for real negotiations and ink a peace treaty that would delineate the borders for good. Until then, we only have cease-fire lines. There is no such thing as “the 1967 borders” (and there is also no such thing as a “Right of Return”). The pack of hyenas at the UN have not done their homework and have not studied international law. They should know better. So for once, the Obama administration did the right thing by vetoing this inaccurate resolution. And if you think that it’s going to cause the Arab world to hate America more than it already does, wake up! No matter what the US does, the Arab world will hate us as much as they hate Israel. Therefore, there is no need to try to accommodate them in the vain hope that they will like us more. They won’t.
Here is B'tselem's succinct explanation of the illegality of the settlements: http://www.btselem.org/english/settlements/international_law.asp
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