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Report:Obama Told Abbas He Supported Dividing Jerusalem

By Philip Klein on 11.4.08 @ 4:12PM

Israel National News has the following disturbing report:

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama privately expressed his support for a new Arab state within Israel's current borders, including eastern Jerusalem, during his meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah this summer.

According to a report published Tuesday in the Lebanese newspaper al-Ahbar, Obama told Abbas that he supports a PA state, and Arab "rights to east Jerusalem" as well.  The sources said Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad "heard the best things they ever heard from an American president" during the meeting. However, said sources quoted in the report, the candidate asked them to keep his declaration a secret.

To recap, this means that he went before AIPAC in June and told a pro-Israel audience that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," then, after Palestinians raised a fuss, he said it was a "final status issue," and then he went to the Palestinian leadership and told them the exact opposite -- that he actively supports a Palestinian state with a capital in eastern Jerusalem.

If, like me, you've approached Obama with skepticism, nothing about this should suprise you. There has been ample reason to believe that Obama's election-year statements on Israel are meant to mask his true feelings on the subject, and now, on the day of the election, we get an account that if accurate, means that all along he was secretly planning to shift U.S. policy in the region toward the Palestinian point of view.

No matter what your position is on the conflict, it should disturb you that Obama is so fast and loose with his words, especially since that's virtually all we have to measure him by. And making promises to both sides is especially dangerous when moderating a conflict that has been exacerbated by ambiguous promises ever since the days of British control.