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Obama defends UNSC resolution position during Israeli TV interview
In a rare interview on Israeli television, the outgoing US President defended a decision not to veto last month’s UN Security Council resolution, which was sharply critical of Israeli settlements.
Speaking to Channel Two’s Ilana Dayan, US President Barack Obama was asked if he understood an Israeli “sense of betrayal” over Washington’s decision to abstain on last month’s vote, rather than apply its traditional veto over Security Council resolutions considered to be hostile towards Israel.
Obama said: “I’ll be honest with you: that kind of hyperbole, those kinds of statements, don’t have a basis in fact.”
He added: “They may work well with respect to deflecting attention from the problem of settlements…they may play well with Bibi’s [Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] political base, as well as the Republican base here in the United States, but they don’t match up with the facts.”
Obama also said that Egypt, in coordination with the Palestinians, was behind the resolution and that “we did not prompt it, we did not encourage it”.
Netanyahu disputed Obama’s account, saying yesterday in Jerusalem: “We have unequivocal evidence that the Security Council resolution passed at the UN against Israel was led by the [Obama] administration. There is no question whatsoever about that.”
Obama also challenged the idea that Washington’s abstention on the resolution was “unprecedented”.
He said: “Our policy has been to oppose settlements. That is not unique to me – that is true of both Democratic and Republican administrations prior to me.”
Netanyahu responded saying that the resolution “speaks about all territory beyond the 1967 lines as ‘occupied Palestinian territory.’ This is a major break with US policy”.
Obama also criticised Netanyahu’s position on settlements during the Channel Two interview.
He said: “Bibi says that he believes in the two-state solution and yet his actions consistently have shown that if he is getting pressured to approve more settlements he will do so regardless of what he says about the importance of the two-state solution.”