Last September, when President Obama invited Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the White House to launch a new round of peace talks, he invoked the great historical figures on both sides of the conflict who had come before them. "Each of you are the heirs of peacemakers who dared greatly -- Begin and Sadat, Rabin and King Hussein - statesmen who saw the world as it was but also imagined the world as it should be," the president said. "It is the shoulders of our predecessors upon which we stand. It is their work that we carry on."
What Obama failed to mention is that for all of their effort, none of those brave statesmen managed to bring the Israelis and Palestinians one step closer to peace. Arguably, we are further than ever from achieving a viable two-state solution to this seemingly intractable conflict.
During his two years in office, President Obama has offered no substantive policy shift from previous administrations, no specific proposals for achieving peace between the two sides, no framework for dealing with final status issues, nothing fresh or new whatsoever save for an unbounded sense of confidence that he could achieve in a year what all of his predecessors failed to achieve in their entire tenures in office.
Reza Aslan, religious scholar, author and United Nations Global Expert
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reza-aslan/the-middle-east-peace-pro_b_776113.html
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