Rabbi Lerner’s Response to President Obama’s Middle East Address is posted on the truthout web site.

The response has some good points, but expects an awful lot from President Obama.  This Palestinian/Israeli issue is such a tough one, that it may be too much to expect that anyone can come up with a solution that both sides will buy into.

As a comment on this article, I reiterated my thought about the position of denying the right of the UN to vote on a solution.

It is interesting that no vote in the UN should be allowed to create a Palestinian state although that is exactly how the state of Israel was created.

How convenient to realize that such an imposed solution is bad policy and should never be followed again just at the point where one side has already benefited from that policy and the opposite side is just now requesting the same.

In a less serious moment, I thought what poetic justice it would be to repeat the history of the formation of Israel.  Let the UN decide on the initial borders of the new Palestinian state and then let the people of the region fight a war to decide where the borders will actually be.  I am not an authority on the history of the beginning of Israel, so there is a good chance that my understanding of what happened has been warped by my upbringing.

Obama may have said that he was only stating publicly what has been assumed privately for a long time. In newspaper reports, I have read that this position has been stated openly by Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush during their administrations.

See the article Obama rejects controversy over his stance on Middle East peace talks.

If you go beyond the video clip above, apparently Obama also said:

“There was nothing particularly original in my proposal; this basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous U.S. administrations,”

Despite what I read on some blog comments, The Jerusalem Post is not in total agreement with Obama, but here is one of their more positive articles about what Obama said, PM: Disagreement with Obama blown out of proportion

In the article Obama: Borders will be different from June 4, 1967 lines, The Jerusalem Post quoted Obama’s speech

“Peace cannot be imposed on the parties to the conflict. No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state,” he declared. “And the United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the United Nations or in any international forum.”

I would think that such a comment needs a lot of explanation. A vote at the United Nations is exactly how the state of Israel was created. Maybe Obama is referring to how badly that turned out as far as creating peace in the middle east. Of course it is fine to say, well we made a mistake with that one, so we are not going to do the same thing to rectify that original mistake. However, that leaves the aggrieved people with with an unacceptable status quo. Not exactly fair. That is why I said the words need explanation. I did not say that they could not be explained.