Obama allows United Nations to condemn Israeli settlements

Source: Washington Examiner | December 23, 2016 | Joel Gehrke

President Obama allowed a resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in disputed Palestinian territory to pass through the United Nations Security Council, marking a dramatic change in U.S. policy just weeks before leaving office.

The U.S. did not go so far as to vote for the resolution, but allowed it to pass by abstaining from the vote after decades of vetoing such proposals at the Security Council. Obama ordered the veto of a similar resolution in 2011, but his administration has grown increasingly critical of the settlements in the past year and frustrated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which the Obama team sees as partially responsible for the failure of recent Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power prefaced her statement on the abstention by quoting President Reagan’s 1982 statement that “settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel” in order to situate Obama’s decision in the current of U.S. foreign policy history.

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House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., called Obama’s decision “absolutely shameful” in a statement released after the vote, and looked toward the future Trump administration to “reverse the damage done” to the U.S.-Israel relationship by Obama.

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