John Kerry

However I also think that the situation itself is getting progressively worse and a solution harder.

The public differences are the strong comments made IN ISRAEL that most US politicians have been too timid to make even in the US. I think the call made by Obama to the students to think of the future and his call that they try to look at things from the eyes of the Palestinians are interesting. I wonder if the idea is that the only thing that would move Netanyahu (and other Israeli leaders) is a groundswell of demand for making peace from the population.

I also think it is interesting that Obama has given the lead on this to Kerry rather than a special envoy -- like Mitchell or Ross who were sequentially involved when Clinton was SOS. Though Obama might have had to do this because diplomacy was not Clinton's strength and she quickly alienated the entire Arab world, putting the SOS in the lead does signal seriousness. That the SOS is Kerry, who is well respected on both sides helps, but this is a thorny mess.

Years ago, when pushing Kerry/Feingold, Kerry spoke of the different Iraqi factions needing to understand that we would be there for only a finite time and that they needed to create the political solution that they could then live with. He said that until they knew we were not staying, all sides were avoiding making any compromises because all thought time on their side and thought they could get more of what they wanted by holding out. The latter part of that has a part in the calculations here. The extremes on both sides have delusional ideas that they could end up in control in a one state solution - with nothing given to the other. There are many on both sides that have already called a two state solution dead. Could the accelerated building of settlements - something that by definition make the two state solution harder - be based on some elements in Israel more willing to sacrifice being a democracy where everyone has voting rights than to really give up land?

A few weeks ago, I attended an interesting lecture given by the professor who has been an archivist of the George Marshall papers on Marshall and his disapproval of the UN resolution that gave Israel its birth. The reasons included that he was convinced that it could lead to a second holocaust as it was predicted the Arabs would attack. The other reason had to do with the fact that even then - the assignment of land to the majority population on it resulted in two states neither of which were contiguous in a land mass the size of Vermont. The General Assembly with that vote charged the Security Council with implementing a plan that would not lead to war - something that was not done because it was deemed not possible. Truman ignored his advise and voted for it - mostly because their was huge support from Americans. What struck me is that the roots of the problem were not - as I always had thought - in the lands won in 1965, but that from the beginning, it was going to be hard to create two states that could both honor the rights of all.