During a question and answer session after Mitt Romney’s AIPAC speech this morning, the former Massachusetts governor was asked what his plans and ideas are for advancing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But Romney didn’t have any ideas and instead said peace should be put off because there’s too much going on in the Middle East:
Q: What are your plans, sir, to, or your ideas rather to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?
ROMNEY: Boy that’s a tough one in these conditions of course because you have questions about whether a unity government is going to be formed between Fatah and Hamas and obviously if that were to occur that has a dramatic implications about the potential for discussions and negotiations. And then of course you have Egypt in tumult, Jordan feeling some fragility right now. You have Syria of course in tumult and I mean talking about a peace process right now is a bit like setting up a tent in the middle of a hurricane. So there has to be some settling down of a number of questions I think before the peace process is going to get its legs again.
Watch the clip:
Romney may want to wait on the peace process, but as Sarah Wildman reported for PBS last month, Jerusalem territorial expert Daniel Seidemann said the window of opportunity for implementing the two-state solution is closing rapidly:
Settlement activity, Seidemann said, after a quiet and unheralded seven-month freeze that began in March 2009, has increased in the last 18 months to levels not seen since the 1970s. “While under current circumstances, the implementation of the two state solution in East Jerusalem is still, with difficulty, possible. Our projections indicate that this will not be the case by the end of 2013.”
Indeed, President Obama appears to recognize this reality. “I make no apologies for pursuing peace,” Obama said in his AIPAC speech on Sunday. “The reality that Israel faces — from shifting demographics, to emerging technologies, to an extremely difficult international environment — demands a resolution of this issue,” he said.