Hillary in Egypt to Mollify Angry Arabs, As UN Debates Goldstone

Associated Press TV reports on Hillary Clinton’s about-face on Israeli settlements.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in both a verbal and a physical about-face, paid an unplanned visit to Cairo today to consult Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on how to recover from her embarassing comments last weekend that seemed to support the Netanyahu administration’s intransigence on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank of Palestine.

[See my post here describing Clinton's earlier misstatements.]

Today, Clinton’s statements were unequivocally against settlements, an important issue on which the current right-wing Israeli government has stubbornly refused to live up to its national commitments under the Road Map to Peace:

“I want to start by saying our policy on settlements has not changed. And I want to say it again, our policy on settlement activity has not changed. We do not accept the legitimacy of settlement activity. And we have a very firm belief that ending all settlement activity, current and future, would be preferable, and that is what we have put forth, and that is what we have continued to support.”

In a press conference with the Egyptian foreign minister, Clinton also made clear the U.S. position with regard to Jerusalem, which the current government has declared its intention to continue occupying and from which it has continually evicted Arab homeowners:

“I can repeat to you what President Obama said in his speech at the United Nations and what he said here in Cairo – that the United States believes that we need a state that is based on the territory that has been occupied since 1967. And we believe that that is the appropriate approach. It is what has been discussed when my husband was president with Yasser Arafat, and it is what has been discussed between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Bush Administration when President Abbas has been there.

I think that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that moving toward a state that reflects the aspirations and the rights of the Palestinian people must include all of the issues that have both been discussed and mentioned by President Obama, and that includes Jerusalem. And I would only repeat that (inaudible) such an emotional issue for me. We would not be having this discussion if we had reached a deal, because as you remember, the parameters that were laid out would have recognized a state on the ’67 borders with some swapping of land agreeable to both sides, and it would have also established the capital for the Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, and it would have created a shared responsibility with international support to protect the holy places that are holy to all three major religions of Abraham.

So we want to assure you that our goal is a real state with real sovereignty with the kind of borders that will enable the people of Palestine to make decisions about where they live and what they do on their own. And it is important to us, and we know that it is vitally important to the people of the region and particularly, most especially, the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

Also today: The United Nations General Assembly has been debating the Goldstone report on Israel’s and Hamas’s alleged war crimes during last winter’s Gaza bombardment and rocket attacks on southern Israel. [I blogged on this yesterday.] More than 40 nations’ representatives have signed up to speak on this issue; therefore the vote on the Goldstone report probably will be postponed until tomorrow.

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