Israel zeroes in on Obama's 2-year deadline

With US President Barack Obama having allegedly set a two-year deadline for the formation of a Palestinian homeland, Tel Aviv moves to bring the US plan under question. Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon on Tuesday floated the idea that the quest for a Palestinian state is not likely to bear fruit for around five years -- which is well after President Obama leaves the White House. Faced with global criticism over its policies against the natives of the land, the Israeli government has snubbed US calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state as well as requests for a freeze in Israeli settlement activities in Palestinian territories. In an address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Yaalon claimed that the "instant peace" plan sought by Obama may lead to the establishment of "Hamastan" in the West Bank. Yaalon insisted that the Israeli occupation and settlement activities do not constitute major obstacles to peace and blamed the Israeli failure to relinquish control of Palestinian lands in the past sixty years on Palestinians who "do not accept that the two state solution". "In their view, one state should be the Palestinian state and the national identity of the other state should remain undefined, so that in the future it can become a Palestinian state as well," he claimed. The speech comes at a time that an unprecedented rift has been developed between the US and Israel since the new government in Tel Aviv rejected the road map agreement. Although the US image has been marred as a result of its decades of unrelenting support for Israeli aggression, Tel Aviv has accused the incumbent president in the White House of meddling in its internal affairs. Yaalon also proposed that a different "road map" be adopted for the realization of peace. "We believe that an almost exclusively top down approach that characterizes the way the Palestinian issue was handled under the Oslo and Annapolis processes should be replaced by a determined performance based, bottom up approach that characterizes the road map," he said.