Israel slammed the Obama administration on Friday for failing to voice opposition to a draft UN resolution condemning settlement construction.
“President Obama and Secretary Kerry are behind this shameful move against Israel at the UN,” a senior Israeli official told CNN. “President Obama could declare his willingness to veto this resolution in an instant but instead is pushing it. This is an abandonment of Israel which breaks decades of US policy of protecting Israel at the UN and undermines the prospects of working with the next administration of advancing peace.”
The White House has not said how it will vote on the resolution, which had been set for a vote Thursday but was postponed.
“The US administration secretly cooked up with the Palestinians an extreme anti-Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back which would be a tailwind for terror and boycotts and effectively make the Western Wall occupied Palestinian territory,” a senior Israeli official said.
A Palestinian official said, “We have nothing to say about this. No President has troubled Palestinians in the UN more than President Obama.”
The New York Times reported this week that Obama’s advisers did not disclose a position on how the US would vote and were holding out until the vote to see how the matter developed.
A Palestinian delegation was in Washington earlier this month to urge the Obama administration to support the resolution. But a senior Palestinian official said they did not know how US intended to vote and any claims otherwise are “totally untrue.”
Two senior US officials involved in the process vehemently deny the Israeli accusations and also said that the US didn’t know how it was going to vote until Thursday morning because it came as a surprise that the Egyptians put the resolution forward so quickly.
“A veto means support of settlement activities,” Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, said after the resolution was pulled, according to the Times. “A veto means abandoning the two-state solution and peace efforts.”
The UN resolution — which calls on Israel calls on Israel to “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem” — was delayed by Egypt after Israeli pressure.
The resolution exacerbated divisions between the outgoing Obama administration and incoming Trump administration.
The Obama administration had been weighing whether to support the UN measure or abstain from voting, which would have been a break from the U.S.’s traditional practice of shielding Israel at the UN and other international organizations.
The Obama administration has grown increasingly frustrated by Israeli settlement construction and it has repeatedly warned it could foreclose the possibility of a two-state solution with Palestine. The admission of an internal debate about the UN resolution illustrated how unhappy the administration is with the Israeli government.
Israel — concerned by the outgoing administration’s ambivalence — reached out to Trump for support. An Israeli official told CNN that his country approached the Trump team after it felt that it had failed to persuade the Obama administration to veto the planned vote.
The official said that Israel “implored the White House not to go ahead and told them that if they did, we would have no choice but to reach out to President-elect Trump.”
Trump subsequently put out a statement opposing the resolution.
“As the United States has long maintained, peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians will only come through direct negotiations between the parties, and not through the imposition of terms by the United Nations,” Trump said. “This puts Israel in a very poor negotiating position and is extremely unfair to all Israelis.”
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi also called Trump and spoke with him about the UN Security Council vote, according to a diplomatic source familiar with the call and an aide Trump. The call was first reported by Reuters.
