Mission impossible: How an old US law could scotch peace talks before they start
Lara Friedman, an expert in US law regarding Israelis and Palestinians and the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that when she heard Abbas’s speech at the UN this year, she immediately understood it might have repercussions. Friedman has for years followed closely all news and legislation on Capitol Hill that relates to Israeli-Palestinian issues. While reading the December 2015 foreign ops bill that added the ICC provision, she recalled thinking, “Holy crap, where did this come from?” She wasn’t sure if anyone else had noticed the ticking time bomb planted silently into the bill. Should the PLO mission in DC be closed, she said, it would take the US relationship with the Palestinians back 30 years. Friedman surmised that may be what the provision’s authors intended: moving the clock back to the pre-Oslo era, when the idea of a Palestinian state was more or less unthinkable in Washington.