Way to Go Canada!On Israel, Harper stands alone at G8 summit.
It was meant to be, as Barack Obama described it in London with his British counterpart beside him, another unified mission to storm the beaches of Normandy in the name of peace and democracy.And the Western world’s leaders do plan to use the Deauville, France, G8 summit to present a united front on the conflicts and revolutions of the Middle East. But one of the rare sources of friction has turned out to be therenegadehonest Middle East views of Stephen Harper.
A unified statement on a negotiated path to a Palestinian state had been a key goal of the Deauville summit, in large part because such a statement might have pre-empted an attempt to pass a United Nations resolution that would declare a Palestinian state against Israel’s will. There was some sense that Canada is putting an obstacle in the way of this goal.
“Mr. Harper clearly is the odd man out on this one, and it won’t do him any favours,” a British official involved with the G8 conference said.Indeed, the summit opened Wednesday after a day of meetings between Mr. Obama and Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in which the two leaders made a bold show of having brought together their positions on Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab revolutions.
Mr. Cameron has generally been much tougher in his criticisms of Israel and more hawkish in his support of Arab revolutions than his U.S. counterpart, but Mr. Obama said they had “turned a corner” and built a common front. Mr. Cameron, standing beside the U.S. President, called his speech “bold” and “visionary.”Canada has not been included in such initiatives because of Mr. Harper’s positions.
But others felt that Mr. Harper’s recalcitrance would be less of an obstacle: After all, he has taken positions that side unilaterally with Israel since his first G8 summit in St. Petersburg shortly after he became Prime Minister in 2006, when he shocked delegates by rejecting a resolution calling for restraint in Israel’s attack on Lebanon, instead drafting his own “Canadian resolution” supporting the Israeli cause
.“Canada is clearly at one extreme end of a continuum on the Israel issue, but we are not an outlier,” said John Kirton, the director of the G8 Research Group at the University of Toronto. “It’s fair to say that they will be able to issue a united statement, perhaps without being specific on the 1967 language, that allows Mr. Obama to say he has made progress on this.”
Read the full story here.