Ex-President Carter praises Obama Mideast policy

[Scurrilous]

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"Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who helped broker the 1979 Camp David peace accords, said Israel faced a make-or-break moment after President Barack Obama called on the Jewish state to freeze settlement building.

Obama, who supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said in his speech from Cairo on Thursday that Palestinians must abandon violence and urged them to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. He also said Israel should stop building settlements in the West Bank.

That policy is at odds with the right-leaning government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who says that construction will continue in existing settlements in the West Bank and has not publicly endorsed a two-state solution.

"Netanyahu now has a decision to make," Carter told Reuters in an interivew in Beirut where his Carter Center has observers monitoring Lebanon's parliamentary election on Sunday.

"'Am I going to publicly defy the President of the United States? Not only in private conversations in the Oval Office but to the world audience, or am I going to maintain the relationship that is extremely important to Israeli people of harmony between the Prime Minister and the President?

Carter said Obama's call for a settlement-freeze was "profoundly important" and acknowledged that it was very difficult for Israelis to accept that.

"I don't see any possibility of having peace between Israel and the Palestinians if Israel continues to expand its settlements," he said."

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