Obama: Our Expectations Of Mideast Progress Were "Too High"

The Jerusalem Post reports that getting "the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to negotiate, or even to agree to the framework in which negotiations will take place, 'is just really hard,' US President Barack Obama said in an interview with Time magazine published Thursday, as the president was completing his first year in office. An unnamed senior Israeli official was quoted by Channel 10 as saying hours after the interview was published that Israel warned the Americans that their Middle East strategy would not bear fruit."

The administration "overestimated our ability to persuade [both sides] to [negotiate] when their politics ran contrary to that. Both sides - the Israelis and the Palestinians - have found that the political environment, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation," Obama told the magazine. Tweet