UN to vote on resolution backing 'two-state vision' 

By Barak Ravid 
December 15, 2008
Haaretz
Original Source: https://mail.hudsonny.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046195.html \t _blank http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046195.html

The United Nations Security Council is expected to adopt on Tuesday a resolution calling on Israel and the Palestinian Authority to continue negotiation over the outstanding core issues in 2009, even after the Israeli general election in February and the end of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' term so as to implement the two-state vision. Senior Jerusalem officials said the measure could lock Benjamin Netanyahu into the Annapolis process should the Likud chairman be elected prime minister. 

U.S. President George W. Bush is personally shepherding the resolution, as part of an attempt to enshrine the Annapolis process in a resolution from the highest international forum. Bush believes that this would serve to sum up his legacy with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and emphasize his vision of two states for two peoples. The outgoing president also hopes that the Security Council resolution will render the Annapolis process irreversible and invulnerable to the shock of changing administrations in the U.S. and in Israel. 

In a weekend meeting in Washington, outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza told Geneva Initiative cofounder Yossi Beilin that the Bush administration seeks to give expression to the significant developments that have occurred in recent years in the Israeli and Palestinian context. She added that the situation in the West Bank has changed greatly, with the introduction of law and order on an unprecedented scale. She said the Israeli and Palestinian positions have become markedly closer and it is important these gains are not lost after the Israeli election and the expected change in leadership. 




The resolution that the Security Council is voting on is the result of joint labor on the part of the Quartet - the U.S., Russia, the UN and the European Union - in coordination with Israel and the PA