Low priority for Palestinian issue if Obama elected US president

The Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has decided not to treat the Palestinian issue as a top priority if he wins the Nov. 4 election, debkafile‘s Washington exclusive sources reveal. The Middle East experts on the senator’s transition team advised him there was no hurry to address the issue in the early stages of his presidency because the Palestinian side has no leaders authoritative enough to sign a peace accord. Their internal divisions are too profound for such a leader to emerge in the foreseeable future, said those advisers.
Their chief recommendation was for the next president to assign top priority to a nuclear Iran and its relations with Syria, according to our sources.
While nothing is being said publicly, debkafile‘s sources report that some of Senator Obama’s advisers have remarked that Presidents Clinton and Bush discovered too late that over-involvement in the Palestinian-Israel dispute achieved nothing and in fact caused them to neglect more consequential Middle East business.
Their misplaced concern hurt their reputations for effectiveness as international statesmen.
By setting the Palestinian question aside, the Democratic candidate if elected will effectively terminate Bush’s 2007 Annapolis initiative and the subsequent on-and-off negotiations with Palestinian leaders conducted by outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert and his would-be successor foreign minister Tzipi Livni.
Those talks anyway achieved very little.
This was admitted in Amman Thursday, Oct. 17, by leading Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia who put the blame for the lack of progress on Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas.