Palestine - is Obama ready to speak his mind?

President Obama has signalled he is not prepared to accept that tactic and allow the question of resuming negotiations and bringing an end to the conflict to meander aimlessly along the road to nowhere.

Slotted into his speech to the United Nations was this clear warning to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority:

I am not naïve. I know this will be difficult. But all of us must decide whether we are serious about peace, or whether we only lend it lip-service. To break the old patterns - to break the cycle of insecurity and despair - all of us must say publicly what we would acknowledge in private.

The President was politely laying down an ultimatum - resume negotiations immediately “without preconditions” or he would publicly speak out and lay down his proposals for achieving the two-state solution. If those proposals were not finally acceptable to both sides then America would not become further involved in pursuing the two-state solution.

One does not need to gaze into a crystal ball to know that no plan the President publicly reveals will ever be acceptable to the Palestinian Authority.

President Obama will not resile from the demand that Israel be recognised as the Jewish State. He will not stipulate that 500,000 Jews living in the West Bank will all have to be kicked out of their homes and businesses. The President won’t insist that millions of former Arab residents and their descendants be given the right to live in Israel.

What President Obama has done at the United Nations has made it very transparent that America is not prepared to be dragged along ignominiously for any further length of time in pursuing an objective that is all but totally unattainable.

Crunch time is fast approaching and for America the two-state solution is all but dead and buried.

Other solutions and options need to be explored and pursued to separate the warring parties and allow each to live with one another as President Obama so eloquently expressed in his address:

And after all of the politics and all of the posturing, this is about the right of every human being to live with dignity and security. That is a lesson embedded in the three great faiths that call one small slice of Earth the Holy Land. And that is why - even though there will be setbacks, and false starts, and tough days - I will not waiver in my pursuit of peace.

America will not depart the scene but it certainly is ready to abandon the two-state solution if the parties cannot get down to business very soon and enter into negotiations to try and agree on its parameters.

“Dignity” and “security” will soon become the diplomatic catchwords that replace “the two state solution”. After 16 years of trying to achieve the impossible - the new direction being charted by President Obama at least offers some realistic hope of succeeding.