Report: Obama was 'shocked' by Israel colonisation of West Bank

US President Barack Obama’s decision to abstain on a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s illegal settlements was informed by his alarm at maps depicting Israel’s colonisation of the occupied West Bank, reported tahe New Yorker.

According to the report, in spring 2015, senior State Department official Frank Lowenstein – the Obama administration’s special envoy on Israeli-Palestinian talks – came across a map he had never seen before.

The map “showed large swaths of territory that were off limits to Palestinian development and filled in space between the [Israeli] settlements and the outposts” in the West Bank.

This depiction of Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land apparently helped Lowenstein see “the forest for the trees”: there was, he realised, “virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained”.

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The map was later shown to Secretary of State John Kerry, and then to Obama himself. Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers, “said the President was shocked to see how ‘systematic’ the Israelis had been at cutting off Palestinian population centres from one another”.

According to The New Yorker, “alarmed by Israeli actions depicted in the maps”, Obama decided to abstain on the December 2017 resolution, “clearing the way for its passage”.