“There’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” President Barack Obama said in a press conference in Thailand Sunday.
Speaking with reporters after remarks he made at a press conference with Thailand's Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, he reiterated American support for “fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people’s homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians.”
While trying to prevent an Israeli ground invasion to dismantle the Hamas terrorist infrastructure, President Obama added that he has told Egyptian and Turkish leaders that “Israel has every right to expect that it does not have missiles fired into its territory.”
He made it clear that his conversations with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi have one objective, “to see if we can end those missiles being fired without further escalation of violence in the region.”
He maintained that the “peace track” still is alive and that the escalation of violence does not allow for the creation of “a genuine peace process.”
He rejected a reporter’s suggestion that the Arab Spring uprisings have failed, despite the rabid anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment in Egypt and Syria, among other Muslim countries.
“Let’s just remember that the exact same situation arose just a couple of years ago, before the Arab Spring,” Obama reasoned. “So I don’t think anybody would suggest somehow that it’s unique to democratization in the region that there’s a conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. That’s been going on for several decades now.
“I do think that as Egyptians, Tunisians, others have more of a voice in their government, it becomes more important for all the players, including the United States, to speak directly to those populations and to deliver a message that peace is preferable to war; that this is an issue that can be resolved if the parties are willing to sit down and negotiate directly; that violence is not an answer; and that there are no shortcuts to the hard work of trying to bring about what I think is the best option -- two states living side by side in peace and security.”