CBS: The hopes for Palestinian statehood received a one-two punch at the
United Nations on Wednesday with President Barack Obama saying no to statehood without direct negotiations and the French president proposing a time table to restart the talks, giving the Israelis and Palestinians one year to reach an agreement.

“Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN. If it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now,” President Obama said.

Obama said in public what he is also saying in private — that a Palestinian state can only be achieved by the Israelis and Palestinians going to the bargaining table and tackling the hard questions that face them. But he stopped short of directly calling on the Palestinians to drop their plan to seek statehood recognition from the UN Security Council.

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Palestinian Ambassasor to U.S. pledges that the new Palestinian state will be “Jew-free.”

DAILY CALLER: During a breakfast briefing hosted by the Christian Science Monitor on Tuesday, Palestinian Ambassador to the United States Maen Rashid Areikat reiterated his call to create a Jew-free Palestinian state.“Well, I personally still believe that as a first step we need to be totally separated, and we can contemplate these issues in the future,” he said when asked by The Daily Caller if he could imagine a Jew being elected mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah in a future independent Palestinian state. “But after the experience of 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it will be in the best interests of the two peoples to be separated first.”

Last year, Areikat made a similar statement during an interview with Tablet magazine. Asked whether it would be neccessary to transfer and remove “every Jew” from a future Palestinian state, Areikat responded “absolutely.”

“I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state,” he said then. “I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.”

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