Obama UN speech so pro-Israeli it shocked even the Israelis: BBC Report

The BBC, unlike Fox and CNN, aspires to be impartial when reporting news from the Middle East. Today, Jeremy Bowen gives his refreshingly blunt eyewitness account of the Palestinian Statehood Bid at the UN. Here are some of his gems.

Most of the assembled delegates, normally polite but rarely animated, stood up to cheer and clap when the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas came to the podium to declare his application for membership. The American delegation, grim-faced, sat on their hands...

[President Barack Obama] made a speech that was so pro-Israeli it shocked even the Israelis...

 It was noticeable how Mr Lieberman didn't clap at some of his prime minister's applause lines - while the rest of the Israeli delegation worked hard to make some noise in a hall that was otherwise resoundingly silent during his speech...

[Mahmoud Abbas] didn't buckle, so his supporters cheered and even wept when they gathered to watch the speech around a big screen in Ramallah in the West Bank...

One Israeli journalist quipped that all the [US] president lacked was a framed portrait with him on the podium of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement...

The region needs peace, and the conflict at the heart of so much poison needs to be ended before more people die...

Jeremy Bowen's conclusion explains why Mr Abbas was right to go directly to the United Nations:

If the Quartet is finding it so hard to agree on a couple of hundred key words, how on earth are they going to persuade the Israelis and the Palestinians to do a deal that still evades them almost 20 years after they started talking peace?

Robert Fisk in the Independent is also brilliant in his article yesterday A President who is helpless in the face of Middle East reality

Obama's performance was pathetic. As usual, Hanan Ashrawi, the only eloquent Palestinian voice in New York this week, got it right. "I couldn't believe what I heard," she told Haaretz, that finest of Israeli newspapers. "It sounded as though the Palestinians were the ones occupying Israel. There wasn't one word of empathy for the Palestinians.

 And today in Prayers, taunts and weary resignation in Jerusalem.

Haaretz had already referred this week to "President Barack Netanyahu" while the racist Israeli foreign minister said he would sign the speech with both hands. Maybe, I reflected in Jerusalem yesterday, Obama really is seeking election – to the Israeli Knesset.

 That just about says it all. The Palestinian Spring has begun...