Transcript

MARTIN INDYK: [President-Elect Obama] said throughout the campaign that he was going to make the Palestinian issue a priority of his from day one of his administration, but I don’t think that he, or any of us, ever imagined that he would be facing such a difficult crisis on day one involving the Palestinian issue.

It’s a very complicated problem that he is going to face because this issue is going to present itself not just as a hot crisis between the Israeli Army and Hamas in Gaza but because this conflict has much broader dimensions. Gaza is, in a sense, on the seam-line of a series of conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, between the Arab states and Iran because Hamas is a proxy of Iran as it seeks to spread its influence into the Middle East heartland, and, more broadly, between the Muslim World and the West or, more specifically, the battle of Islamic extremists -- Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda -- some of them backed by Iran, that are bent on challenging the West. This plays itself out in Gaza as well. So, for all of these reasons, the new President is going to have to address this issue.

He, of course, has so many other issues that he is going to have to deal with. Most important of all is the economy here, the global recession. You are fully aware of all the other issues on his plate, but this one has now forced itself onto his agenda in a way that will require his attention and, more particularly, the attention of Secretary of State-Designate Hilary Clinton.

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