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Obama: Our expectations of Mideast progress were ’too high’

21 January 2010 19:15 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Ziya Agazade â€“ APA. Getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to negotiate, or even to agree to the framework in which negotiations will take place, "is just really hard," APA reported citing US President Barack Obamaâ€™s interview To â€œTimesâ€ newspaper.

Obama admitted that the administration "overestimated our ability to persuade to negotiate when their politics ran contrary to that. Both sides - the Israelis and the Palestinians - have found that the political environment, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation," Obama told the magazine.

Obama said that Israel, "after a lot of time," showed willingness to "make some modifications in their policies," but "still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures."

In the interview, which covered a vast range of topics from internal issues like health care to foreign policy regarding North Korea, Obama said that if he would have anticipated the issues early on, "we might not have raised expectations as high."