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Obama In Video Message to Israelis: Exhaust Every Opening For Peace

President Barack Obama urged Israeli to exhaust every opening for peace that is necessary and still possible in a vide0 message screened to 100,000 people who gathered at a rally marking the 20th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder in Tel Aviv.

“One the night he was taken from us, he looked at the thousands gathered and said that the path of peace was preferable to the path of war, and he exhausted every opening, every possibility in the pursuit of a just peace,” Obama said in a pre-recorded message. “Tonight, Yitzhak speaks to us still. Let us demonstrate that we expose violence and extremism of any kind, and let us exhaust every opening for the peace we know is necessary, just and possible.”

Despite the recent wave of violence, the president reiterated comments he made during his visit to Israel in 2013, in which he said that “peace is necessary, just and possible.”

“I still believe what I said here two years ago, that peace is necessary, because it is the only way to ensure true and lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians,” he continued. “Peace is just because the Jewish people have the right to live in their homeland, and Palestinians have the right to be a free people in their own land. And peace is possible if both parties are willing to truly compromise and take risks for the only real solution — two states for two people; a democratic Jewish state living side-by-side in peace and security with a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state.”

“A bullet can take a man’s life, but his spirit and his dream of peace will never die,” Obama cloncluded.

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