Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Netanyahu's "settlement freeze"

The ever-so-magnanimous Mr. Netanyahu has declared a 10-month freeze in settlement construction in the West Bank.  Predictably, he's being hammered from the Right, including the pro-settlement portion of his electoral base, who are screaming betrayal and, ominously indeed, are saying it's time to go after him the way they went after earlier PMs who entertained compromise on the issue of Jewish settlements.  (One of those PMs, of course, was Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a pro-settlement extremist.)

But please read the fine print on this magnanimous declaration:
  • existing construction will continue
  • there will be no halt to construction of schools, synagogues, and similar infrastructure
  • there will be no halt in construction in East Jerusalem, which is part of "our sovereign capital."

This is a joke.

But the timing is perfect for Mr. Obama, who now can say that his patience and policies have helped bring about "progress" in the "peace process" - at a time, of course, when he desperately needs to embellish his foreign-policy creds, now that he's about to announce (from West Point, no less) a major escalation of the US military effort in Afghanistan.

1 comment:

Don said...

My thoughts exactly.

The Palestinians, of course, can't accept this non-freeze and consequently there won't be peace talks anytime soon. I wonder if Obama really thought this non-freeze would lead to new peace talks. He can't be that dumb, can he?

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