On Monday George Mitchell met with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in New York to continue the ongoing US-Israeli discussion on settlements. Ha’aretz reported on an interesting moment from the meeting in their article “Obama: U.S. will be ‘honest’ with Israel on settlements“:
The disagreement over the understandings concerning the settlements produced an embarrassing encounter in London last week during a meeting between Mitchell, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor and a number of Netanyahu’s advisers.
At the meeting, the Israelis claimed there was a letter between former president George W. Bush and former prime minister Ariel Sharon stating that the settlement blocs would remain in Israeli hands, so construction is permitted there. Mitchell showed the Israelis that one of the letter’s sections discusses the principle of two states for two peoples. “That is also written in the letter – do you agree to that?” he asked.
We’ve been following the ongoing question of whether the Obama administration was going to honor the Bush/Sharon agreements, which have been incredibly important to Israel and almost totally ignored here in the US. It’s good to see Obama is abandoning this horrible policy, and calling out the Israelis for their hypocritical stance.
Update: The Times joins the discussion with this Ethan Bronner article – “Israelis Say Bush Officials Agreed to Settlement Building.” It outlines much of the same story the Washington Post reported on a couple weeks ago. Basically, the Israelis are upset that Obama won’t honor a Bush promise that made no sense in the first place. The contradiction of this agreement is demonstrated most clearly when Bronner explains that Israel only signed the Road Map, thus agreeing to freeze all settlement growth, because they thought they had an agreement with the US on how they could continue expanding the settlements. Bronner:
The Israeli officials said that repeated and ongoing discussions with Bush officials starting in late 2002 gave unambiguous permission to build within the boundaries of certain settlement blocs as long as no new land was expropriated, no special economic incentives were offered to move to settlements and no new settlements were built. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity about an issue of such controversy between the two governments.
When Israel signed onto the so-called roadmap for a two-state solution in 2003, which says its government “freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements),” the officials said, it was after a detailed discussion with Bush officials that laid out those explicit limits.
