The only way to read the following is in the light of a piece in Haaretz last week saying that the 11th commandment of Israeli life is Thou shalt not be a freier, and freier goes beyond its literal definition, sucker, to mean anyone who feels that he must be good to his word to others. Or, more precisely, to Others. Larry Derfner in the Jerusalem Post:
Obama knows, like everyone in the world knows, that on the matter of
settlements, if you give this country an inch, it will take a mile.
That's what's so ridiculous about the dispute with the US over
whether the Bush administration agreed to let the Sharon government
build up settlements within certain limits: Even if such an agreement was made, we never held up our end.
How can we tell Obama to honor an unwritten pact that his
predecessor made (or didn't make) with us, when we didn't even keep our
word to his predecessor?…
So who are we kidding? We never kept our side of any May 2003 agreement
over settlements with the Bush administration, if there was such a
thing. In the six years since, settlement construction has eaten up an
additional 2,000 dunams of the West Bank, according to a rough estimate
by Hagit Ofran of Peace Now's Settlement Watch. So our telling Obama
now that he's breaking America's word by insisting on a real settlement
freeze is just plain gall – or, as we call it around here, chutzpa.
