Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy: “Rightly or wrongly, Obama has made the settlement issue a test of his credibility, and if he backs down then all the progress he has made will wash away instantly. That makes this a pivotal…
Meanwhile, barely a peep in the US media. Yesterday the Guardian reported that Israel is directly challenging the Obama administration by moving forward with a plan to build 240 new homes in a West Bank settlement. The Wall Street Journal…
David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is an important member of the Israel lobby. He wrote a book on the “peace process” lately with the Holy Avatar of the lobby, Dennis Ross. The avatar has lately…
What’s Marty Peretz’s game? Elena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, gave a speech in Norway. The New Republic picked it up, and Peretz called it “wonderful.” Bonner has a harsh streak. Here she is on the two-state solution: [C]reated next…
Tony Judt has an important piece on today’s Times Op-Ed page with bad news: the settlements are not going anywhere, they represent 10 percent of the Jewish population, and the belief that they are going away is “fictions on the…
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post dug up a 1979 State Department memo that says that the Israeli settlements violate international law. The legal opinion has never been contradicted, says its author. Kessler got pushback from the Israelis: Israeli Embassy…
When I was in Gaza, Norman Finkelstein called Netanyahu a “truck driver.” He was referring to Netanyahu’s lack of grace, and absence of literary sensibility. At Huffpo, Daniel Levy echoes the thought in describing Netanyahu’s “baby step”: Even the historical…
AIPAC has hailed the Netanyahu speech as a “bold” step. But six years ago Netanyahu wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he called for “A Limited Palestinian State.” Bibi in June 2003: The guiding principle is this: The Palestinians…
Obama welcomed the Netanyahu speech: “The president welcomes the important step forward in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “The president is committed to two states, a Jewish state of Israel and an independent Palestine,…