Israel went right on planning housing for tens of thousands more settlers while absorbing “more than one half of our entire global foreign military financing,”
.. But let’s be clear on the settlements. They may or may not constitute a primary cause of the conflict, but they do demonstrate Israel’s decades-long commitment to building in a way that makes a viable Palestinian state impossible. You cannot be a Palestinian in the West Bank watching the steady growth of Israeli settlements, outposts and barriers without concluding that Israel’s occasional murmurings about a two-state peace are mere camouflage for a project whose objective is to control all the land in perpetuity without annexing it. Annexation would be awkward; some 2.75 million Palestinians would demand the vote. Better to play games and let millions of strangers squirm.
Kristof on Kerry’s Israel Speech
I thought Kerry’s speech was excellent, the best explanation a senior official has made about why settlements are poison. As Kerry notes, Israel is on a path that increasingly makes a two-state solution impossible, and at that point if it wants to remain a Jewish state it will not be a democracy and will have no chance of enduring peace.
It’s not that if the settlement policy ended, peace would break out. Bibi Netanyahu is right that there are other obstacles on the Palestinian side. But we should work toward a situation where peace is possible in 20 years — and settlements foreclose that possibility.
.. it’s already striking that the most consistent supporters of current Israeli policies are not American Jews but rather American evangelicals. That trend is likely to continue under Trump and his extremist pick for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a strong supporter of settlements.
The Obama Administration’s Final Warning On The Middle East Peace Process
The vain and bullying persona that Donald Trump projects online and in three dimensions is consistent: he is convinced that all that is required to restore the globe to a state of order and prosperity is his own good self. “The world was gloomy before I won—there was no hope,” he tweeted on the day after Christmas. “Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!” He is both the Prince of Peace and the savior of the Nasdaq index.
.. Trump is prepared to insert himself into any argument—even if it is a century old and endlessly complex—with half a thought and a hundred and forty characters.
.. Daniel Kurtzer, who was Ambassador to Egypt under Bill Clinton and Ambassador to Israel under George W. Bush, told me that he was appalled both by Trump’s presumption and Netanyahu’s collusion.
“We are in uncharted waters—a President-elect trying to make policy and a foreign leader conspiring with that President-elect to undercut a sitting President,” Kurtzer said. “But such are the times.
.. The political center of gravity in Israel has been moving to the right for many years, so much so that the greatest threat to Netanyahu’s personal power comes from politicians and parties who support some form of annexation of the West Bank or some form of one-state resolution in which the Palestinians do not have full civil rights. And even though Netanyahu has paid lip service to a final settlement and two states for two peoples, he always, given a choice between power and principle, acts to preserve his power.
.. the Administration had been “alarmed” by many of Trump’s appointments to his national-security team—notably the appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser—but the selection of Friedman was “over the top.”
.. “He put his political and charitable support directly into the settlements; he compares Jews on the left to the kapos in the concentration camps—it just put it over the top.”
.. The Israelis—right, center, and left—have long been wary of the U.N., a venue that once upheld the notion that Zionism is a form of racism and passes relatively frequent condemnations of Israeli actions, but which does not have the political wherewithal to sanction Russia for bombing hospitals and aide convoys in Syria or countless other states for their more heartless and illegal transgressions.
.. Netanyahu’s argument, and that of those to his right as well, is that Israel cannot relinquish the “strategic depth” provided by the West Bank when the “neighborhood” is either in flames (Syria), unstable (Jordan, Egypt), or hostile (take your pick).
Moreover, he argues that the Palestinians, thanks to the anti-Israeli incitement of their schoolbooks and politicians and propaganda, will never be satisfied with a two-state solution; what they want is greater Palestine, all of Palestine—not merely Ramallah and Jenin and Nablus but Haifa and Safed and Afula. That is Netanyahu’s argument for the status quo.
.. he went on, what the Secretary of State failed to recognize was that the conflict with the Palestinians “has always been about Israel’s right to exist.”
John Kerry and Israel: Too Little and Too Late
During Mr. Obama’s eight years in office, the illegal Israeli settler population has swelled by 100,000, to well over 600,000. Simultaneously, for eight years Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has directed a barrage of calculated slights, insults and acts of disrespect at the president of the United States. The Obama administration has finally reacted with Mr. Kerry’s speech and by allowing Resolution 2334, which condemns Israeli settlement expansion, to pass in the United Nations Security Council. By doing so, the United States simply acted in accordance with international law and the global consensus of nearly 50 years.
.. A recent poll conducted by the Brookings Institution found that 46 percent of Americans believed that their government should impose sanctions against Israel over the construction of new settlements; the figure rises to 60 percent among Democrats.
.. He has accused the Obama administration of a “shameful ambush,” as if the resolution were a dirty trick instead of a statement in line with longstanding American policy and international law. And his government has vowed to press forward with plans to build even more settlements.