Israel Matzav: Oh my! WaPo slams Obama for painting himself into a corner over a 'settlement freeze'

Oh my! WaPo slams Obama for painting himself into a corner over a 'settlement freeze'

Perhaps Jackson Diehl - who was never pro-Israel - may have had an epiphany last month when he met with 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen. In Monday's Washington Post, he slams the Obama administration for painting itself into a corner regarding the 'settlement freeze.'

This absolutist position is a loser for three reasons. First, it has allowed Palestinian and Arab leaders to withhold the steps they were asked for; they claim to be waiting for the settlement "freeze" even as they quietly savor a rare public battle between Israel and the United States. Second, the administration's objective -- whatever its merits -- is unobtainable. No Israeli government has ever agreed to an unconditional freeze, and no coalition could be assembled from the current parliament to impose one.

Finally, the extraction of a freeze from Netanyahu is, as a practical matter, unnecessary. While further settlement expansion needs to be curbed, both the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments have gone along with previous U.S.-Israeli deals by which construction was to be limited to inside the periphery of settlements near Israel -- since everyone knows those areas will be annexed to Israel in a final settlement. Before the 2007 Annapolis peace conference organized by the Bush administration, Saudi Arabia and other Arab participants agreed to what one former senior official called "the Google Earth test"; if the settlements did not visibly expand, that was good enough.

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Israel Matzav: Oh my! WaPo slams Obama for painting himself into a corner over a 'settlement freeze'