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How Obama Created the Biden Incident

(Washington Post) Charles Krauthammer - Why did President Obama choose to turn a gaffe - the announcement by a bureaucrat in Israel's Interior Ministry of a housing expansion in a Jewish neighborhood in north Jerusalem - into a crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations? The neighborhood is in Jerusalem, and the 2009 Netanyahu-Obama agreement was for a 10-month freeze on West Bank settlements excluding Jerusalem. Clinton's spokesman publicly announced that Israel was required to show in word and in deed its seriousness about peace. Israel? Israelis have been looking for peace - literally dying for peace - since 1947, when they accepted the UN partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.) Israel made peace offers in 1967, 1978 and in the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Yasser Arafat tore up seven years later to launch a terror war that killed a thousand Israelis. The Palestinians have not once accepted an Israeli offer of permanent peace, or ever countered with anything short of terms that would destroy Israel. Under Obama, Netanyahu agreed to commit to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians; assisted West Bank economic development; and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Secretary Clinton herself called "unprecedented." And Clinton demands that Israel show its seriousness about peace? Now that's an insult.
2010-03-19 10:26:08
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