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New State Department Assault on Israel

(Council on Foreign Relations) Elliott Abrams - Last week the State Department engaged in a remarkable assault on Israel marked by hostility and ignorance in both tone and content. Its five-paragraph statement not only protests certain recent settlement activities but actually accuses Israel of no longer being interested in a negotiated settlement. The history of Obama administration efforts gives the lie to that accusation: it's quite clear that the Palestinians repeatedly refused to come to the table and ultimately defeated Secretary Kerry's efforts to get something going. As Obama negotiator Martin Indyk told Ha'aretz in 2014, "We tried to get Abu Mazen [Abbas] to the zone of possible agreement but we were surprised to learn he had shut down." Moreover, the State Department refers to construction in Jerusalem, Israel's capital, as settlement construction, and refers to Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem as "East Jerusalem settlements." There are no "East Jerusalem settlements;" the term "settlement" loses meaning when applied to Jews building homes in their nation's capital city. Construction in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem is not a problem in creating a Palestinian state, nor is construction in major blocs Israel will keep. With all the misery and bloodshed in the Middle East; with all the terrorist attacks Israel must face; with chaos in Iraq and Syria; with a PLO thinking not about talks but about lawsuits against the UK over the Balfour Declaration, it's remarkable that housing construction strikes the State Department as the critical problem we face. The writer, a senior fellow at CFR, handled Middle East affairs at the U.S. National Security Council from 2001 to 2009.
2016-08-01 00:00:00
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