[W]hile Bibi had a number of “conventional” options for dealing with the issue, he chose to go nuclear by making this issue — and his defiance of US concerns — a top story. In doing so, he has undermined the prospects for the very negotiations he claims he wants. [...]

The plan, if implemented, will allow the construction of 844 units, and these units won’t be inside the existing footprint of the settlement. Rather, they will be on the settlement’s southwestern flank, expanding Gilo in the direction of the Palestinian village of Wallajeh (a village in which a large number of the homes are fighting Israeli demolition orders). This new Gilo plan clearly dovetails with another plan to build a new settlement, called Givat Yael, which would straddle the Jerusalem border and significantly extend Israeli Jerusalem to the south, further sealing the city off from the Bethlehem area and the West Bank (and connecting it to the Etzion settlement bloc). That plan, it was reported yesterday, also appears to be suddenly gaining steam. (for a map showing both the Gilo plan and Givat Yael, click here.)

The Gilo plan is thus extremely provocative on several levels. It represents a clear and public statement from the Netanyahu government that it is neither “freezing” nor acting with “restraint” in East Jerusalem. It compels the Palestinians to respond, just as it compels other regional actors to respond. Finally, it has important strategic implications, since the plan, implemented, would impact on border options for Jerusalem under a future peace agreement.

Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth reported — and a U.S. official confirmed – that Obama administration envoy George Mitchell had asked an aide to Netanyahu at a meeting in London on Monday to block the proposed construction in East Jerusalem. This latest affront comes less than a week after President Obama met with Netanyahu for 70 minutes in the White House.

Writing in yesterday’s New York Times, Roger Cohen suggested that recent history “makes clear that the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t deviate from the pattern of settlement growth established since 1967.” The U.S. has its own history of recognizing the illegitimacy of the settlements, and recognizing the role that they play in powering Palestinian resentment and violence, while never undertaking serious measures to pressure Israel to curb them. The Obama administration showed admirable clarity at the outset about these things, but then refused to stand strong behind its demand that Israel abide by its previous commitments to halt settlement growth, and its credibility has suffered for it.

The administration has certainly made its own mistakes on this issue, and I think the Palestinians have been unwise in refusing to negotiate without a complete settlement freeze. But we need to recognize that Netanyahu’s intransigence, born of an ideological commitment to seizing as much Palestinian land as possible, is a huge part of the problem here. Add this to his tendency to provoke crises and humiliate his country’s key patron, the United States, at almost every opportunity, I wonder when the Obama administration will simply stop pretending that Netanyahu is a partner for peace.

Now imagine that a U.S. Congressional delegation visited that country, but rather than criticizing that government for its violations, those American legislators criticized U.S. policy, and the American president for enforcing it.

I think this might be seen in some circles as controversial. Even inappropriate.

But this is precisely what just occurred in Israel, where a GOP delegation led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) criticized the Obama administration’s attempts to hold Israel to its previous commitments to freeze settlements and halt the eviction of Arab families from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to make way for Jewish settlers:

[T]he delegation of 25 Republicans say their weeklong mission to Israel is designed to show solidarity with the Jewish state and promote Mideast peace. [...]

Cantor and others supported Israel’s handling of the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem earlier this week, a move criticized by the European Union and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I don’t think we, in America, would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws,” Cantor said.

The United States and the United Nations both condemned the eviction of the families. Under President Bush’s 2003 road map, Israel committed to “freez[ing] all settlement activity,” and the Obama administration has made clear that it considers attempts to expand the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem to be covered by that commitment.

A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) described exactly what Cantor and his colleagues are supporting:

The families, evicted in the early hours of Sunday from the homes where they have lived for more than half a century, continue to suffer distress and shock. The children are particularly traumatised. The lasting humanitarian impact on the 53 people directly affected including 20 minors cannot be over-estimated. Seeing settlers being escorted into the houses in which some family members were born, was particularly distressing for these refugees.

Not only were they surrounded by Israeli police and security personnel at dawn, their homes broken into and their families thrown onto the streets, they have had to endure the indignity and humiliation of their personal effects being loaded onto trucks and dumped in scrub land at the edge of Jerusalem’s Route One.

On Monday Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, was “summoned to the State Department for a reprimand” over the Sheikh Jarrah project, for the second time in two weeks. Oren has said that Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem “does not represent any attempt to alter the demographic balance” of the area, but Israeli government documents, as well as a substantial research by Israeli human rights groups, reveal his claim to be untrue.

Noting that the evicted families “were given those houses by the UN a few years after they, like tens of thousands of other Palestinians, fled their homes in west Jerusalem during the 1948 war,” Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner wrote that the Sheikh Jarrah evictions “revealed our settlement policy in all its glory“:

It reminded everyone that the issue isn’t houses and zoning, it’s justice and decency — or, rather, injustice and indecency.

Maybe it’s too much to ask Cantor and his colleagues to recognize the injustice and indecency of Israeli policy toward Jerusalem’s non-Jewish residents. But it shouldn’t be too much to expect them not to go abroad and provide cover for it.

The discord over Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem has revealed this divide pretty starkly. To state the obvious, Jerusalem is a hugely sensitive issue. Both Israelis and Palestinians have strong historical ties to the city, and both claim it as their capital. Many Israelis have memories of when Jews were denied access to their holy sites by the 1948-1967 Jordanian occupation, and understandably react strongly against any hint that the city might again be divided.

In this article in the Jewish Week describing how Netanyahu is appealing to the American Jewish community to oppose the U.S. pressure on Jerusalem settlements, the ADL’s Abe Foxman, while acknowledging that Obama’s approach is “not a departure, policy-wise,” said:

What troubles many in the Jewish community isn’t that the U.S. is raising the issue of settlements, but that it looks like Washington is negotiating with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians — and that part of that involves the central issue of Jerusalem. So in a way, it looks like the U.S. is basically predetermining final-status issues in those negotiations.

It’s pretty clear that Israel is actually the party who, by continuing to build up the Jewish presence in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods while tightly constraining Arab growth, is trying to predetermine the final status of Jerusalem. The U.S. is simply asking Israel to stop this until Jerusalem’s status can be decided through negotiations — which has been U.S. policy since 1967, and is the reason why the U.S. Embassy remains in Tel Aviv. Foxman’s claim really doesn’t make much sense unless one is working from the assumption that treating Israeli and Palestinian claims equally is inherently unfair to Israel.

But, as President Obama made clear in his Cairo speech, he does treat Israeli and Palestinian claims equally. This was hugely significant, something that has been recognized in the Middle East far more than here in the U.S. By holding up Palestinian nationalism as co-equal with Israeli nationalism and treating Palestinians as deserving of statehood in their own right, not merely as some sort of consolation prize or as a secondary plot in a Jewish national redemption story, Obama became the first president to really explicitly recognize “two states for two peoples” as more than just a slogan.

As significant a shift as this was, though, it doesn’t necessarily means that the U.S.-Israel relationship must become weaker, or any less special, and I don’t think it should. If anything, that outcome would be a result of continuing Israeli intransigence on necessary steps toward two states, such as ceasing building on land it has previously committed to negotiating over. I do think, however, that President Obama could do a better job communicating this distinction to the American and Israeli people.

“Mass Palestinian immigration.” Thanks to 9/11 and the continuing threat of terrorism, Americans are particularly afraid of mass immigration of anyone right now. Comparing the challenges facing Americans in dealing with unrestricted immigration and Israel’s situation will be well received.

Thanks to 9/11 and the continuing threat of terrorism? You’d think the pro-Israel hawks would be a little more sensitive to the blatant exploitation of the violent deaths of thousands of people at the hands of hateful insurgents and the constant fear of future attacks.

Not only are TIP’s “talking points” shamelessly offensive, they’re also based on a total misinterpretation of the immigration issue in the United States. TIP is debating that the “right of return” principle doesn’t apply to the thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants that were forced from their homes in Israel, which doesn’t really have anything to do with immigration at all. Secondly, the only people who are framing the immigration issue in America using scare tactics like the ones TIP recommends are anti-immigrant xenophobes. Chances are someone like nativist Mark Krikorian isn’t going to help them win over any level-headed supporters. By appealing to the worse instincts of Americans, TIP isn’t contributing much to either the “right of return” or the immigration debate.

In his speech, Fayyad called on Palestinians to “unite around the project of establishing a state and to strengthening its institutions… so that the Palestinian state becomes, by the end of next year or within two years at most, a reality.”

This schedule is extremely ambitious, given that any attempt to build Palestinian state institutions will face the everyday obstacles of the occupation – checkpoints, the separation wall, closures, and the like – as well as the likely hostility of the current Israeli government. While the United States Security Coordinator under Gen. Keith Dayton is currently working to build coordinate the building of professional Palestinian security forces, the United States will have to lead a more robust diplomatic effort to both ease the problems the occupation poses to state building and provide the necessary support to the Palestinian Authority to actually build the necessary state institutions.

In other words, the United States needs to get Israel to trust that the Palestinian Authority can effectively govern and control the West Bank. It’s ironic that this situation exists, considering Israel apparently trusts Hamas – the group that’s committed to Israel’s destruction – to run the Gaza Strip, while not affording the same trust to the PA, which has been negotiating on the basis of the two-state solution since the early 1990s. Via the USSC, the United States has played a valuable role in soothing some Israeli fears about Palestinian security forces, but more could be done on a broader scale.

What Fayyad is proposing will require a crash program that both builds long-term institutions while ameliorating current conditions in the West Bank. These two efforts are complementary, given that effective state institutions will be worthless if they’re unable to function properly due to the restrictions imposed by the fact of the occupation. Working out a realistic plan for Palestinian state building in Fayyad’s timeframe will require coordination between the United States, the PA, and Israel, as well as coordination between executive departments and agencies and Congress and the White House here in Washington. Senator Mitchell’s team will have its work cut out for it.

Beyond the difficulties inherent in state building and the burdens of the occupation, the other huge hurdle Fayyad’s plan will have to overcome is the political split between the PA-ruled West Bank and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. While it’s possible for the United States and PA to confine state building efforts to the West Bank, Fayyad (along with most observers) believe reuniting the Palestinian Territories is critical to the effort. As Fayyad stated in his speech, “ending the occupation and building the state requires ending the split.”

But he’s staked out his own markers for what a successful intra-Palestinian reconciliation will entail. “There is no pluralism in security. The Palestinian Authority is solely responsible.” The state having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is pretty much State Building 101, and it would mean that Hamas would have to renounce its own armed forces for a potential reconciliation to work. For their part, Hamas didn’t giving any indication of bending in their predictable rejection of Fayyad’s speech.

Despite these titanic obstacles, Fayyad is basically on the right approach. If there’s going to be a Palestinian state, then there are going to have to be effective Palestinian state institutions. But despite 16 years since the start of the peace process, too many of these institutions are still grappling with the basics. Making a Palestinian state (and thus the two-state solution) work will require intensive effort by the United States to build these institutions, and there’s no time like the present.

As I’ve written on the Center’s website and posted on Foreign Policy.com, I’ve been on a trip to Israel, the West Bank, and Jerusalem for the past week and a half, and yesterday afternoon I had a dizzying experience in the span of a few hours. The second part of my trip is with a delegation organized by Academic Exchange, in partnership with the Milken Institute and the Yitzhak Rabin Center, and we have had an excellent set of meetings.

Thursday afternoon, we went from the controversial Israeli settlement Ofra to meetings just a few miles down the road in Ramallah with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Saeb Erekat, a chief Palestinian negotiator for years. Then we headed back into Jerusalem, where we got stuck in traffic due to heavy security for a gay pride parade, which, unlike previous years, fortunately was held without any violence.

Our afternoon started out in Ofra with a discussion by Israel Harel, a leading Israeli settler and columnist in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. With about 3,000 residents, Ofra is a settlement northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank — it was one of the first settlements set up by the Gush Emunim movement in the 1970s. It is currently at the center of a legal and political battle inside of Israel over certain parcels of land and housing units — at a time when the United States and other countries have placed a higher priority on the settlement question.

This article outlines the issues at play in the most recent legal case involving Ofra. Israel’s Ministry of Justice confirmed land that the World Zionist Organization, acting as an agent for the Israeli government, leased to a family in Ofra, even though the leased land was actually Palestinian private property. The case is still pending in Israel’s Supreme Court, and it has several complicated wrinkles, like many other similar cases. And this is just one case — some Israeli groups have raised broader questions about the legality of other parts of Ofra, which is distant from the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel and is connected to Jerusalem by a road built for Israeli settlers.

As Harel gave us a tour of the settlement, he had some strong words to say about the Obama administration’s recent push to get a settlement freeze, which he strongly opposed (no big surprise there). Harel said he was worried that Obama was spending so much time learning the names of things like a small settlement outpost that Obama mentioned in a recent public statement. In his view, with the situation in Afghanistan and threats like a nuclear Pakistan, he thought the American president’s focus on small settlement outposts was misplaced.

He made a plea to anyone in the group who might have ties to the Obama administration, saying to pass along a message: the more pressure America puts on Israel, the more the “Arabs would be less eager to come to terms with us.” In his equation, the more America pressured Israel on settlements, the less likely the Arabs would be willing to stop their support for terrorism and incitement. It was clear that Obama and his top officials’ statements on settlements have troubled Harel. When asked if Israelis in Ofra would abide by a possible Israeli order to leave the settlement in the future, Harel said that he did not believe there would be a civil war, but that he couldn’t predict how the younger generation of the settlement’s population would behave. So in Ofra, the fears and concerns are high.

After our tour at Ofra, our group took the short drive down the road to Ramallah, where we had two meetings, one with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad (see the highlights here) and chief Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) negotiator Saeb Erekat. We met Erekat at the offices of the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, and he reiterated a common frame for the issue that I have heard in many meetings with Palestinian officials — there are essentially three options: 1) a two-state solution established close to the lines of the 1967 borders; 2) a one-state solution; or 3) what is happening now in the West Bank, a carving up of small slices of territory in an approach that Erekat called “apartheid” and said was based on “racism and bigotry.”

He also echoed a similar question I had heard during the first week here with meetings with other Palestinian officials, asking — “What do the Israelis want?” From his perspective, even though he has spent more than a decade across the negotiating table from Israeli officials, he was still unclear about their bottom line. In his view, Israeli officials kept on changing what it was they wanted from the Palestinians. Erekat made clear that his own position was in favor of a two-state solution, the first option, but he believed time was running out. “My biggest nightmare is my inability to bring peace,” he said, and like other Palestinian officials, he stressed the importance of what the Obama administration does. He cast Obama’s speech in Cairo in a long-term historical context, saying essentially that this was not just a chance in a decade or so, but a chance in a several centuries to change the relationship between the Middle East and Western countries. So in Ramallah, the hopes and expectations are high.

The issues on the Israeli-Palestinian front are as complicated as ever. Emotions run high on all sides, and in meetings like we had yesterday, it seems very difficult to bring about a comprehensive and sustainable resolution. But one thing is clear — if the Obama team has accomplished one thing, it is that it has gotten the attention of key leaders and constituencies on the Israeli-Palestinian front. Unlike the preceding administration, which first operated on an “anything but Clinton” approach of neglect, the Obama administration has engaged from the start and made clear its commitment to a two-state solution.

After the opening steps, the hopes, expectations, and fears of key actors out here are sky-high, and all parties are watching closely what the Obama administration does next. What we may be seeing now is the restoration of something the previous administration left in tatters — America’s leverage and power to do something about the situation out here, but we’re in the early stages, and a lot depends on the next steps President Obama takes.

Marc Lynch, with whom I’ve been traveling, has more here on why Obama should hold firm on settlements.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to give a speech this Sunday at Bar-Ilan University outlining his government’s policy toward Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s Haaretz reports Netanyahu is expected to embrace the 2003 road map while adding new conditions to its implementation, and rebuffing the Obama administration’s call to freeze all settlement construction. While acceptance of the road map –- and therefore the existence of a future Palestinian state -– represents a significant step by Netanyahu, it should by no means be recognized as a “concession.” It is simply a recognition of Israel’s past commitments.

But by accepting the road map without acceding to one of its key components –- halting all settlement growth –- Netanyahu is in effect undermining the viability of the road map. President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have rightly held fast to a settlement freeze, fending off the dubious arguments for “natural growth” (which is impermissible under the road map anyway). Despite whatever concessions Netanyahu offers in his speech this weekend, the Obama administration should not bend in its insistence that all settlement growth stop and both the spirit and letter of the road map be adhered to.

It seems clear that Netanyahu is playing a difficult two-level game now: he is attempting to appease Israel’s indispensable patron, the U.S., which has taken a harder line on settlements and other issues relating to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, while maintaining his governing coalition in Israel, which doesn’t like the idea of a Palestinian state at all. This balancing act is tricky, and Netanyahu’s track record suggests he might not be able to pull it off.

Some of Netanyahu’s other conditions -– demilitarization of a Palestinian state, airspace control, and the like –- have been discussed as part of negotiations. Presenting these as conditions for negotiation rather than subjects for negotiation simply adds an additional, unnecessary hurdle to restarting serious negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s basically asking the Palestinians to surrender some of their bargaining chips before entering into negotiations.

Netanyahu’s last and most contentious condition is largely symbolic –- the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Considering that the Israelis themselves haven’t been able to pin down what a Jewish state is –- religious? ethno-nationalist? -– putting the Palestinians on the spot to recognize it as such simply confuses the primary issue of Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist, which the PLO has done since the late 1980s. After all, if Israel has a right to exist, who outside of Israel cares whether or not it defines itself as a Jewish state or not? That should properly be a matter for Israelis themselves. Ironically, by demanding the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Netanyahu is basically inviting the Palestinians to become intimately involved in the domestic debate over the self-identity of the Israeli state. This does not strike me as a smart move for an Israeli leader concerned about his country’s long-term future.

From a domestic political perspective, such a recognition demand simply amounts to red meat for Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners. And it may work to keep Netanyahu in power by stalling Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over an ultimately pointless semantic distinction. But for U.S. interests, such an impasse would have deeply negative consequences.

Unless Netanyahu surprises everyone this weekend and fully embraces the road map without further conditions, the Obama administration should stick to its current policy of demanding a settlement freeze. It cannot allow the Israeli government obfuscate and play semantic games in order to break free from the obligations it has assumed over the years.

An undeterred Krauthammer then charged that the president, by recognizing both Jewish and Palestinian suffering, was making a “moral equivalence” (a favorite term conservatives use when they can’t come up with an actual argument) between genocide and displacement. Krauthammer then insisted that the state of Israel bore no blame for the displacement of the Palestinians:

The Palestinian displacement occurred not as a result of the birth of Israel, but as a result of the invasion of Israel at its birth, by Egypt Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan, and by Palestinian irregulars. It was the war of extermination started by the Arabs which resulted in the Palestinian refugees. Now that is an extremely important distortion of history.

Watch it:

The real distortion of history here is, of course, committed by Krauthammer. The Palestinian displacement began months before the Arab invasion of May 1948, the result of a civil war between Palestinian Arab and Zionist militias. By March 1948, some 100,000 Palestinians had already fled their homes and lands. The problem only grew worse with the invasion of Arab armies. While there is some disagreement among historians as to the extent to which expulsion of the Palestinians was a set policy of the Zionist leadership, there is general consensus that various acts of expulsion and cleansing of Arab villages took place.

While I generally concur with the other panelists that the most important thing is to deal with the here and now, at the same time I think one has a responsibility to honestly represent the scholarly-historical consensus, to the extent that it can be gleaned, and push back against the sort of denialism in which Krauthammer is engaged. While we shouldn’t get bogged down in historical blame arguments, we should recognize that stupendously dishonest renderings of history by prominent newspaper columnists play an important role in preventing American political support for attempts to broker peace.

Related, earlier I attended a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center in which conservative scholar/activist Martin Kramer, while discussing the current problem of Palestinian disunity, raised the tired old question of “Are the Palestinians really a people at all?” As an academic question, this has essentially been settled. Of course, the purpose of this question is in no sense scholarly, but purely political. Questioning the genuine “peoplehood” of the Palestinians is intended to imply that the right of the Palestinians to a homeland is not equivalent to Israel’s, and, as with Krauthammer’s coloring book version of 1948, to support the idea that Israel bears no special responsibility toward a resolution of the Palestinian problem.

I was happy to see other panelists jump on Kramer for this, and then Kramer somewhat clumsily qualify his answer in response. Conservative scholars and pundits have been making these kinds of discredited claims for a long time, far too often going unchallenged in the mainstream media. With President Obama’s Cairo speech, however, in which he recognized both the Palestinian dispossession narrative and placed their claim to statehood on an equal footing with that of Israel, the president effectively placed the views of people like Krauthammer and Kramer where they belong: Out on the margins.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

So let’s get this straight: The President of the United States went to Cairo, condemned anti-Semitism, called Holocaust denial “ignorant,” told Arabs to stop demagoguing the Palestinian issue, and quoted from the Talmud, but Krauthammer insists he “uttered not a word” of the truth. Okay.

Meanwhile, for those who prefer their discussions of this issue a bit saner, ThinkProgress recently sat down for an interview with Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, to discuss the Obama administration’s initial foray into the Middle East peace process. Kurtzer said that he thought the administration had “gotten off to a terrific start, because the president, number one, made it clear that the peace process is a presidential priority.”

I asked Kurtzer about the apparent tension between President Obama and P.M. Netanyahu over the issue of settlement contruction — the Obama administration has requested a complete freeze, without exceptions, something which Netanyahu has called “unreasonable.” Kurtzer said that “as part of his establishing [the Israeli-Arab peace process] as a presidential priority, the president is talking about the need to deal honestly with issues that have not previously been dealt with as honestly they might have, and on the Israeli side settlements is the most pronounced of those issues.”

Every administration since 1967 has said to Israel not to build settlements and very few have done anything about it. And so the president is saying to Israel this is not dependent on Arab behavior, this is not dependent on reciprocity, it’s not dependent on anything else except Israeli action and therefore things have to change. I think one can be confident that the president will say the same things on the Arab side, on issues related to their behavior: violence, recognition of Israel, and other kinds of issues that have stalled progress towards reconciliation. But for an administration that’s only four months old, there’s been a lot of very serious work and some very important markers laid down.

Watch it:

I also asked Amb. Kurtzer about some of the difficulties Mr. Netanyahu might face in regard to his own governing coalition, which includes a number of hardline right-wing parties unsympathetic to Palestinian claims and unwilling to relinquish control of Palestinian lands. Kurtzer responded that “Very often in the past, we have been too deferential to the political constraints or problems that leaders have,” but Obama is “a president who says to leaders: ‘Look you got to where you are, you have to figure out how to stay where you are, but we also have policy interests. And you have to deal with those policy interests.’”

Now, Mr. Netanyahu in this case has options. He can say to the president “No I’m not going to do what you want.” And then of course there will be ongoing tension between the two countries, but this does not suggest — and I would argue very strongly against those who make the argument — this does not suggest that there is somehow an intention to bring Netanyahu down. The president actually gets along with Netanyahu. They met a few times before Obama became president and there is mutual respect there. So no, I think this is a serious policy matter. And Obama is going to leave it to Netanyahu to deal with the politics in Israel.

Full transcript:

KURTZER: I think generally the Obama Administration has gotten off to a terrific start because the President, number one, has made it clear that the peace process is a presidential priority. And not only has he done that rhetorically, but through the appointment of George Mitchell, his own involvement in telephone calls with leaders, interviews, and now, of course, the speech in Cairo. As part of his establishing this as a presidential priority, the president is talking about the need to deal honestly with issues that have not previously been dealt with as honestly they might have. And on the Israeli side settlements is the most pronounced of those issues.

Every administration since 1967 has said to Israel not to build settlements and very few have done anything about it. And so the president is saying to Israel this is not dependent on Arab behavior, this is not dependent on reciprocity, it’s not dependent on anything else except Israeli action and therefore things have to change. I think one can be confident that the president will say the same things on the Arab side, on issues related to their behavior: violence, recognition of Israel, and other kinds of issues that have stalled progress towards reconciliation. But for an administration that’s only four months old, there’s been a lot of very serious work and some very important markers laid down. [...]

The other lesson that the president seems to have absorbed is that one needs to be cognizant of the politics in the region but one can’t play, manipulate, determine the politics of the region. Very often in the past we have been too deferential to the political constraints or problems that leaders have. This is a president who says to leaders: “Look you got to where you are, you have to figure out how to stay where you are, but we also have policy interests. And you have to deal with those policy interests.”

Now, Mr. Netanyahu in this case has options. He can say to the president “No I’m not going to do what you want.” And then of course there will be ongoing tension between the two countries, but this does not suggest — and I would argue very strongly against those who make the argument — this does not suggest that there is somehow an intention to bring Netanyahu down. The president actually gets along with Netanyahu. They met a few times before Obama became president and there is mutual respect there. So no, I think this is a serious policy matter. And Obama is going to leave it to Netanyahu to deal with the politics in Israel.

[Netanyahu]’s preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear program seems sincere and deeply felt. I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.”

“Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit.

If Iran’s nuclear program is, metaphorically, Amalek’s arsenal, then an Israeli prime minister is bound by Jewish history to seek its destruction, regardless of what his allies think.

There’s a bit more to the significance of “Amalek” here than Goldberg lets on. It’s true that the biblical role of the Amalekites is essentially to harass and persecute the Israelites, but that’s only part of it. The other part is that the Amalekites — men, women, children, and livestock –get destroyed in huge numbers by divine command (I Samuel 15:3) — something we would probably refer to as “widespread atrocities,” if not outright “genocide” in a modern context.

Interestingly, as Goldberg himself has reported in the past — but for some reason neglects to mention in his article — invocations of “Amalek” are a feature of extremist Israeli settler propaganda against Palestinians and Arabs, something which I’m sure is not lost on Israel’s more right-wing American supporters. In a 2004 New Yorker article on the Israeli settler movement, Goldberg asked Benzi Lieberman, the chairman of the council of settlements “if he thought the Amalekites existed today.” Lieberman responded:

“The Palestinians are Amalek!” Lieberman went on, “We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.”

It seems like an adviser to the Israeli prime minister deploying this historical metaphor against Iran is just the kind of thing that might encourage a rational Iranian regime to try and obtain some sort of a deterrent. It’s also interesting that Goldberg — who has been one of Israel’s chief Iran alarm-bell ringers here in the U.S., always noting with great concern the various utterances of Iran’s leaders against Israel — should have no problem conveying it. Just as with Rick Warren’s comments about biblical support for assassination, it’s the kind of thing that Americans and Israelis tend to freak about when it comes from the other side, but downplay or apologize for when it happens in our own political-cultural context — when we even notice it.

Clearly, Iran presents a challenge for both the U.S. and Israel. But I’m not sure what purpose is served by casting Iran as such an unreasoning, irrational, and undeterrable foe, other than maybe frightening people in order to short-circuit attempts at diplomacy.

Also, read Bernard Avishai and Tony Karon.

“There’s a kindred spirit between Christian Zionists and Netanyahu,” said the Rev. James Hutchens, president of The Jerusalem Connection, a Christian group. “He has demonstrated his willingness to reach out to us in the past and he shares our views. He is much more resistant to giving up land for peace — he’s referred to it as land for terror. I’m looking forward to working with him in any way we can.” [...]

[Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America] admitted, “We have been in contact with a number of Bibi’s confidants, and the impression they give is that this will be a very tough government — that there will be no concessions without a transformation in the [Palestinian] culture. And they said they were very appreciative of our efforts to bring that message to Congress.”

It seems to me that if you had groups of, for example, Arab-American lobbyists openly talking about how they were going to work in concert with a foreign government to frustrate U.S. foreign policy aims, it would be a pretty big deal. I’m almost certain that conservatives would be up in arms. Andy McCarthy would attack the media for not reporting it correctly. Frank Gaffney would quickly churn out a dubiously-sourced report. And Daniel Pipes and the gang at Middle East Forum would be flooding my inbox with splenetic warnings of the Islamist/Sharia/Wahabbi conspiracy to steal America’s vital essence — not that they don’t do that anyway.

As it is, Pipes is already helping to run interference for the new right-wing Israeli government, praising foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s speech yesterday — in which the racist extremist Lieberman declared that Israel’s commitments at the 2007 Annapolis peace conference had “no validity” — as a “brilliant debut.”

According to Besser’s article, one of the right-wing Christian groups involved in lobbying for Netanyahu’s agenda is Christians United For Israel (CUFI), led by Rev. John Hagee. Last May, Sen. John McCain was forced to reject Hagee’s presidential endorsement after ThinkProgress and other organizations publicized various offensive positions Hagee holds, such as that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for teh gay, and that “God allowed [the Holocaust] to happen” in order to help re-establish the state of Israel and bring about the End Times.

If today’s Army Radio reports are true, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister-designate, and Avigdor Lieberman, its likely foreign minister, have made a secret agreement to start building homes on a piece of land called E1.

Just yesterday, Middle East Bulletin published an edition focused on settlements -– one of the main stumbling blocks on the road to a sustainable two-state solution -– and included a primer about and photos of E1. E1 is a corridor of land between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim that has been a point of contention between Israeli governments and the United States for over a decade.

Israelis see Maale Adumim as a suburb of Jerusalem and one of the settlements that will remain in Israeli hands at the end of any negotiations and government ministers have said in the past that they are building E1 to establish contiguity between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim. There have been plans to build approximately 3,500 homes in E1 for several years, but they have been repeatedly put off.

In 2008, however, a police station was opened in E1 and overall, Israel has invested over NIS 100 million in infrastructure in the area. There are already signs in the area bearing the name of the new neighborhood –- Mevasseret Adumim. Establishing such contiguity through E1 would deeply cleave the West Bank at its narrowest point and separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank, leading to what President Bush famously cautioned must be avoided — a “Swiss cheese” state for the Palestinians.

Both Acting Prime Minister Olmert and designee Netanyahu have pledged that they are “partners for peace” with the Palestinians. Olmert signed on to Annapolis, under which the United States was to monitor both sides’ compliance with their obligations, and Netanyahu just signed a coalition agreement with the Labor Party that according to Haaretz includes the stipulations that “Israel will formulate a comprehensive plan for Middle East peace and cooperation, continue peace negotiations and commit itself to peace accords already signed.” Freezing settlement growth and taking down outposts is a Road Map obligation for Israel and the Sharm el-Sheikh fact-finding committee (chaired by now Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell) called in its 2001 report for a complete settlement freeze — including “natural growth.”

As Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) said in a hearing on rebuilding Gaza in February:

I think those of us… who are deeply committed to … the security of the state of Israel—must say, and must say it in an unequivocal fashion: It is incumbent upon Israel to freeze settlement activity. While in and of itself that is not the only part of this equation, the Palestinians have enormous responsibilities; but the notion that Israel can continue to expand settlements, whether it be through natural growth or otherwise, without diminishing the capacity of a two-state solution, is both unrealistic and, I would respectfully suggest, hypocritical.

The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority’s credibility and weakening support for peace talks. “Israel’s actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making,” says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.

Haaretz also reports that “the dispute between the United States and Israel over the razing of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem is intensifying and will likely become the first clash between the Obama administration and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.”

A specific controversy concerns the Jerusalem municipal government’s plan to “evict 1,500 residents and raze 88 homes in an area Israel has designated as a national park, on top of other demolition plans for the Silwan neighborhood.” The position of the U.S. is that the destruction of Palestinian homes constitutes a violation of the road map. Israeli officials say that Silwan “is a domestic issue of law enforcement and that the future status of Jerusalem is only to be discussed in the final status negotiations.”

Israel asserts that the targeted houses in Silwan were built without proper permits, but Palestinians contend that “permits are impossible to obtain and that many of the homes were built before Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967.”

On March 5, in a joint press conference with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, Secretary of State Clinton criticized the planned demolition in Silwan, calling Israel’s activities “unhelpful” and that it was “an issue that we intend to raise with the government of Israel and the Government at the municipal level in Jerusalem.”

The following day, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat “rejected” Sec. Clinton’s criticism calling it “a lot of air,” and speculating that Clinton had been misled by Palestinian “disinformation.”

Rabbis for Human Rights has research detailing how the Israeli government uses various bureaucratic measures to prevent the growth of Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, while at the same time (as reported by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem) facilitating an increased Jewish presence in an around the city through the discriminatory enforcement of building codes.

Israeli officials may insist that “the future status of Jerusalem is only to be discussed in the final status negotiations,” but the clear goal of Israeli settlement policy is to determine as much of that status as possible in advance of negotiations through the creation of “facts on the ground” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In an interview last year with Middle East Progress, Lt. Col. (Res.) Ron Schatzberg of the Tel Aviv-based Economic Cooperation Foundation said “most of the Israeli public understands that the dream of keeping Jerusalem united is unrealistic.

However, there are right wing factors on our side that hinder such a development by building or buying properties in East Jerusalem. The municipality of Jerusalem encourages this phenomenon and the Israeli government provides security to the settlers, which is funded by the Israeli tax payer.

And the American taxpayer, too.

Interestingly, while Israeli Foreign Ministry officials responded to American concerns about “punitive” house demolitions by arguing that “the East Jerusalem demolitions were not punitive, but rather part of enforcing municipal building codes,” last Tuesday, Haaretz reported that Israel plans to demolish the home belonging to the extended family of Hussam Duwiyat, who stole a bulldozer in Jerusalem last July and plowed into nearby vehicles, killing three and injuring dozens. That is, not as part of enforcing municipal building codes, but rather as a punitive measure.

Blair responded that “as far as the effects of business associations and the ethics rules, Ambassador Freeman is going through the vetting that is done with anybody joining the executive branch.” Because of concerns expressed by some of members of Congress, “the inspector general is taking a closer look at those associations than is normally done.”

In regard to statements by Freeman that some have regarded as troubling, Blair said that “those have all been out of context, and I urge everyone to look at the full context of what he was saying.” Blair praised Freeman as a skilled and highly intelligent analyst, and suggested that those concerned with how Freeman’s views may impact policy “might misunderstand the role of analysis that supports policy.”

For one, neither I, nor anyone who works for me, makes policy. Our job is to inform it. We’ve found over time that the best way to inform policy is to have strong views held within the intelligence community, and then out of those we come out with the best ideas. And Ambassador Freeman with his long experience and inventive mind will add to those strongly.

Watch it:

As Spencer Ackerman reports, it looks as if concerns about Freeman’s potential financial conflicts have come to nothing, so we’re left with concerns over Freeman’s “strong opinions.” He’s apparently the only person in Washington not allowed to have any.

Transcript below.

LIEBERMAN: I want to leave that there, I want to go to a different question, Admiral. I know there’s been a lot of controversy over your selection of Charles Freeman to be the .Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The- seven of our colleagues wrote yesterday on the Intelligence Committee wrote yesterday expressing their concern, I’m concerned, the concern is based, to state it briefly, on two points: one I think is about some questions about some previous business associations the ambassador has had to meet and raise questions about his independence of analysis and the second are statements that he’s made that appear to be, that are inclined to lean against Israel or too much in favor of China. In fact, I gather yesterday and the last few days that leaders of the 1989 protest that led to the Chinese governments’ massacre at Tiananmen Square wrote to President Obama to convey, I’m quoting, “our intense dismay at your selection of Mr. Freeman.” So I wanted to ask you on the public record this morning, we you aware of these comments and associations by Admiral Freeman, by Ambassador Freeman, before you chose him for this position and the concern here is that it suggests he’s more of an advocate than an analyst which is what we want in that position. Second, in any sense, what are you doing about the concerns that have been expressed by people about this selection?

BLAIR: Let me just make a couple of points about my selection of Ambassador Freeman. First, as the effects of business associations and the ethics rules, Ambassador Freeman is going through the vetting that is done with anybody joining the executive branch in terms of past financial associations. In addition because of the letter by some of the members of Congress, the Inspector General is taking a closer look than what is normally done with a federal employee so that’s one piece of it. As far as the statements of Ambassador Freeman that have appeared in the press, I would say that those have all been out of context and I urge everyone to look at the full context of what he was saying. Two other things though, a mutual friend who I have known for a number of years said about Ambassador Freeman that “there is no one whose intellect I respect more and with whom I agree less than with Ambassador Freeman.” Those of us who know him find him to be a person of strong views, an inventive mind- in the analytical point of view, I’m not talking about policy—and when we go back and forth with him better understanding comes out of those interactions, and that’s the value that I think he primarily will bring. On the, on the effect that he might have on policy, I think that some misunderstand the role of development of analysis that supports policy. Number one, neither I nor anyone who works for me makes policy, our job is to inform it. We’ve found over time that the best way to inform policy is to have strong views held within the intelligence agency and community and then out of those we come out with the best ideas, and Ambassador Freeman with his long experience and inventive mind will add to those strongly. So that’s the view that I had when I asked him to serve and that’s how I feel about it.

LIEBERMAN: Yeah, I appreciate your answer, time is up but I will say this. Obviously, the intelligence community are not policy-makers, you’re analysts and providers of intelligence information. The concern about Ambassador Freeman is that he has such strong policy views, and look, and you know those are not only his right and his responsibility to express that this position may not be right for him because he will have to separate his policy views from the analysis. I just want to say that I don’t have a particular course to recommend, but having been around the Congress for awhile, my own sense is that this controversy is not going to go away until you or Ambassador Freeman find a way to resolve it. I’ll go back and look at the statements that are on the record, I’ve read some at length, and they’re very decisive even in the context. So, whether I disagree or agree with them he’s very opinionated and it’s a question of whether it’s—I suppose in the end, my time’s up I have to end, but this puts a greater burden on you to filter out opinions from analysis to make sure that you’re giving the President and the other leaders of our country, sort of, unfiltered information not biased by previous policy points of view.

BLAIR: Yes sir I think I can do a better job if I’m getting strong analytical viewpoints to sort out and pass on to you and to the President than if I’m getting pre-cooked problem judgments that don’t really challenge.

LIEBERMAN: Okay, I guess I would say to be continued.

FREEMAN: Mr. bin Laden’s principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

Then another from 2004

FREEMAN: The heart of the poison is the Israel-Palestinian conundrum. When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was told by Saudi friends that on Saudi TV there were three terrorists who came out and spoke. Essentially the story they told was that they had been recruited to fight for the Palestinians against the Israelis, but that once in the training camp, their trainers gradually shifted their focus away from the Israelis to the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and to the United States. So the recruitment of terrorists has a great deal to do with the animus that arises from that continuing and worsening situation.

Kramer is enormously pleased with himself for having unearthed these passages, accusing Freeman of “touting precisely the sort of nonsense he had previously dismissed out of hand.” But any fair and educated reading of the statements reveals no contradiction at all between them.

It’s clear that the original concern of bin Laden was the presence of the U.S. military in “the land of the two Holy Mosques” and U.S. support of the “corrupt and tyrannical regime” that rules there, as Freeman indicates. But bin Laden has always been careful to pay lip service to the Palestinian issue (his 1996 fatwa mentioned Palestine seven different times) for the simple and obvious reason that it is a deeply resonant issue in the Middle East, a well of resentment and poison from which any Islamic extremist — whether or not he in fact really gives a damn about the Palestinians — can quickly and easily draw some jihadist cred.

The second quote actually demonstrates this point pretty well. According to Freeman, rather than peddling the anti-Saudi/American jihad up front, terrorist plotters baited recruits with the Palestinian cause. Why? Because they knew they’d get takers. Because the Palestinian issue makes a lot of people angry in the Middle East. There’s no contradiction at all in saying that bin Laden’s “principal point has nothing to do with Israel” while acknowledging that bin Laden has exploited Arab and Muslim anger toward Israel to power his larger cause. This is not complicated.

Nor is it some kind of marginal view, Kramer’s hysteria nothwithstanding. Back in May, then-Senator Obama recognized the Israeli-Palestinian issue as a “constant sore” that “infect[s] all of our foreign policy,” saying that “the lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions.” Unsurprisingly, the same people who dishonestly tried to paint Obama as an anti-Israel extremist are now after Freeman, and for the same reasons: He voices some inconvenient truths about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and represents a challenge to the treasured neoconservative myth that US and Israeli interests are identical.

The fact that Islamic extremists have made use of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a recruiting tool is not, in itself, an argument for changing U.S. policy on Israel. It is, however, a cost that clearly merits consideration when determining that policy. Many of those attacking Chas Freeman would simply like to pretend otherwise.

The crossings have to open for two reasons. One is, that when we open up the crossings we can cut down on the traffic in the tunnels, and therefore make sure that nothing goes through those tunnels that endangers Israeli security — or, by the way, Gazan security, because some of these rockets misfire and land in Gaza — but also to address the desperate humanitarian conditions that we saw in Gaza…We saw the industrial infrastructure bashed to the ground. We saw the American International School — and we actually have a tape on that — bashed to the ground.

Ellison said that, by creating a black market for basic goods, keeping the crossings closed boosted outlaw elements in Gaza who also controlled the tunnel traffic, which also includes weapons.

Ellison traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories with his Congressional colleague Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA). The two spoke along with Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), who visited Gaza separately, and Daniel Levy at an event sponsored by the New America Foundation and moderated by Steve Clemons, which I attended.

Rep. Baird noted that it was a challenge to “do validity and honesty to what we have seen and experienced, without at the same time being perceived, as is easy to do, as…taking one side against the other. There are clearly, in my judgment, wrongs on both sides, but that doesn’t necessarily justify one action or another…We witnessed destroyed schools, destroyed hospitals, an entire industrial area that had been leveled.” Baird also noted that the Congressmen had visited nearby Sderot, a frequent target of Hamas rocket attacks, which Baird called “unacceptable.”

The challenge, Baird said, is knowing “what the immediate humanitarian need in Gaza, and how do you get the support to people who need it.” Though he praised President Obama’s efforts over the last few months, which he said “gives a lot of people a lot of hope,” he stressed that “it’s not enough to throw money at the problem.”

The money itself will not be of use unless we find some kind of way to have rapprochement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas…and unless you can get things back and forth across the border. And it won’t work in the long run, either in the West Bank or in Gaza, unless some other fundamental changes are made, and we believe those changes have to be made.

Baird referenced a clip from a video shot by his staff (also available on Ellison’s page) during his visit to the West Bank, talking to a Palestinian doctor who lives in Ramallah and commutes to work in Palestinian East Jerusalem, a trip that would normally take about twenty minutes, but currently takes between ninety minutes and two hours because of Israeli checkpoints.

On Gaza, Baird said he believed “what is happening there is a threat to our security — which, given this [Congressional] pin should be my highest priority…but neither do I think it is adding to the security or the prosperity of the people of that region. And therefore I think we need to seriously reevaluate the policies that we’ve seen played out.”

Rep. Holt stressed that “you can’t really in one day address the military doctrine of the Israelis that led to the kind of military action and really total devastation” in some places in Gaza — Holt noted “I have my own opinions on that” — but he did address “the need for humanitarian aid to get in now.” The United States must do more to make this happen, Holt said.

Responding to the suggestion that Gazans should be expected to rise up against Hamas, as some conservatives suggested they would in the wake of Israel’s bombardment, Ellison reminded the audience that neither Fatah nor Israel could dislodge Hamas from Gaza. “People, it won’t happen,” Ellison said. “We’ve got to find another way to deal with this issue.”

In last week’s cover article for the Weekly Standard, Elliott Abrams, who most recently served as President Bush’s deputy national security adviser for Global Democracy Strategy, joins a long line of former Bush advisers harkening back to the good old days of George W. Bush’s first term to repudiate policies they helped shape. He takes a swipe at the “visions, dreams, and endless conferences” that marked the Bush administration’s second term policies regarding the Middle East peace process, and extols the “gritty realism” of Bush’s first term — gritty realism that he thinks should be guiding the Obama administration’s policies on the issue.

So what does Abrams mean by gritty realism?

- Accept that “a final status agreement is not now a real-world goal.”

- Realize that instead what we need is “an intense concentration on building Palestinian institutions in the West Bank.”

- And finally, “rethink the recent commitment to leaping all at once to full independence for the Palestinians, and even to break the taboo and rethink that ultimate goal itself.” That includes reconsidering “links to Egypt and Jordan.”

While this may seem like a more convenient path considering the challenges that lay ahead, not least Israeli and Palestinian political fragmentation and deadlock, it is fundamentally wrong.

For starters, Marc Lynch already debunked the Egypt/Jordan links last month pointing out that no one who would be part of this solution –- the Jordanians, Egyptians or Palestinians -– has any interest in it.

The problem with Bush’s second term policies was not that he got too excited about diplomacy. It was that he ignored the peace process for seven years and then took an essential concept –- the combination of progress on final status issues, implementation of Road Map obligations (including for the Israelis a settlement freeze and improving movement and access in the West Bank and for Palestinians fighting terrorism and building security forces) and the building of Palestinian institutions -– and failed to implement the necessary processes to ensure that progress was made on all three simultaneously.

Let’s take Abrams’ familiar plaint that there is no Palestinian partner for peace, and that that is why the focus should be on building Palestinian institutions. Abrams argues that the Palestinian leadership is weak, lamenting that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “had less help from the West than one might expect.”

The shift away from realistic efforts to build Palestinian institutions and toward international conferences like Annapolis put President Abbas in the limelight, not the pragmatic work of Fayyad and his ministers.

This is a curious argument. First of all, the premise of the Annapolis process, developed by the Bush administration while Abrams was at the NSC, was to spur movement on all three fronts simultaneously. Between the administration and the Quartet, there were four envoys responsible for Road Map obligations and Palestinian institution-building. Real progress was made, particularly in Jenin, on building Palestinian security forces’ capabilities and on economic development .

As Hashim Shawa, the general manager of the Bank of Palestine, who has been an active participant in efforts to build the Palestinian economy, explained in an interview with Middle East Bulletin last month, the Palestinian economy in the West Bank is growing significantly. But it is severely limited by two critical elements: one, the lack of progress on movement and access issues and continued settlement building and two, the lack of a political horizon.

One of the novelties of the Annapolis process was the announcement by President Bush that the United States “will monitor and judge the fulfillment of the commitment of both sides of the road map.” Yet despite the fact that last February a team of former Israeli generals and security specialists offered an alternative system of checkpoints that would ease the restrictions in the West Bank, the number of barriers and checkpoints actually grew after the Annapolis conference. And settlements, which Israel has committed to freezing, grew by 69 percent in 2008 (and according to Peace Now, there are plans to build up to 73,000 new homes in settlements and outposts). These are things Abrams wants to put aside while energy is put into building Palestinian institutions. Prime Minister Fayyad, upon whom Abrams heaps much praise and whose lack of support he bemoans, made it very clear last year, however, that all three must happen simultaneously.

Combine all of this with the fact that under the Annapolis process no envoy was tasked with overseeing the political process (although there were people suggesting such an envoy be appointed) and that it was instead left solely with Secretary Rice. This might help explain why Abrams is “unaware of the achievement of any actual agreement on any important issue on either track” between Olmert and Abbas or Livni and Qureia.

Yesterday’s donors conference in Cairo was an important step in moving forward on Gaza reconstruction. Yet serious challenges remain, including the current division of the West Bank and Gaza.

With these challenges in mind, the lessons for the Obama administration should not be to follow Abrams’ path of gritty realism, which very might well lead to the end of a two-state solution. The lessons should be: start immediately (as President Obama has done) and put in place the necessary mechanisms to translate words into actual progress on all three of these fronts simultaneously.

Bolton responded to this question as if it were reasonable, saying “I don’t know what the Obama administration will do in response” to an attack by the Arab nations against Israel:

BOLTON: I would certainly hope they would come to Israel’s assistance, but I think there’s no guarantee of it. I think the more likely response is to appoint a special envoy and try to negotiate an end the hostilities.

Q: Your short answer then would be “no”.

BOLTON: I very much fear that’s right.

Watch it:

As should be obvious, the scenario presented is ridiculous. There is no analyst on the right or the left who seriously thinks that the Arab states are preparing to attack Israel. (Right now these states are much more concerned about Iran, and the extent to which Iranian power and influence in the region was greatly increased as a result of the Iraq war, which Bolton still insists was awesome.) But, if this never-going-to-happen scenario did actually come to pass, I think there is little doubt that the United States would come to Israel’s aid. (Though, as it has in the past, this aid would probably come mainly in the form of replenishing the arsenal of Israel’s military, the conventional dominance of which is a main reason why the scenario is nonsensical.) But Bolton doesn’t allow any of this to get in the way of trashing the Obama administration with shameless fearmongering about Israel.

To make peace with Egypt, Israel abandoned settlements in the Sinai peninsula, forcibly uprooting residents there. It did the same when withdrawing from Gaza recently. It was prepared to do the same in the West Bank in 2000 and 2001, though it never had to follow through because negotiations collapsed.[...]

If Israel’s government and population can be convinced that a real peace is attainable, then they should be able to dismantle the settlements.

It’s true, the settlements are reversible. I’ve heard this frequently from Israel hawks, and it’s always struck me as a brutally cynical argument. Leaving aside the myriad other ways in which settlements negatively impact the conflict, the fact is that there are people and families making their homes in these places, in many cases having been encouraged to do so by their own government. “Dismantling the settlements” doesn’t just mean taking down buildings and houses, it means breaking up neighborhoods and support networks that have been built up over many years. It makes no sense to me that someone would offer the prospect of the eventual destruction and expulsion of these communities — that is, of course, what their “reversal” entails — as some kind of mitigating factor. To my mind, this only compounds the immorality of the settlement enterprise.

After a nail-biting few months, exit polls are in for the Israeli elections, and right now it looks like Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party is leading Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party by one or two seats in the 120-seat Knesset. If the numbers hold, it will be a stunning upset for Netanyahu, the frontrunner throughout the campaign.

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, with its message of “no citizenship without loyalty” comes in third (which leaves the once-establishment Labor Party a distant fourth). Yet Lieberman did not do as well as some polls in the lead up to the elections had predicted. With a relatively high turnout, especially with winter rains, voters appear to have rejected two former prime ministers, Netanyahu and Barak, in favor of Livni at the last moment.

Preliminary results may take several days to tally in full, as the votes of soldiers and diplomats must still be counted, and will not be certified until next week. After that, President Shimon Peres will hear from all the parties about who to nominate for prime minister. That person will have 26 days plus a possible 18-day extension to form a coalition. If no coalition is formed, Peres can then ask another candidate to try.

Israeli coalition building is always full of public posturing and private deal-making and Livni has already tried and failed to form a coalition after being elected chairwoman of Kadima in September. If the polls are right and if she is given the task, it remains to be seen what will she be able to do with a political landscape that has a majority (63 or 64) of mandates for right-wing parties.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has started to wage his own campaign to be prime minister despite coming in second in the exit polls.

Although the first nail-biting phase has come to an end, the final outcomes of these elections and the outlines of a new coalition will take a while to shake out.