Netanyahu's Jewish-State Gambit

P. David Hornik
American Spectator
14 October '10

In May 2009 the Obama administration called on Israel to stop all settlement activity in the West Bank, including "natural growth." President Obama assumed that this settlement activity was the basic obstacle to peace with the Palestinians -- even though since 1992 there had been both on-and-off Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and West Bank settlement, and the Palestinians had never made the former conditional on a stoppage of the latter.

In November 2009, with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas boycotting talks with Israel since the Obama administration had made its demand about settlements, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu imposed an unprecedented ten-month moratorium on Israeli construction in the West Bank.

Yet Abbas continued to boycott talks. He only, finally, consented to join them a few weeks before the ten-month freeze expired -- and said he was making his further participation conditional on an extension of the freeze. This took no little chutzpah. For about nine months, the freeze had apparently made no difference to him; now he was saying he couldn't do without it.

Seemingly, since getting him to remain in the peace talks, or participate in them at all, was so difficult, the logical conclusion was that the talks, and the "peace" they were supposed to conduce to, weren't all that important to him.

(Read full article)

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