Ethan Bronner’s tone is inimitable. Israel currently has 2,500 housing units under construction in the West Bank–every single itty-bitty one illegal. But apparently those aren’t quite enough. As Bronner writes today in the NYT,
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will approve the construction of hundreds of new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank in the coming days as a prelude to a building freeze of six to nine months aimed at restarting peace talks with the Palestinians, senior Israeli officials said Friday.
The plan — meant to meet the contradictory demands of Mr. Netanyahu’s own Likud Party and those of Palestinians, the Arab world and the West — immediately drew protests from the Obama administration and the Palestinian Authority.
“As the president has said before,” the White House said in a statement, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion, and we urge that it stop. We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate.”
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, meeting in Paris with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, said the plan was “not acceptable.”
One needn’t be a staunch anti-Zionist to be a little puzzled by the ongoing charade. Netanyahu approves more settlement construction. Paymaster Obama “urge[s]” that it stop, so that “peace negotiations” can go on. And Uri Avneri burbles that the BDS campaign will simply drive Israelis into the arms of the hard-right. Last I checked Netanyahu wasn’t running about with Ta’ayush or giving medals to the Yesh Gvul activists. In fact, he is the hard-right: he’s building illegal settlements willy-nilly, and in exchange for a settlement freeze that isn’t a settlement freeze, “Israel expects gestures from several Arab states, including the reopening of Israeli offices and flyover rights for Israeli planes on their way to Asia,” as Bronner, with implacable calm, puts it [Iran’s nuclear facilities are in the path of those “Israeli [war] planes”].
Amidst this irredentist madness, Bronner calmly writes of how “While the new units and exemption to Jerusalem could prove deeply problematic for the Obama administration and the Palestinian Authority, American officials seem to believe they are on the verge of an announcement in the next few weeks of a renewed Middle East peace process.”
Please tell me that “seem to believe” is just mockery; Bronner must know better. Right?
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
[…] The Silliness of Ethan Bronner Ethan Bronner’s tone is inimitable. Israel currently has 2,500 housing… […]