Israel Envoy: U.S. Ties in Crisis

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Israel Envoy: U.S. Ties in Crisis
Topic Started: Mar 15 2010, 10:44 AM (67 Views)
bob-bob-bob	Mar 15 2010, 10:44 AM Post #1
Advanced Member Posts: 735 Group: Advanced Members Member #4,816 Joined: July 27, 2008	Updated March 15, 2010 Israeli Envoy: U.S. Ties in 'Crisis of Historic Proportions' FOXNews.com Israeli media carried Ambassador Michael Oren's remarks as officials said the Obama administration is pressuring the Jewish nation to scrap the east Jerusalem building project that has ignited turmoil U.S.-Israeli relations have hit a 35-year low over a contentious east Jerusalem building project that threatens to derail peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians, Israel's envoy to Washington was quoted as saying Monday. Ambassador Michael Oren's remarks clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's assurances that the political turmoil resulting from the settlement announcement, which the Obama administration slammed as "an insult," was under control. "Israel's ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975 ... a crisis of historic proportions," the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted Oren as saying to Israeli diplomats in a phone briefing over the weekend. Israeli officials said that the U.S. is pressing the Jewish nation to scrap the east Jerusalem building project. Competing Israeli and Palestinian claims to east Jerusalem were feeding tensions in the holy city, where Arabs and Jews maintain an uneasy coexistence and sometimes clash. Police were out in large numbers in the volatile Old City in expectation of renewed clashes related links White House Ups Ante With New Criticism of Israel Top U.S. officials have lined up in recent days to condemn the Israeli plan to build 1,600 apartments in east Jerusalem, the sector of the holy city that the Palestinians claim for their future capital. The project caused a storm in Washington because it was announced during Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the region last week, badly embarrassing the U.S. and complicating its efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. The Palestinians immediately threatened not to join upcoming U.S.-brokered talks meant to jumpstart negotiations after a 14-month breakdown. U.S. officials have not disclosed what steps they want Israel to take to ease the crisis, and Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev refused to comment Monday. But Israeli newspapers and radio stations said Washington wants the construction project canceled. They also reported that the U.S. wants Israel to make a significant confidence-building gesture toward the Palestinians. Suggestions included releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails; turning over additional areas of the West Bank to Palestinian control; removing some of the roadblocks hampering the movement of Palestinians and goods in the West Bank; and easing the blockade on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, media reported. Washington, they added, also has demanded that Israel officially declare that talks with the Palestinians will deal with all the conflict's big issues, including final borders, the status of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven from their homes during the war that followed Israel's 1948 creation. The unusually harsh U.S. criticism has undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to suggest that the crisis had passed. Israeli newspapers reported Monday that Israel's ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told Israeli diplomats in a conference call Saturday night that their country's relations with the U.S. haven't been so tense since 1975. The Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment. East Jerusalem, home to Muslim and Jewish holy sites, historically has been the most explosive issue dividing Israelis and Palestinians. Israel annexed the territory after capturing it in the 1967 Mideast war but the Palestinians and the international community have not recognized that move and consider the Jewish neighborhoods Israel has built there to be illegal settlements. Although previous Israeli leaders have agreed to the principle of sharing the disputed holy city, Netanyahu objects to partitioning Jerusalem and wants to keep the city united under Israeli control. He also exempted east Jerusalem from a November order limiting settlement construction for 10 months. The order, issued under intense U.S. pressure, applies only to the West Bank. The Palestinians want the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip to be part of their hoped-for state. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/15/reports-pressuring-israel-scrap-building-plan/ Edited by bob-bob-bob, Mar 15 2010, 10:47 AM.



gibby62	Mar 18 2010, 12:31 PM Post #2
Adopted Child of God Posts: 2,987 Group: Advanced Members Member #4,933 Joined: October 29, 2008	http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/18/obamateurism-of-the-day-232/ Obamateurism of the Dayposted at 8:05 am on March 18, 2010 by Ed Morrissey Obamateurism, we turn to an unusual source: The New Republic. The center-Left magazine published an essay yesterday by Yossi Klein Halevi that dresses down Barack Obama for setting back Israeli-Palestinian peace talks 20 years, thanks to his amateurish blundering on the status of construction around Jerusalem. And it’s Halevi and TNR that uses the term “amateurish”: The return of menace to Jerusalem is not because a mid-level bureaucrat announced stage four of a seven-stage process in the eventual construction of 1,600 apartments in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood in northeast Jerusalem. Such announcements and building projects have become so routine over the years that Palestinians have scarcely responded, let alone violently. In negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, the permanence of Ramat Shlomo, and other Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, has been a given. Ramat Shlomo, located between the Jewish neighborhoods of French Hill and Ramot, will remain within the boundaries of Israeli Jerusalem according to every peace plan. Unlike the small Jewish enclaves inserted into Arab neighborhoods, on which Israelis are strongly divided, building in the established Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem defines the national consensus. Why, then, the outbreak of violence now? Why Hamas’s “day of rage” over Jerusalem and the Palestinian Authority’s call to gather on the Temple Mount to “save” the Dome of the Rock from non-existent plans to build the Third Temple? Why the sudden outrage over rebuilding a synagogue, destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948, in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, when dozens of synagogues and yeshivas have been built in the quarter without incident? The answer lies not in Jerusalem but in Washington. By placing the issue of building in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem at the center of the peace process, President Obama has inadvertently challenged the Palestinians to do no less. Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly. Obama is directly responsible for one of the most absurd turns in the history of Middle East negotiations. Though Palestinian leaders negotiated with Israeli governments that built extensively in the West Bank, they now refused to sit down with the first Israeli government to actually agree to a suspension of building. Obama’s demand for a building freeze in Jerusalem led to a freeze in negotiations. Finally, after intensive efforts, the administration produced the pathetic achievement of “proximity talks”—setting Palestinian-Israeli negotiations back a generation, to the time when Palestinian leaders refused to sit at the same table with Israelis. That Obama could be guilty of such amateurishness was perhaps forgivable because he was, after all, an amateur. But he has now taken his failed policy and intensified it. By demanding that Israel stop building in Ramat Shlomo and elsewhere in East Jerusalem—and placing that demand at the center of American-Israeli relations—he’s ensured that the Palestinians won’t show up even to proximity talks. This is no longer amateurishness; it is pique disguised as policy. Most of the Obamateurisms we feature here are by nature fun and light. This one’s going to cost lives — well, more lives — and there’s nothing fun or lighthearted about that. It’s one of the main reasons Americans should have understood that electing someone with no experience and no demonstrated diplomatic capabilities whatsoever was a huge mistake, literally a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, in this instance, it’s the Israelis and the Palestinians who get to pay the price. (via QandO)
	Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Eph 6:11-12


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