Today’s announcement by the Government of Israel helps move forward toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements. Let me say to all the people of the region and world: our commitment to achieving a solution with two states living side by side in peace and security is unwavering.

Clinton created a great deal of outrage in the Arab world after she called a previous offer from Netanyahu that came far short of a total freeze “unprecedented.” This reply is far more restrained.

Palin’s apparently eschatological comment doesn’t appear to be an accident. The Charlotte Observer reports that she’s taking dinnertime advice on Israel from the Graham family:

The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate told Billy Graham about how she came to faith in God as a girl in Bible camp.

She quizzed him on the presidents he’s known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

The Rev. Billy Graham is a credit to this country, and has for all of his life eloquently melded evangelical Christianity with a civic-mindedness and a broadmindness that have appealed to people of all faiths and no faith. (He apologized for an unfortunately antisemitic comment with President Nixon that was caught on tape and recently released.) Franklin Graham is a much different story. A Christian Zionist leader, Franklin has described Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion” and suggested erroneously that the Christian God and the Muslim God are two different deities. He even asked President Obama on the campaign trail if he was a Muslim. And unfortunately, Billy Graham is not long for this world, so if Palin is trying to yoke herself to the Grahams, then she’ll be palling around with Franklin more and more.

“I disagree with the Obama administration on that,” Palin told Walters. “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

Uh, more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead? Does Palin think the end times, heralded by the ingathering of the Jews, is nigh? In reality, Jews are immigrating to Israel at a fairly historically low rate.

J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami had this reaction, issued in a statement from the pro-peace pro-Israel pro-Palestinian group:

J Street rejects Sarah Palin’s comments attacking President Obama’s sensible policy on Israeli settlements in the West Bank yesterday during an ABC News interview with Barbara Walters.

Palin’s pandering to her right-wing base comes at the expense of the security of the State of Israel, the lives of those actually living the conflict, and the fundamental American interest in achieving a two-state solution in the near term. Her words reveal a glaring ignorance of damaging facts and a callous disregard of past and present U.S. policy.

For decades, American presidents have held that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an impediment to peace. They are joined by the majority of Israelis and pro-Israel Americans who view the growing settlement enterprise as a threat to Israel’s very future as a Jewish democracy.

President Obama’s administration continued along that path yesterday, rightly and sensibly expressing concern with unilateral actions on both sides that would preempt the negotiation of final status issues that are necessary to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict.

J Street supports President Obama and Middle East Peace Envoy George Mitchell as they press the parties to begin the hard work of achieving a two-state solution, the only way to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic homeland.

When the White House press shop sent out its statement criticizing Israel this afternoon — I received mine at 2:14 p.m. — the headline above the statement read: “Statement by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the Approval of Settlement Expansion in Jerusalem.” But the version that appears online has the headline “Statement by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Jerusalem.”

I don’t know what happened here. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its undivided capitol, but the claim is rejected by the Palestinians and the United Nations, and the U.S. maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv so as to avoid the appearance of taking sides in the dispute. The Gilo area of Jerusalem in question did not fall into Israeli hands until the 1967 war, and so while there’s a dispute in the press over whether it should be called a settlement, the United Nations considers it to be one. From, ahem, Wikipedia:

Gilo is located over the 1967 Green Line. According to HonestReporting, Gilo is not a “settlement” in the most widespread sense of the term, which HonestReporting states “can conjure up images of isolated enclaves in the West Bank”. Gilo lies within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries and is geographically contiguous to surrounding Jewish neighborhoods that pre-dated the Six Day War. Some media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press, Boston Globe and CBS News,have described Gilo as a “neighborhood”.^[11] A CNN memorandum to its staff stated that “We refer to Gilo as a ‘Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem’… We don’t refer to it as a settlement.” Palestinians and media watch groups feel this is not accurate.^[12] Other media outlets such as the BBC, AFP, Reuters and the Economist describe Gilo as a “settlement”.^[11] The United Nations also describes Gilo as an “Israeli settlement” in East Jerusalem.^[13]

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs just released this statement:

We are dismayed at the Jerusalem Planning Committee’s decision to move forward on the approval process for the expansion of Gilo in Jerusalem. At a time when we are working to re-launch negotiations, these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed. Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations. The U.S. also objects to other Israeli practices in Jerusalem related to housing, including the continuing pattern of evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes. Our position is clear: the status of Jerusalem is a permanent status issue that must be resolved through negotiations between the parties.

The Israelis have been difficult, as always: whenever [Special Envoy George] Mitchell raises East Jerusalem in talks with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli stands up and walks out of the room.

But your post mentions a couple times the possibility of Hamas running in elections. You’re missing something (though you’re in good company). They can’t run.  They are barred by Abbas’s decree law on elections.  Not by name, but still pretty explicitly: nobody can run who doesn’t certify his/her acceptance of some things that Hamas won’t accept.  Those provisions were inserted precisely to keep Hamas from running.

This is, by the way, another case of blindness to Palestinian domestic politics.  The reason elections are unlikely is because they would be deeply unpopular unless they would be based on national reconciliation.  They would give nobody in Ramallah any legitimacy and would probably cost them dearly.

Since the June 2007 fighting in Gaza, it’s been pretty clear that there couldn’t be elections unless Hamas and Fatah agree, the US supports them, and Israel acquiesces.  And that’s a tough series of hoops.  The most likely course, by the way, is for the Central Elections Commission to report to Abbas that they don’t think they can carry out elections. He then regretfully reports that while he is a good democrat, Hamas is not. And he throws the problem to the PLO to appoint a president (and get rid of the parliament where Hamas still has a majority).  I don’t know who that president will be—we’ll hear what Abbas has to say about that soon—but I would guess Abbas himself is still the most likely option.

A likely consequence is that Hamas — which formally rejects a two-state solution to the conflict and with which Israel is, to put it mildly, extremely reluctant to negotiate — will benefit if next year’s scheduled elections go forward. Abbas is now polling even with Hamas’ Ismael Haniyeh for the presidency. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress continues to denounce and reject Goldstone, with little attention paid to the consequences of such a stance for the alternative to Hamas in Palestinian politics.

I asked my friend Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine for his perspective on the Obama administration’s relationship with the Palestinians — over Goldstone and beyond — and he emailed me a typically insightful and judicious reply:

I think they also showed a very profound lack of understanding about how what they were asking the PLO to do diplomatically would play out domestically in Palestine in the context of the lack of a settlement freeze and actually the lack of anything specifically concrete the PA could point to as positive benefits deriving from the PLO’s diplomatic strategy of maximum cooperation with the Obama administration. To be fair, the administration has had to balance a lot of different factors while trying to pressure both Israel and the Palestinians to come to terms when there are tremendous domestic political obstacles to either of them actually doing that.

I do think the administration understood to some extent the problem the PA found itself in because the attitude, at least in Geneva, of US representatives towards the Goldstone report softened somewhat after the uproar in Palestine and the Arab world, and I think they’ve shown some understanding of the Palestinian position. However, they seem to decided now is the time to tack towards easing pressure on Israel and turning pressure towards the Palestinians, possibly partly motivated by displeasure on Goldstone but probably more because they want the Palestinians to return to negotiations without insisting on a complete settlement freeze which they have come to understand they are not going to get out of Netanyahu. Overall, I think this administration is more sensitive to the needs of its Palestinian partners than any of its predecessors, but I think the United States in general has a long way to go in realizing how much it shapes the Palestinians it will be dealing with and how much every little detail determines who will be in power in Palestinian society. I think we are inching towards a better understanding of that, but it obviously hasn’t been fully digested yet or things would have gone somewhat differently than they have.

Hussein thinks there just won’t be elections next year. That’s how serious the consequences of this episode are — though he points out that Hamas’ unpopularity means that it won’t necessarily benefit from the damage inflicted on Abbas’ Fatah party. Yet the Goldstone debacle seems to be barely discussed in the United States, a chasm in the story the size of the political and humanitarian problems in Gaza.

The Palestinian side seems to want to put the unfortunate experience behind it. Asked to comment on the impact that the Obama administration’s decision to press Palestinian President Abbas to shunt the Goldstone report aside — it basically devastated his political standing — Maen Areikat, the Palestinian representative in Washington, said through a spokesman that this was “history” and “we’re happy to have it behind us.” Hussein Ibish, a fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, said that the Palestinians basically know that Congress is going to take these sorts of stances on Israel issues. “I don’t think it will have much of an impact,” Ibish said in an email. “The administration handles diplomacy and has to take responsibility for national security. Everyone here and abroad knows that.”