Feith, along with Paul Wolfowitz, headed the Office of Special Plans under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tasked with digging up raw intelligence on Saddam Hussein before the war began — specifically ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Today, Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Perry reached out to Rumsfeld himself for tips on foreign policy contacts:

Perry’s aides have been tight-lipped about the gathering, which National Review reported included former Rumsfeld aides Doug Feith, Daniel Fata, and William Luti, as well as the magazine’s Andrew McCarthy and others. But I’m told Rumsfeld helped steer Perry’s staff to the low-key advisory group, and his detainee adviser Cully Stimson was also invited, but couldn’t attend.

Stimson ran the Department of Defense’s detainee affairs office, overseeing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Fata, at the Department of Defense under Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, focused on Europe and NATO.

Feith, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, slammed many of his former colleagues on the Iraq war in his 2008 memoir.

Despite few other indicators as to how Perry would handle foreign policy, Adam Serwer at the American Prospect suggests, based on that lineup of visitors, “Perry would be the candidate most likely to inherit the former president’s foreign policy views.”

Till now, Perry’s foreign policy experience has centered on the Texas-Mexico border, where he’s criticized the Obama administration for its “grossly inadequate” defense, and dispatched Texas Department of Public Safety officers and helicopters for additional defense.

As the Texas Tribune reported in late June, Perry also staked out his turf in the Israel-Palestine debate, with a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, criticizing attempts to protest Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza.

“It is inconceivable in many ways that we would have to even argue and debate whether or not Israelis could live in Israel, not just in parts of Israel but anywhere in Israel they wished to live,” Huckabee added. “I cannot imagine as an American being told that I could not live in certain places in America because I was Christian, or because I was white, or because I spoke English. I would be outraged if someone told me that in my country, I would be prohibited and forbidden to live in a part of that country, for any reason.” #

Israel Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz also spoke at the ceremony and asserted that construction in Jerusalem is “not an impediment to peace, it brings it closer,” adding that the more Israel builds “the more peace there will be.” #

As reported by Haaretz: #

“That is why this neighborhood is only the cornerstone. It will serve as a model for the resurgence of Jerusalem’s construction swing,” Hershkowitz said. #

Also addressing the crowd, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor David Harari said that the “housing units to be built here are only the beginning of the road,” adding that talks were underway “to turn it into a substantial neighborhood.” #

Earlier this month, Haaretz learned that the Jerusalem planning commission was expected to approve a new large-scale construction project beyond the Green Line. #

The plan, called Gilo: Southern Slopes, includes the construction of 1,400 housing units on an area between the neighborhood of Gilo toward the Cremisan Monastery, and the settlement of Har Gilo. It is expected to draw widespread international criticism. #

Huckabee, a Fox News personality and likely 2012 GOP presidential candidate, who in 2007 claimed “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian,” was joined by actor and tea party favorite Jon Voight in a three-day visit hosted by the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, a group whose focus is to promote Jewish settlements. Both Huckabee and Voight will be meeting with Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as touring existing housing units. #

In a meeting with reporters, the former evangelical minister dismissed the notion that Israel should relinquish land for peace, calling it an “unrealistic, unworkable and unreachable goal.” #

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports: #

Most of the international community — including President Barack Obama — considers Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem illegal because they are built on occupied land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians claim both areas for a future state. #

Huckabee suggested that [if] a Palestinian state were to be established, it shouldn’t come at Israel’s expense. #

“There are vast amounts of territory that are in the hands of Muslims, in the hands of Arabs. Maybe the international community can come together and accommodate,” he said. #

Huckabee also claimed that any peace agreement has to recognize that “the Jewish people have indigenous rights to the land in which they occupy and live and it goes back not 60 years or 80 years but it goes back 3,500 years.” #

The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, states that international law clearly defines the Jewish settlements in the West Bank as illegal: #

The establishment of settlements in the West Bank violates international humanitarian law which establishes principles that apply during war and occupation. Moreover, the settlements lead to the infringement of international human rights law. #

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population. #

The establishment of settlements results in the violation of the rights of Palestinians as enshrined in international human rights law. Among other violations, the settlements infringe the right to self-determination, equality, property, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement. #

#

Gaza, of course, is under an Israeli blockade and controlled by the rejectionist group Hamas, which the U.S. won’t talk to until it ceases rejecting the peace process and the existence of Israel. Within those parameters, any aid package has to depend on external and diplomatic circumstances to reach Gaza. The $400 million Obama announced will go through Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who don’t have sway over Gaza or its 1.5 million residents.  So the administration labeled them “a down payment on the United States’ commitment to Palestinians in Gaza, who deserve a better life and expanded opportunities, and the chance to take part in building a viable, independent state of Palestine, together with those who live in the West Bank.”

The White House called the siege of Gaza “unsustainable” in a press release, and says it demands “a significant change of strategy.” In what direction? The administration pledged to “work with our partners in the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Egypt, and the international community to put such a strategy in place.” In other words, the administration either has no idea or isn’t prepared to tell Israel to lift the siege.

But here are the “down payment” initiatives, as per a White House fact sheet:

A $240 million investment by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) in the AMAL mortgage finance program in the West Bank, which is designed to increase homeownership by offering long-term mortgages at fixed- and variable rates.

· $75 million in funding through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to support the Palestinian Authority’s work to improve infrastructure throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

· $10 million in USAID-funded activities aimed at enhancing the Palestinian private sector’s competitiveness.

· $40 million to support UNRWA’s Emergency Appeal for Gaza and the West Bank, which will help improve educational and health services, increase job creation, and repair shelters in Gaza, while also addressing core humanitarian needs in the West Bank.

· $14.5 million in USAID projects for school rehabilitation, small-scale agriculture, the repair of a hospital facility and other community infrastructure in Gaza.

· $10 million for the construction of five new UNRWA schools in Gaza.

· $5 million to start nine USAID-funded projects to repair water distribution and wastewater collection systems in Gaza.

Abbas needs to bring home “a means of easing the siege on Gaza that helps the ordinary people but does not help Hamas politically or in terms of PR,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow with the American Task Force on Palestine. But Abbas isn’t wedded to any specific mechanism for lifting the siege. “ATFP has been saying since the borders were closed in 2007 that the best way to open them is to have PA forces with international monitoring, supervision and participation on the Palestinian side, combined with a major effort to shut down the smuggling tunnels,” Ibish continued. Carnegie’s Henri Berkey thinks that such a plan is in both the Israeli and Palestinian Authority interest.

But Gaza is an inflection point for the fragile peacemaking efforts of the administration. It’ll be up to Obama to expand the Gaza crisis into a full-fledged strategy for negotiations. That’s what Abbas needs Obama to say today. “He needs [Obama] to reassure the Palestinians that even use all his leverage, especially his new leverage after his partial defense of Israel from international pressure over the flotilla attack, to move them into a more serious engagement on the real issues in the negotiations,” Ibish said. “He needs deeper understandings with the United States on the need to pressure Israel to really engage with permanent status issues and not just procedural matters or minor matters like water in the proximity talks.”

To some degree, the real test of Abbas’ visit won’t come today. It’ll come when his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, arrives in Washington. Abbas doesn’t have the power to ease the siege of Gaza. And he doesn’t have the power to expand the aperture of the proximity talks. The past year-plus of Netanyahu’s tenure as premier has seen Netanyahu resist Obama’s power to press Israel on peacemaking. So what will Netanyahu say to Obama?

Eighty five percent (85%) of the respondents indicated that Israel either did not use enough force (39%) or used the right amount of force (46%) regarding the recent ship boarding incident. Only eight percent (8%) felt the Israelis used too much force.  Sixty one percent (61%) felt that Israel should not adjust its tactics to elicit a more favorable international reaction.

Seventy three percent (73%) of those polled indicated that Israel should not open up Gaza to international humanitarian shipments. A majority of those polled, fifty six percent (56%) indicated that Israel should not agree to an international inquiry committee to investigate the incident.

Recall that President Obama did not join the rest of the world in condemning the raid. But it appears that Israelis expected him to support it:

Seventy one percent (71%) disliked U.S. President Barack Obama with forty seven percent (47%) expressing a strong dislike. In all, sixty three percent (63%) of those polled were dissatisfied with the American government’s reaction to the incident.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas will ask President Barack Obama Wednesday for “bold decisions” on the Middle East but US-led peace moves face a torrid climate after Israel’s Gaza flotilla raid.

Obama will welcome Abbas to the White House seeking to ensure regional fury over the May 31 Israeli commando strike does not doom indirect Israel-Palestinian talks that took months for Washington to organize.

He will also discuss American efforts to break through a “status-quo” on the blockaded Gaza Strip, which his administration describes as “untenable” following the deadly Israeli maritime raid, which killed nine Turks.

“Bold moves.” Breaking through the Gaza “status quo.” If all of that sounds vague and tentative, some Mideast watchers think that’s because the post-flotilla atmosphere between Israel, the West Bank-only Palestinian Authority and the Obama administration is marked primarily by confusion. Even after the raid, Obama may want Abbas to show an openness to moving beyond the indirect “proximity talks” — whereby George Mitchell, the administration’s envoy for Mideast peace, plays a game of telephone to convey messages between the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Americans — and to direct negotiations. And in this op-ed for The Hill, Abbas loudly proclaims his desire for dialogue — without specifics about the form that dialogue should take. But after the raid, can Abbas really sell his people on the idea of moving more aggressively in the direction of talks with the Israelis?

“I’m not so sure that any of the actors here is exactly sure what they want, or what they can go in expecting,” said Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, an Arab-Israeli conflict specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace who just returned from a trip last week to Israel and the West Bank. “You have that with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, where I don’t think he knows what he wants or what his next move is, I’m not sure the Obama administration does, and I don’t think Abbas does. And partly everyone is hoping the other side is going to come in and provide the solution.” She described the diplomatic climate ahead of Abbas’s visit as “collective breathholding.”

This is the first presidential meeting since the flotilla crisis. Obama will meet with Netanyahu soon after, following a charm offensive by the Obama administration to publicly proclaim Netanyahu as a partner. Obama and Abbas can talk about ways to perhaps get Netanyahu to ease the Gaza siege. But what will Netanyahu say?

Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Program, had an idea for Israel to turn the diplomatic tables on Hamas for the first time since establishing the Gaza blockade. They can reiterate their call for Hamas to release captured soldier Gilad Shalit; rely on international assurances against Hamas-driven attacks from across the border in Gaza; and then lifting the blockade. “You put this as your condition, and then you put Hamas in the corner,” Barkey said at a morning meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “Because then Hamas will have to decide whether to accept these things, and you completely shift the discourse.”

Speaking of the Israelis, though, Barkey said, “I don’t know why they’re not doing it. To me that’s a no-lose situation, because the onus is on the other side. And then you ask for international guarantees, so you can say that if a rocket gets fired [into Israel] then Hamas will have to live with the consequences internationally.”

Others, though, haven’t been so shy. And those voices all seem to be knee-jerking in defense of Israel.

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) put the blame squarely on “the so-called ‘humanitarian aid’ flotilla” for steering into “an internationally recognized [blockade] … in an effort to provoke Israel.” Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) told Greg Sargent that the flotilla was designed “to instigate a conflict with the Israeli navy ,” which, he added, “isn’t hard to do.” And Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), senior Republican on the Foreign Affairs panel, said that Israel was simply acting in self defense.

“Israeli soldiers had every right to defend their lives against a lynch mob attacking them with knives and clubs,” she said in a statement.

But of course, this implies that the anti-blockade activists didn’t have the right to defend themselves from armed soldiers dropping out of the sky onto the decks of foreign-flagged ships in the middle of international waters. The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle today pushed that point further:

This morning a bunch of people are trying to defend Israel by saying that the protesters attacked first.  No, they didn’t.  Boarding someone’s ship in international waters is an attack.  To put it another way, how many of the people mounting this defense would criticize Israeli sailors if they attacked a bunch of armed Palestinians who were airdropping, one by one, onto their ship, after firing tear gas grenades in to soften them up?

Along those lines, why would Iran, Syria or anyone else feel an obligation to obey international law if Israel here is immune from it?

It’s a long study, with seven authors, and I’ve barely made a crack in it, so I won’t try to summarize the specific recommendations. But CNAS, looking at recent cases of international peacekeeping forces in transitional states or autonomous provinces, examines what security conditions need to be met for a viable independent Palestine that doesn’t threaten Israel to come into being.

Israel generally has balked over the years at the prospect of international peacekeeping forces patrolling the West Bank, as such a force would limit Israel’s freedom of military action in occupied Palestine. (Andrew Exum, one of the studies’ authors, lists a short host of reasons why Israel shouldn’t have a problem with such a force while — at least in the introduction — glossing over the fact that it does.) But less important than any specific recommendation is the fact that the think tank that has launched many an official into the Obama Pentagon and State Department, CNAS, is expending any intellectual heft on the issue at all, let along thinking through the modalities of interim internationalization of West Bank/Jordan River Valley security. Such a detailed study, coming in advance of a potential Obama peace plan — which the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu definitely does not want — will most likely be read at the Israeli embassy and in Jerusalem as a sign that a real U.S. push on a two-state solution is gathering momentum.

And it reaffirms a linkage that some on the American Jewish right and the Israeli government don’t want to see made. “Although peace in the Middle East is hardly the exclusive responsibility of the United States,” Exum writes in the introduction, “it is a goal long sought by its political leaders and one inextricably linked to U.S. interests.” That viewpoint was roundly mocked as simplistic at the AIPAC conference this year, despite it being the stated policy of decades of American administrations.

It’s that sort of urgency, up against the current impasse in the peace process, that’s leading the Obama administration to consider offering its own peace plan. Even if it does, Clinton implicitly clarified in her speech, “We not only know we cannot force a solution, we have no interest in forcing a solution. The parties themselves are the only ones who can resolve their differences.”  Notice, though, that that’s not the same thing as pledging not to offer a U.S. proposal for peace.

Her speech also tethered the peace process to the marginalization of Hamas, a shared Israeli-Palestinian Authority-U.S. interest:

In contrast to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority has staked its credibility on a path of peaceful coexistence. Even more than economic opportunities, that path for the Palestinians must lead to a state of their own, for the dignity that all people deserve, and the right to chart their own destiny. If President Abbas cannot deliver on those aspirations, there’s no doubt his support will fade and Palestinians will turn to alternatives – including Hamas. And that way leads only to more conflict.

But the U.S., the so-called Quartet (the U.S., Russia, the United Nations and the European Union) and the Arab states can only facilitate a solution, Clinton said: “[T]here are only two peoples who can make the decisions. … President Obama can’t work harder than the people of Israel and the Palestinian territories.”

He didn’t mean, he said, that U.S. troops were directly endangered by the persistence of the conflict, nor did he formally request to have responsibility for security assistance to Israel and the Palestinian territories transferred to U.S. Central Command. But the conflict “does contribute, if you will, to the overall environment in which we operate,” Petraeus said. Reiterating a theme from his testimony, he cited that “moderate leaders” in the region typically tell him that the intractability of the conflict “gives the radicals, the extremists, the argument that the only time they have made progress on the issue has been when there is an intifada.”

Petraeus associated himself with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s near-contemporaneous remarks to AIPAC, particularly the stuff she said about how Israel “is, has and will be an important strategic ally of the United States.”