Palestinians

Maybe “blasts” was the wrong verb for my old headline on the White House’s response to Israel’s expansion of settlements in Palestinian East Jerusalem. The White House appears to have done some editing.
When the White House press shop sent out its statement criticizing Israel this afternoon — I received mine at 2:14 p.m. — the [...]

I said in an earlier post on the Obama administration and the Goldstone commission that Hamas might “benefit if next year’s scheduled elections go forward.” That was poorly phrased. What I meant was that Hamas stands to benefit from the weakening of more moderate factions. Because, as George Washington University’s Nathan Brown emailed me, I [...]

Missing from this otherwise-very good Washington Post piece about the Obama administration’s early and serious missteps on restarting Israel/Palestine peace talks is, unfortunately, the Goldstone commission on Gaza, which is relegated to a single sentence. This is the capsule version: Obama feared that Israel would freak out and foreclose on any peace talks if U.N. [...]

As predicted/snarked, not the greatest day at the State Department press briefing. Spokesman P.J. Crowley gets asked about Fatah’s memo expressing disillusionment with President Obama:

CNN reports that Osama bin Laden’s latest audiotape is about Gaza:
The message is “an invitation” from bin Laden to take part in “jihad to stop the aggression against Gaza.”
The terrorist leader has attempted to hijack the cause of the Palestinians before, so this was probably inevitable.

In the midst of this confused New York Times piece on Israel’s objectives in Gaza — “Mr. Olmert has been far more careful this time to state ambiguous and modest goals for the war,” apparently, even though his defense minister says it’s an “all-out war” to the “bitter end” and from the perspective of a [...]