settlements

Well-known Israel expert Sarah Palin criticizes President Obama’s criticism of Israeli settlement expansion (most recently over Gilo):
“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 [...]

While in Israel, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee gave an interview to an extremely sympathetic reporter for PajamasTV. Asked about “the Obama administration’s view of Jewish settlements,” Huckabee compares the idea of telling Jewish families not to move to the settlements to American segregation. “We tried that in the United States,” Huckabee says. “We had [...]

Former GOP Arkansas governor, Fox News host and presumed presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is in Israel and he tweets:
I’ll be in Israel this week and touring the highly disputed settlements that Obama and Hillary are trying to stop.
“Highly disputed” is one way of putting it. “Illegal” is another, and “contrary to Israeli obligations under the [...]

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman met with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday and reiterated his opposition to a settlement freeze. “We cannot accept this vision about absolutely completely freezing call for our settlements,” Lieberman said during a joint presser. But he also had a formulation that I haven’t seen before:
First of all, we [...]

Via Robert Farley, Yossi Peled, an Israeli cabinet minister, proposes that Israel stop buying U.S. military equipment if the Obama administration continues to insist on a settlement freeze and negotiations with Iran. The Jerusalem Post reports that Peled wrote his cabinet colleagues an 11-page letter lamenting President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world:
“Obama’s ascendance represents [...]

Here’s how you know Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left a bad first impression with the Obama administration. Asked in an ABC News interview yesterday about reports that his allies floated saying that the Bush administration had secretly promised Israel that it could expand settlement construction in the West Bank, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham [...]

The Netanyahu government in Israel is claiming that the Bush administration had a secret deal with Netanyahu’s predecessors to allow Israel to continue settlement construction in the West Bank, despite the fact that the 2003-era road map for Israeli-Palestinian peace explicitly “freezes all settlement activity.” Some Bush-era officials dispute that they ever reached such a [...]

In advance of President Obama’s long-awaited address to the Muslim world in Cairo on Thursday, the administration appears to be seeding the public-diplomacy bed. I can’t read Arabic, but my friend Marc Lynch can, and here’s how Marc puts it in the course of a longer (and quite valuable) post about Obama’s approach to Israel-Palestine:
General [...]