Daily News Channel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that a complete halt of Jewish settlements will not happen, according to a parliament source. Netanyahu said at a closed-door Knesset committee meeting that Israel would agree only to a partial reduction of housing construction and for a limited time, not the year the United States would like, said a government official who was not authorized to speak about the meeting and did not want to be identified.
In a hilltop suburb South of Jerusalem called Efrat, Sharon Katz serves a neat plate of sliced cake inside her five-bedroom house, surrounded by pomegranate, olive and citrus trees that she planted herself. She glances out the window at the hills where, she believes, David and Abraham once walked. “We are living in the biblical heartland,” she sighs.
If the 300,000 West Bank settlers identified by the American President as an obstacle to Middle East peace were expecting Bibi Netanyahu to support their cherished dream of an Israel stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean sea, they were disappointed on Sunday night. The right wing leader instead took a sharp and unexpected lurch to the center and said he’d support a two-state solution, meaning something called Palestine is a step closer to being inked onto their 3,000-year-old Biblical map. To his credit, clench-jawed Netanyahu could have used the re-election of Israel’s favorite bogeyman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran to raise the usual security alarms and resort to time-tested fear-mongering
Many Jewish settlers in the West Bank believe the land was promised to them in the Bible by God. By that rationale, the thoughts of the U.S. president or even their own leaders means little.
When an Israeli cabinet minister proposes that his country impose sanctions on the United States, his government is clearly in a state of distress. Pressure from the Obama Administration to freeze Israeli settlement construction and move toward a two-state peace with the Palestinians has reportedly spurred Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled to recommended that Israel shop outside the U.S.
The big question about Barack Obama has always been this: Is he a risk taker?
If President Barack Obama thought he could deliver the promise of a few Israeli concessions during his upcoming Cairo speech to the Muslim world, he was sorely mistaken.