Channel Two in Israel has reported that the US and Israel will make announcements tonight that the proposed deal of US benefits and assurances in exchange for a 90 day extension of the building freeze in Judea and Samaria is off the table, and peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians will not be renewed for the time being.
According to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the US is preoccupied with things like North Korea and Wikileaks and the "understandings the prime minister [Binyamin Netanyahu] reached [with US Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton were a gentleman's agreement and not finalized."
I'll translate.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made verbal offers to Netanyahu that kept diminishing. When Netanyahu became concerned and finally asked for the offer in writing so he could present to his cabinet, the Obama Administration stalled, said a letter was en route and finally refused to provide anything in writing..just as I predicted two weeks ago.
This was a bait-and-switch attempt to game Netanyahu and Israel by Clinton and Obama, similar to what they pulled by denying that the assurances President Bush made to Israel to get Ariel Sharon to sign on to the Road map ever happened.
That trick has apparently outlived its effectiveness.
The deal was also likely pulled because the 'Palestinians' refused to go along with it and were going to say no anyway.
According to one of my notorious Little Birdies, this one inside the 'Palestinian Authority', the 'Palestinians' were insisting that the freeze include East Jerusalem and that the boundaries of a future Palestinian state be guaranteed by Obama before they would return to the negotiating table.
Needless to say, as much as Obama might like the idea, there's no way Netanyahu or any other Israeli politician could get their cabinet to go along with it. And thanks to Israel's new referendum law that requires public approval of any further territorial giveaways, even if they were silly enough to approve it they could never have gotten it past the Israeli public.
At any rate, the negotiations between Israel and the 'Palestinians' were always futile and bound to fail..because what the 'Palestinians' want is not a state next to Israel but a state in place of Israel, and one without any Jews in it at all.
This was made plain when the 'Palestinians' recently announced that they were no longer bound by the Oslo Agreement, and that all of Israel was up for grabs by them.
The Israeli response to all this should be a simple one. Since negotiations have been broken off, rev up the bulldozers. Build like crazy in Judea and Samaria, formally annex the Israeli controlled areas as part of Israel, and demarcate borders unilaterally.
Then begin moving the 'Palestinian' non-Israeli citizens over to the 'Palestinian' occupied areas and end the farce.
-Selah-
Cross posted at American Thinker and Big Peace.
UPDATE: It's now official..told ya:
The United States has abandoned efforts to convince Israel to renew a freeze on settlement construction as a precondition for renewing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a State Department official said Tuesday.U.S.-Israeli talks over a possible settlement freeze have ended after what the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the diplomacy, called a "joint determination." A previous Israeli moratorium on new settlements in the occupied West Bank expired in September, and Palestinians have refused to return to stalled talks unless new construction stops.
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