I guess the timing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement of a 10-month partial settlement "freeze" should come as no surprise, heading as we are into a long holiday weekend when everyone will be so comatose on tryptophan that a news crawl at the bottom of CNN mentioning Bibi's "freeze" will only seem like a positive contribution by Israel to the peace process.
But the "freeze" can't be very encouraging for the Palestinians, whose hopes were raised after President Obama's Cairo speech and who now see that Netanyahu's administration has squirmed out from beneath the firm demand for a total freeze that started this whole thing. I don't see any official response from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas out on the wires yet, but this AFP story from yesterday probably sums up what he's feeling:
US President Barack Obama is "doing nothing right now" to restart the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said in an interview published Tuesday.
And yet, we're also seeing what kind of domestic pressures Bibi faces in his own country from right-wingers who oppose any kind of freeze at all. (Obligatory note: Most Israeli construction in the West Bank and Gaza is illegal in the eyes of the United Nations, to say nothing of international law.) Haaretz reports that conservative Knesset member Yaakov Katz has called Bibi's "freeze" offer "spitting in the faces of those to whom he promised less than a year ago that he would constitute an alternative to Sharon's policy of uprooting."
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Categories: Diplomacy, Israel & Palestine, Obama Administration, Politics
Tags: Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, settlement freeze
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