Everyone was surprised yesterday when the White House issued a statement warning Israel to tone down its settlement construction announcements, faulting them for large unilateral moves and asking them to hold off pending future talks between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli officials seemed less surprised by the comments, deciding that they’re going to official interpret the comments as a full endorsement of continued settlement expansion, amounting to giving the Israeli government “carte blanche” to build as they wish with no restrictions.
How they were told “stop” and heard “go” appears to be related to previous statements from President Obama, which Trump’s statement yesterday closely mirrored. Israeli officials saw the Trump statement as softer in tone than Obama’s calls for Israel to stop building settlements, and are therefore presenting it as a net win. After all, it’s not like Obama did much of anything about Israel’s reckless expansion of settlements, and after this statement, Israel seems to reason Trump is liable to do even less.
Reflective of Israeli officials interpreting the statement as is most politically expedient to them, settler officials also took the White House comments that the settlements “might not help” the peace process as saying that the settlements definitely don’t hurt the peace process, thanking Trump for that statement.
The White House has not responded to the reinterpretation of everything they said by the Israeli government, though since President Trump has been eager to style himself as “pro-Israel,” the fact that the Israeli government is virtually re-writing his statements to say what they want them to say may well be a convenience to him.
It is all a lot of noise in the dog and pony show. We all know what the parameters of the endgame between Israel and the Palestinians is likely top be. A lot depends on where the other pieces are on the chessboard when the endgame happens.
It is not Iran testing us (their missile test was perfectly legal) but Netanyahu testing our patience (with the illegal settlements).
It is a sad and bitter irony indeed that perhaps the most dangerous, vicious, evil and vile criminal leader in the Middle East wasn’t from Iraq, or Libya, but in fact from Israel. Clearly so much of the violence and hatred and terrorism is a direct result of the crimes and atrocities committed by Israel. It would have been far better to have removed the nuclear weapons from Israel in 2001 and forced Israel back to the Pre1967 borders as mandated by international law instead of destroying 2/3’s of the entire Middle East killing millions, turning 10’s of millions into refugees, reducing entire cities to rubble, spending more than 7 Trillion dollars. The world in general and America in particular would have become a far better place than it is today.