In May, Hillary Clinton gave an interview with al Jazeera in which she laid out the administration’s position on Israeli settlements. “We want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth — any kind of settlement activity,” Clinton said. By all accounts, that position accurately reflected the president’s views, but such a position had never before been publicly articulated. Did the White House want to publicly demand that the Israelis halt all settlement activity — and on al Jazeera? Probably not, but once Clinton put it out there, the White House decided to stick with it. The result was pure ecstasy on the anti-Israel left, where the administration’s demand for a settlement freeze was seen as evidence that this president would not hesitate to bring the full weight of his office to bear in extracting concessions from Israel. M.J. Rosenberg, formerly of the left-wing Israel Policy Forum and now at the partisan media watch-dog group Media Matters, went so far as to say that Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze was not a “precondition” for peace talks. “Stopping the settlements is not a precondition,” Rosenberg said in an opinion piece for al Jazeera back in May, “because their increase makes an agreement impossible…It is comparable only to the cessation of terror.” Yet the Palestinians interpreted the Obama administration’s demand for a freeze as a reasonable precondition for talks and adopted it as their own. At the same time, the Obama administration had made no comparable demand of the Palestinians. Abbas had the Obama administration right where he wanted them — out front and enforcing his precondition for talks while asking nothing in return. Suddenly all that has changed. In that same piece last May, Rosenberg wrote,
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