Jews living in the Jewish homeland are not settlers; their homes are not “settlements.”
Obama is brash in his respect for Islamic anti-semitism. He was raised on it. His hatred of Israel and his history of forging antisemitic alliances is meticulously detailed in my book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. Now it is yielding stinking, rotting, poisonous fruit.
Kerry: US considers Israeli settlements to be ‘illegitimate’ Jerusalem Post, November 6, 2013
BETHLEHEM – US Secretary of State John Kerry urged Israel on Wednesday to limit settlement building, an issue that is weighing on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Friction over the talks has risen this past week on the back of Israeli plans, announced in tandem with its release of 26 Palestinian prisoners, for some 3,500 new homes for settlers in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
“Let me emphasize at this point the position of the United States of America on the settlements is that we consider them… to be illegitimate,” Kerry said after discussions with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Kerry made the comments in responding to Palestinian frustration over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and stressed that “at no time” did the Palestinians agree to accept the settlements as a part of a negotiated peace accord.
Kerry, faced with grim Israeli and Palestinian assessments of progress in peace talks, said on Wednesday that Washington was not giving up on a deal.
“As in any negotiation there will be moments of up and moments of down, and it goes back and forth,” Kerry said in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, where he met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“But I can tell you that President Obama and I are determined, and neither of us will stop in our efforts to pursue the possibility (of peace),” he said.
Earlier at a meeting with Kerry in nearby Jerusalem, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the negotiations on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had failed to make any real progress.
The bleak picture painted by the right-wing leader was similar to the one sketched by senior Palestinians, who have said an Israeli plan announced last week for 3,500 more settler homes in the occupied West Bank was a major obstacle to the success of the negotiations.
But in Bethlehem, Kerry said the United States, Israel’s closest ally, was convinced “that despite the difficulties, both leaders, Abbas and Netanyahu, are also determined to work towards this goal”.
During the meeting with Kerry, Abbas on Wednesday assured the US secretary of state that the peace talks with Israel would continue.
“The Palestinians are committed to negotiations that would lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital,” Abbas was quoted by his spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudaineh, as telling Kerry.
Abbas also told Kerry that the Palestinians consider all settlements to be illegitimate, Abu Rudaineh said.
The spokesman’s remarks came in response to Kerry’s statements that Israel should “limit” construction in the settlements as much as possible.
Pamela Geller is the Editor of Atlas Shrugs.
