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...President Obama, who has pressured Israel to resume peace efforts. But senior Palestinian officials vehemently rejected Netanyahu's statements; negotiator Saeb Erekat said the Prime Minister's intransigence on crucial sticking points--like his insistence on demilitarization and refusal to consider the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the West Bank--"closed the door to permanent-status negotiations...
...Tehran has been a mix of anger, exhilaration and dread. The day after Ahmadinejad was declared the victor in a landslide, people emptied into the streets in rage. Downtown, groups of demonstrators set several buses, a building and hundreds of garbage bins on fire, smashed the windows of state banks and destroyed ATMs. On Ghaem-Magham Street, I watched a lone woman dressed in a head-to-toe black chador standing on the side of the road, flashing the peace sign to passing cars and yelling, "Only Mousavi." The woman, a 36-year-old bank employee named Maryam, had told...
...prioritized. Netanyahu, who faces more public pressure from Washington than any Israeli leader in nearly two decades, says he wants peace talks and recently declared his qualified support for a two-state solution. But even as he makes concessions on other fronts - like easing security restrictions on the West Bank - Netanyahu insists on continuing building inside existing settlements; days before Netanyahu and Mitchell were to have met, Israel's government approved the construction of hundreds more housing units in two West Bank settlements. As if that wasn't clear enough, Netanyahu this week derided the Administration's concern over settlements...
Washington is insisting on the settlement freeze in line with the requirements of the 2003 road map for peace, and because the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem are the geographic basis of the Palestinian state envisaged in the two-state solution. As long as Israel continues settlement construction, Palestinians doubt its seriousness about agreeing to a viable Palestinian state. But Israel claims it has a right to keep building within the boundaries of its existing settlements to deal with what it calls "natural growth," and it expects to keep the occupied land on which most are built...
Netanyahu and Obama have made some progress on other aspects of restarting a peace process. The Israeli leader has finally accepted the idea of a Palestinian state, albeit with limited sovereignty, and he has signaled an intent to ease the Gaza blockade, remove some West Bank roadblocks, release some Palestinian prisoners and transfer more security responsibility in West Bank towns to Palestinian forces. But in publicly and repeatedly demanding a settlement freeze, even after Israel objected, Obama has made it not only a test of Netanyahu's bona fides as a peacemaker, but also of U.S. credibility. The President hasn...