Smiling Like A Cheshire Cat

I was sent this excerpt from 1990 from:

Making Way for the Messiah
October 11, 1990
Robert I. Friedman

“The Saddamization of Kuwait has won us a lot of friends,” said Rabbi Yechiel Leiter, the mayor of a small Jewish settlement in the center of downtown Hebron on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. As far as Leiter and other militant settlement leaders I talked to recently are concerned, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait greatly buttresses their claim that, in a treacherous neighborhood, Jewish settlements reinforce Israel’s security.

“We are grinning like Cheshire cats,” said Yisrael Medad, aide to Geula Cohen, a leader of the ultranationalist Tehiya party and a resident of Shiloh on the West Bank, who believes that Israelis will be much less willing to trade territory for peace now that the PLO and a great many Palestinians in the territories have embraced Saddam Hussein—a move that has even provoked the anger of an embittered and demoralized Israeli left.

Over the years, Jewish settlements have been condemned by the US as an obstacle to peace. Just before the crisis in the Gulf, Representative David Obey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, which establishes funding levels for US aid programs, warned Israel that it risked having its aid cut if it built new settletments or expanded existing ones. And Israel’s request for $400 million in US loan guarantees to house Soviet Jews has been held up by the Bush administration out of concern that the money would flow into settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza or would be used to free up money in Israel’s treasury for settlements...

BTW, Obey "left Congress in January 2011, and was succeeded by Republican Sean Duffy. He began working for Gephardt Government Affairs, a lobbying firm founded by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, in June 2011."

I'm still in Shiloh.

(k/t = DG)

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UPDATE

I went searching for more Friedman pieces and found this:

As bad as life has become for Israelis, it is far, far worse for Palestinians: Their economy has crumbled; IDF roadblocks prevent Palestinians from getting to work, children from getting to school and the sick from getting to hospitals; missiles and rockets crash through apartment buildings in the middle of the night and tanks rumble down streets maliciously crushing cars. More than 770 Palestinians have been killed and some 16,000 injured by the army and settlers since the onset of the second intifada.

"Far, far worse"?

That's what made Friedman a bad journalist.
^