State Department Asked To Be Consequential

They are consistent over at State, aren't they?

June 8th this week:-

QUESTION: Can I change topics?
MS. NULAND: Yeah, please.
QUESTION: The Palestinian issue.*
MS. NULAND: Thank you, Said.
QUESTION: Okay, good. Despite your expressed anger at the beginning of this week at the settlement activities, today the Israelis have announced also more settlement activities in East Jerusalem and Atarot and Giv’ot and Kfar Etzion. It’s about 2,400 housing  [?] in all. So beyond another expressed anger, what are you doing to stop them from this activity that is not helping the peace process?
MS. NULAND: Well, I would certainly agree with you that this is not constructive, that we talk about it, as we do in all of these cases whenever they come up, and that we remain engaged.
QUESTION: Okay. Do you believe that if you sort of espouse a different narrative and expressing that anger, that the Israelis may take pause and stop?
MS. NULAND: Said, I’m not quite sure what the question was there.
QUESTION: Okay. Well, let me rephrase the question. Perhaps if you change your narrative – you keep saying that our position is well known on the settlements. Perhaps you need to remind them of that – what that position is and what are the consequences if they continue to sort of just flaunt their sort of noncompliance with your anger on the settlement issue.
MS. NULAND: Said, this speaks to the larger objective here, which is to get these parties into a direct dialogue about security, about borders. Because when borders are set together peacefully, all of these issues go away. So that’s why our fundamental approach is to try to get them to the table.
QUESTION: But this week marks the 45^th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem [did they mark the Jordanian occupation annually, too?]. And the occupation seems to be going on and on and on. Why can’t you take the initiative, so to speak, a fresh initiative perhaps, to get the peace talks going, and you have as far as that initiative an end or a freeze to settlement?
MS. NULAND: Again, we are continuing to work hard with both parties. You’ve seen the exchange of letters between the prime minister and the President. You’ve seen subsequent public reaffirmations of their commitment to work. This is – nobody needs to tell you, Said, that this is hard, difficult work. We are doing what we can to support getting them back to the table.
QUESTION: So what are you doing as far as – in the aftermath of these exchange of letters?
MS. NULAND: I think I’ve said what I have for today. We do anticipate that David Hale will be out in the region again. I don’t know if it’s next week or – I think it may be next week.
STAFF: No dates yet.
MS. NULAND: Yeah. No dates yet.

* Why isn't this the Peace Issue?

P.S.  Just came in:



Israeli Settlements, American Pressure, and Peace - Steven J. Rosen　

(View the study (PDF))

Mahmoud Abbas participated in 18 years of direct negotiations with seven Israeli governments, all without the settlements freeze that he now insists is an absolute precondition to begin even low-level talks.
President Obama's failure to distinguish construction in east Jerusalem from settlement activity in the West Bank put him at odds with the Israeli consensus. No major party in Israel, and no significant part of the Jewish public, is willing to count the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem as "settlements" to be "frozen."
The Sharon government reached an understanding with the Bush administration to ban outward geographic expansion of established settlements, while reserving the right to continue expansion inside the "construction line" of existing houses. Almost all the construction that the Netanyahu administration has allowed is either in Jerusalem or in the settlement blocs, the two categories that Israel had thought were protected by understandings with the Americans.
Israelis were bitterly disappointed by the Obama administration's refusal to acknowledge agreements with a prior U.S. government that the Israelis considered vital and binding. Sharon aide  Dov Weissglas said, "If decision-makers in Israel...discover, heaven forbid, that an American pledge is only valid as long as the president in question is in office, nobody will want such pledges."
Stalled peace negotiations in the Obama years cannot be blamed on Netanyahu's policies of accelerating settlement construction. He has in fact slowed it down. What has undermined peace negotiations, rather, is Obama's policy on the settlements - and the unrealistic expectations that policy has nourished.

^