Gershom Gorenberg says that the lesson from the latest crisis in Israeli-Palestinian talks is that Obama should be negotiating with the Israeli public.
Only a bit more subtly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed his own weakness on Sunday. It was the last day of the 10-month building moratorium, which Netanyahu had refused to renew despite the high risk of sabotaging the peace talks. But Netanyahu at least wanted to avoid in-your-face displays of new construction — like the public groundbreaking planned at the settlement of Revava that evening. Netanyahu reportedly asked the organizers — settlement leaders and Knesset backbencher Danny Danon of his own Likud Party — to keep a low profile. It didn’t help. At Revava that evening, cement was poured, several thousand people cheered and released balloons, and Danon proclaimed, “The building freeze is over.” So much for party discipline.
