US Middle East initiative takes early holiday

When the Obama administration started its latest Middle East initiative, it was amid great fanfare. I blogged – sceptically — about the optimism exuding from the State Department at the time. Now, however, the US government has given up its push for a freeze in Jewish settlement construction as quietly as possible. As Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution puts it: “The Middle East peace process just died, but nobody seems to be in mourning. Twenty months of U.S. efforts to freeze Israeli settlement activity to create a conducive environment for negotiations have produced only deadlock.”

Keen for the demise of the latest US effort to be seen favourably, Hillary Clinton gave a speech on Friday saying that the United States was still committed to a Middle East peace agreement and would revert to its earlier strategy of shuttling between the Israelis and the Palestinians.