There is a lot of hot air coming from that article....most of their conclusions don't make any sense.
I didn't post it for the article, I posted it for the letter. When's the last time 327 Congressmen agreed on anything?
That doesn't make them right. As described in the above linked video, Israeli's aren't exactly thrilled with how the PM has handled the situation from his side. Israel is putting themselves in a difficult situation as they've pissed of Great Britain as well and This isn't a case of the US having a complete policy shift towards the Israel, it's due of the current Israeli political party in power having a policy shift towards the rest of the world. There was absolutely no need to start construction of new settlements in the disputed area.
Your ignorance of the facts throughout this thread is self evident, but you have to be at least called to task on this one. Israel has borders outside of its initial boundary only because of the 6 Day War in '67 when they were attacked by 5 neighbors and beat them all. The expanded boundaries are a result of land captured at that time. And of that land, the vast majority - the Sinai peninsula - was returned in exchange for a peace deal with Egypt. They retain the Golan Heights because it is a strategic value vis-a-vis Syria, one of the attackers. As for the Palestinians - if Arafat was a braver man, they could have had 97.5 % of their ancestral homeland as a state, and peace and security, but he turned that deal down at Camp David.
On Passover, Israel concerned over world standing http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100329/D9EO89AG0.html
I apologize for not spelling it out more carefully.....what is Israel getting flack for doing right now? Think about about and come back to me with something else. Oh....and for calling me out you....next time you might want to check your facts. 6 days wars technically started when Israel launched a preemptive attack on Egypt after a period of small skirmishes over water rights. More specifically their incursion into what is now the West Bank was unilaterally deemed as a ridiculously excessive response over some guerrilla attacks that had thought to be originating from there. Do you have any other revisionist history you want to throw out? You also also not quite right about the Camp David process in 2000. The sticking point was that Israel would only provide 75% of the West Bank. Which was a decrease in the Palestinian territory previously established through international mediation.
Again, you are amazingly wrong: From the NY Times, June 27, 2002: "It's really very simple—Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton put on the table during July–December 2000 a historic compromise and the Palestinians rejected it. They concede that Barak's offer at Camp David was "unprecedented" and that the upgraded (Clinton) proposals offered the Palestinians 94–96 percent of the West Bank, 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, a sovereign Palestinian state, an end to the occupation, the uprooting of most of the settlements..." So, if you got this basic fact wrong, guess what other facts you have wrong...err, all of them?
Actually after digging a little deeper we are both right about this. The 94% you are using would be the result of a 10 year transition of some of the disputed lands with the exception being Jerusalem which had some notable exclusions. The 75% was the starting point for the West Bank. The issue for the Palestinians was that the Israeli's still would control majority of the flow of goods and services between and to a lesser extent within the Palestinian controlled areas. You should now that the percentages being used are in reference to internationally agreed upon boundaries set up during the Oslo accords negotiations (though actions from both sides ended up killing whatever momentum the agreement started.In hindsight, that deal was due in large part to Barak's surprisingly even keeled approach to the conflict. Despite all of his accolades, Arafat bungled a multitude of issues both within the Palestinian community as well as internationally. The situation right now is completely different as Netanyahu has never really taken the peace process seriously (his first term was evidence of that) when compared to predecessor. Additionally the coalition he pulled together for his second term is very hawkish and can be best described as the Neocons of the Israeli political spectrum. If you want to read probably the best book I've seen about this topic check out "The Iron Cage" by Rashid Khalidi. While he does have a lot of criticism about the western world's impact on the situation as well as Israel's actions, he repeatedly calls the the Palestinian leadership and the community as a whole for playing the victim card and calls for unification within the very fractured community.
