Israelis Claim Secret Agreement With U.S.

[bemildred]

Oh good.
:popcorn:

A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon four years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president's efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.

Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush's letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush's peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank. In an interview this week, Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed this understanding in a secret agreement reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2005, just before Israel withdrew from Gaza.

U.S. officials say no such agreement exists, and in recent months Rice has publicly criticized even settlement expansion on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which Israel does not officially count as settlements. But as peace negotiations have stepped up in recent months, so has the pace of settlement construction, infuriating Palestinian officials, and Washington has taken no punitive action against Israel for its settlement efforts.

Israeli officials say they have clear guidance from Bush administration officials to continue building settlements, as long as it meets carefully negotiated criteria, even though those understandings appear to contradict U.S. policy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303128.html

[madeline_con]

1. DUPE

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3281004&mesg_id=3281004

[bemildred]

2. Actually, that's where I got it from.

But LBN is not the I/P forum, and there is no prohibition against posting a story in two appropriate forums. Also, the LBN posting does not follow the rules for that forum, the subject line is not the story headline. But whatever ...

Posting the same thing twice in the same forum is what you are not supposed to do, in certain forums. In some forums, even that is OK, though other posters may gnaw on you about it.

[ConcernedCanuk]

3. "SECRET" agreement? - yeah, right. The whole world knows there is a "special" realtionship

.
.
.

Between the USA Administration and Israel.

Israel is the Middle East nuclear time-bomb, encouraged and paid for by the United States of America.

If it came right to the truth,

methinks Israel is just a USA military puppet,

with nukes

[Shaktimaan]

5. methinks you might not know

too much about the history of either Dimona or Israel's relationship with the US.

why does everyone have this compulsion to insist that either Israel controls the US or vice versa? is the conflict so confusing that people must rely on inventing inane conspiracies to try and make sense of it? or is it that folks are generally more comfortable with the idea that there's some evil darth vader guys who are really behind all this conflict for their own selfish gain, instead of facing the far messier, (scarier) yet more accurate truth.

[snot]

4. I tried to rec but got a msg: "Error. You can't recommend posts from this forum."

Sorry if I'm dense, but never ran into that before . . . ?

[bemildred]

6. The forum has certain rules, they are in a thread always pinned to the top. nt

[azurnoir]

7. Ever wish you could still be surprised?

I do, but this no surprise, not in the "revelation", not in the reactions of either side, all it shows is that the "peace talks" are truly the dog and pony show we knew they were anyway.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

8. "They hate us for our freedoms!" nt