To: steve harris who wrote (9396 ) 4/11/2014 3:54:27 PM From: joseffy Respond to Inside the White House’s Secret Campaign to Scapegoat Israel Adam Kredo April 10, 2014 freebeacon.com Washington Free Beacon that top Obama administration officials have worked for the past several days to manufacture a crisis over the reissuing of housing permits in a Jerusalem neighborhood widely acknowledged as Israeli territory.Senior State Department officials based in Israel have sought to lay the groundwork for Israel to take the blame for talks collapsing by peddling a narrative to the Israeli press claiming that the Palestinians were outraged over Israeli settlements, the Free Beacon has learned. planted several stories in Israeli and U.S. newspaper s blaming Israel for the collapse of peace talks and have additionally provided reporters with anonymous quotes slamming the Israeli government.Martin Indyk and his staff, the secret media campaign against Israel paved the way for Secretary of State John Kerry to go before Congress on Tuesday and publicly blame Israel for tanking the talks. the Obama administration has in the past retaliated against critics from inside the pro-Israel world. Martin Indyk started telling anyone who would listen that in fact the Palestinians were angry over the housing issue,” the source said. “Eventually, the Palestinians figured out it was in their interest to echo what the Americans were saying.” served as the U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, as well as in several other roles, was appointed by Obama to act as the U.S. special envoy for peace negotiations.One former Israeli diplomat familiar with Indyk’s tactics said that he is a crass political player who has a history of planting negative stories about Israel in order to undermine the Netanyahu government and bolster his hand in the talks. see his fingerprints,” said the source, who referenced a separate story two weeks ago in which U.S. government sources implied that newly installed Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer was not performing his job effectively. “This is part of Indyk’s playbook.” “There was only one person who would do this kind of thing and it’s Martin Indyk and his staff,” the former diplomat added.Kerry’s peace team has a track record of trashing Israel anonymously. Kerry’s team leaks anti-Netanyahu quotes and claims to the Israeli press—not that is should be a mystery why Israeli reporters based in Israel keep producing anti-Bibi quotes from ‘American officials,’” the source said. just imagine the outrage if the roles were reversed and Bibi had a team on the ground in D.C. trashing Obama to the Washington Post on background ,” the source said.was actually a reissue of an earlier pronouncement permitting these new apartments to be built, meaning that the substance of the decree had not changed for months and had not been a roadblock to the peace talks.Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg dismissed the notion in late 2009.building of apartments in Gilo is irrelevant to eventual disposition of Jerusalem because everyone—the Americans, the Palestinians, and the Israelis—knows that Gilo, the suburb that is the latest source of tension between Washington and Jerusalem, will undoubtedly end up in Israel as part of a negotiated solution (not that that’s ever happening, by the way),” Goldberg wrote . “It doesn’t matter, then, if the Israelis build 900 housing units in Gilo or 900 skyscrapers: Gilo will be kept by Israel.”New York Times on Tuesday noted in a report of the talks that the issue of Gilo had “seemed a much less provocative issue,” even for the Palestinians.“the fact Kerry is leaving it up to him [Indyk] is a sign they’ve had to give up.”
