Prime Minister Netanyahu today announced a partial 10-month settlement freeze. And, understanding that Netanyahu's freeze is meaningless, the far right is backing him 100%.

According to the New York Times, "A statement from Mr. Netanyahu's office said the moratorium would be in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names of the West Bank, meaning it would not include Jerusalem, and would not apply to new residential building, so existing construction would continue and public structures like schools and community centers would be unaffected." (And, I'd guess, also parks, hospitals, day care centers, bakery cooperatives, Weight Watchers centers, synagogues, more synagogues, Arthur Murray's dance studios, aviaries, fine restaurants, zoos, etc).

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This is definitely worth reading. But this piece by Steve Clemons of New America Foundation is even better.

I have been in Washington since I volunteered for the McGovern campaign. Gregory Craig -- who was essentially dumped for trying to make the administration live up to its campaign pledges on Guantanamo and other civil liberties issues -- is the rare Washington insider I have never heard anything bad about.

On the contrary, everyone I know who knows him says that he is a dedicated liberal, a policy wonk, and a guy with no hidden agendas. Unlike 90% of the people in this capital (including pretty much the entire Congress with a few sterling exceptions) he puts country over personal aggrandizement.

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Anyone who still doubts the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis (that the lobby tries to squelch debate on Israel-Palestine) should check this out.

It is a piece by Rabbi Brian Walt who was scheduled to participate on a panel called "Palestinian Human Rights: Your Involvement" until Goucher's President banned the session from taking place.

According to the college newspaper, Sanford Ungar, President of Goucher, put the kibosh on the session, saying: "We don't want Goucher to end up on a list of schools with a reputation of bringing vehemently pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli speakers to campus. I don't think it would be good for enrollment."

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I think that President Obama's problems are not reflected in his 49% approval rate in the latest polls. Next week he'll be at 56% or 46%. Whatever. I don't put much stock in them.

But I do put stock in this. I do not know a single person who is not disappointed by Obama's first year in office. And the people I know represent Obama's base. Pretty much all of them supported him in the primaries. They worked like dogs during the general. And they took buses, cars and planes to be at his inauguration.

Today much of their enthusiasm is gone.

And the reason for their disappointment is that they wanted a fighter, someone who would implement campaign promises (at least the ones a President can do unilaterally like gays in the military) and challenge the right's lies. Instead they have a conciliator.

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I met the young man last week. We spent some hours together and he's an incredibly brave kid and journalist. This video is the presentation he makes about his home, Gaza, throughout the world.

George Mitchell's job as Middle East Special Envoy has got to be terribly frustrating for a man whose life story has been one success after another.

But the Israel-Palestine conflict tends to be a career destroyer. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was the most popular political figure in the United States when he went to the region to kick-start negotiations during the George W. Bush administration.

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It's getting fun over at the Atlantic.

Andrew Sullivan has been getting better and better on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. After a decade or so of keeping quiet on the 42-year occupation (probably to avoid offending his Likud mentor, Martin Peretz), Sullivan is saying what he really thinks.

And Sullivan's current Atlantic colleague is taking it personally. Jeff Goldberg complains about Andrew breaking with him publicly on Israel. "This is the thanks I get," Goldberg writes, "for defending him [Sullivan] as a Zionist."

Of course, not everyone thinks being labeled a Zionist is a compliment. It seems to me that Sullivan is even-handed, as sympathetic to Palestinian aspirations for a state in West Bank/Gaza/East Jerusalem as he is to a Jewish state within the '67 borders.

He is also one of the most influential journalists in the world.

Goldberg, ever predictable, is discomfited by Sullivan who is anything but. The Gaza war has succeeded in opening another pair of very significant eyes.

Also, Phil Weiss on New York Times columnist Roger Cohen demolishing WSJ's Brett Stephen on Iran at a synagogue debate. Beautiful.

NOTE: MEDIA MATTERS will begin distributing my weekly column on the Mideast after Thanksgiving. If you want to received it by e-mail, write to me at mjrosenberg8@gmail.com. Write subscribe in the subject line.

The neocons (Bill Kristol. Jeff Goldberg, Frank Gaffney, John Bolton, Martin Peretz, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthammer, etc) are arguing among themselves about how much blame Islam deserves for the Fort Hood slaughter.

In response, Americans for Peace Now produced a little primer on Israeli or (using the neocon categories) Jewish religious violence.

And this primer, helpful as it is, barely scratches the surface. The entire settlement enterprise in the occupied territories was ignited by religious fanatics. And the settlement enterprise is violent by its very nature -- displacing Palestinians, starving Gaza, restricting Palestinian movement and, when convenient for religious settlers and/or soldiers, beating and killing those who get in the way. The religious crazies -- supposedly so deeply in love with the Land of Israel -- also rip out olive groves and literally poison the land with chemicals to destroy Palestinian agriculture.

So is Judaism violent? No, but Jewish extremists are, just like their Muslim counterparts. As for Christianity, one need hardly elaborate on the Christianity-blessed extermination of native peoples worldwide or the Holocaust's Christian roots.

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Just yesterday US mediator, George Mitchell, told the Israelis that the United States opposed expanding the Gilo settlement in East Jerusalem. According to Israeli press reports, Mitchell said that moving ahead with settlement expansion now could kill the peace process.

So what did the Israelis do today? They approved the Gilo expansion.

This then may be President Obama's last chance to get it right. In his Cairo speech in the spring he demanded that the Israelis freeze settlements. Prime Minister Netanyahu ignored him except to make clear that he had no intention of freezing anything. Then the Secretary of State made it worse by going to Israel and praising Netanyahu for his "unprecedented" moves for peace.

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Yossi Sarid, the longtime head of Israel's Meretz party and a staunch Zionist, writes in Ha'aretz that the Palestinians should unilaterally declare a state now (like the Jews did in 1948) in West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

It's a very interesting idea. And it has a lot to recommend it. He writes:

"Abbas owes it to his people, to himself, and to us. This week, there were reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds this possibility very scary, and he expects the Americans to nip it in the bud. But his nightmare is our only chance for an end to the occupation in our time.

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I'm going to write about Charles Krauthammer today without telling about the time he freaked out royally in synagogue on Yom Kippur.

I'll get right to his column today which is a diatribe against the media for not attributing the actions of the Fort Hood killer to his religion. Actually, I have noticed no such reluctance. There is hardly a story about Nidal Hassan that does not mention his adherence to the most extreme and violent strains of Islam. And that is the way it should be. His views matter so do their source.

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I knew Marc Adin, author of this piece, during our childhood days in Kingston, New York. I remember him as pretty good at Nok Hockey which was the main fun thing at our local Jewish center.

Anyway, Marc's life spun off in a different direction from the rest of our crowd when he went to Vietnam.

This is his powerful story. And not just his.

On November 4, the House of Representatives voted 344-36 (22 voted present) in favor of a resolution condemning the Goldstone Report, which chronicled the war crimes committed during last year's Gaza war. Not only that, in a break with normal procedure, the House refused to agree to Rep. Keith Ellison's (D-MN) request to publish the Goldstone Report in the Congressional Record. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) objected to publication and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman (D-CA) agreed with her. Bottom line: the American people will not be able to access the Goldstone Report on a US government website (which was surely Ros-Lehtinen's intention). Note: the Congressional Record routinely publishes what it called "extraneous material. In this case the Goldstone report was the subject of the vote which made it especially important that it be published in the record of the House. Plus Rep. Brian Baird on the Gaza slaughter.

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Crisis.

President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu met for two hours last night. Here is the post meeting statement from the White House.
"The President and Prime Minister Netanyahu discussed a number of issues in the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship. The President reaffirmed our strong commitment to Israel's security, and discussed security cooperation on a range of issues. The President and Prime Minister also discussed Iran and how to move forward on Middle East peace."

Cold. No photo. No reporters in the room. The President did not escort the Prime Minister to his car (or to the Metro) and the White House issued a statement that said nothing. It was written before the meeting as it made no reference to anything that occurred during the meeting.

Clearly, Mahmoud Abbas outsmarted everybody by threatening to resign. He forced the United States to look into the abyss -- and then push Bibi right to its edge. This was the least friendly meeting between an American president and an Israeli prime minister in memory. The message: don't play with us, Bibi.

Will the administration stick to its guns? Who knows? Its tendency is to follow pressure on Israel with apologetics (like going along with Israel's teeth gnashing over Goldstone and forcing the Palestinians to go along with it too). If it backs down again, its effectiveness in the Israeli-Palestinian arena is done. They need to stick.. For America's sake, and for Israel's and the Palestinians.'

Get ready for a big AIPAC/Congressional push back. Obama should let them sweat too. He has the power (on foreign policy, Congress is near irrelevant unless a President is intimidated by it).

Yesterday Joltin Joe Lieberman tried to put the Fort Hood slaughter in a religious context, specifically in an Islamic context.

Of course, as a self-proclaimed "man of faith", he won't say that the problem is not Islam but fanatics of all faiths. I mean, just because the history of the world has been scarred by one religious massacre or assassination after another by people of all faiths is no reason not to single out Muslims. Well, not for Joe, anyway. Or the supremely nutty Eric Cantor who believes that all Jews everywhere, including here, are under attack by Muslim "men with guns."

These characters may not recall that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Orthodox Jew, a killing that was justified theologically by ultra-Orthodox rabbis both before and since the killing. Or that physician Baruch Goldstein, a crazed religious nut, opened fire at a mosque in Hebron and killed 27 worshipers while they prayed. Today his grave is a shrine in Hebron for lunatic settlers.

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