Reality Check

Mitchell Plitnick, an early editor of Jewish Peace News and now Director of the US Office of B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identifies a showdown in-the-making between President Obama's demand for a complete halt to settlement construction and the defiant construction of more housing in the settlements by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak (read the article in Mitchell's blog, "The Third Way"). Whether or not there will be a confrontation and how it is resolved will provide the first concrete way to assess how serious President Obama is about pursuing Palestinian-Israeli peace in a different mode than his predecessors.

--Joel Beinin

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Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Z. Shlensky
Rebecca Vilkomerson
Alistair Welchman
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Jewish Peace News archive and blog: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com
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