"The "quartet" of Middle East peace mediators -- the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia -- on Friday issued its own condemnation of the settlement plan and said it would assess the situation at a previously scheduled meeting in Moscow next week.
""The Quartet has agreed to closely monitor developments in Jerusalem and to keep under consideration additional steps that may be required to address the situation on the ground," the group said in a statement, without providing further details."
[Former Ambassador Martin Indyk advises Netanyahu, recalling Albright, that he should pay more attention to the U.S. and less to his right wing. Indyk also recalls that the Prime Minister's mishandling mishandling of the U.S. contributed to his defeat by Ehud Barak in 1999. That is a generous reading of the former Clinton adminstration's stance. Recall that while Bill Clinton and Co. were regularly infuriated by Netanyahu, they never really got tough with him. Demonstrations of pique are not getting tough. If you want an example of an administration being tough, you need to go back to Bush/Baker, and there you did have an Israeli Prime Minister going toe-to-toe with the U.S. and losing, literally. Yitzhak Shamir is the case in point.]
[The question that the Obama administration should be asking right now, is not merely how to continue a firm line with a Prime Minister who has no interest in a reasonable two-state solution, but how to insure that his political career is understood by the Israeli public as jeopardizing the only bilateral relationship that really matters to Israel. Netanyahu is not a peacemaker, and to presume that he is only plays into his game.]
