In the comments, aired Friday on the Jewish Channel cable network, Gingrich said, “I think we have had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs.”

He also put Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the militant Islamic group Hamas in the same boat, saying they “both represent an enormous desire to destroy Israel.” Gingrich also described the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as “delusional.”

A map of the first Persian empire ( 558–330 BC) which clearly shows the state of Palestine

Describing Gingrich as ignorant of the region’s history, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad suggested that Gingrich should review history, “because all he seems to know about history is the Ottoman period.”

Gingrich’s statements are a “denial of history, which is not acceptable,” he said.

Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi said Gingrich has “lost touch with reality.” His statements show “ignorance and bigotry,” and were “a cheap way to win pro-Israel vote,” she said.

Dimitri Diliani, a leading member of Abbas’ Fatah party, described Gingrich’s remarks as “reflective of the ignorant, provocative and racist nature of Mr. Gingrich.”

He warned that statements like these “jeopardize peace and stability in the region.”

LAT

In the conversation reporters heard, French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he can’t stand Netanyahu and calls him a liar. Obama responds, through a French interpreter: “You are sick of him, but I have to work with him every day.”

Bachmann told reporters Obama needs to apologize to America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

“I call on President Obama to immediately apologize to Prime Minister Netanyahu and I also believe that the president should demonstrate leadership and demand that the French President Sarkozy do the same,” Bachmann said.

White House spokesman Jay Carney had no comment on the conversation.

Bachmann said that Obama is putting too much space between the U.S. and Israel. “And now president Obama has put Israel further at risk by allowing Iran the time Iran needed to get closer to obtaining nuclear weapons,” Bachman said. She cited a report Tuesday from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency that says Iran is secretly acquiring know-how and gear needed to create nuclear weapons and preparing for tests.

The darling of the Tea Party has apparently been pulling in Jewish supporters, because of her Jewish sounding surname.

She’s sharply critical of Obama and U.S. plans to exit Iraq noting in particular the influence Iran will gain. “We’ll have fewer troops in Iraq than we have in Honduras — and that is despite spending 4,400 American lives and $805 billion,” Bachmann said.

“The president’s made some tragic errors in his foreign policy,” Bachmann said.

Bachmann plans to make a foreign policy speech on Thursday in Charleston ahead of debate in Spartanburg on Saturday that will emphasize that topic.

The Minnesota congresswoman is trying to re-ignite her campaign in early-voting South Carolina and regain the tea party supporters she lost to Herman Cain and a Mitt Romney. Earlier Tuesday she again took issue with a tax break for the nation’s low-income workers she now wants eliminated, saying former President Ronald Reagan made a mistake when he pushed for Congress to pass the law.

She’s competing against a raft of tax proposals: Romney’s proposal not to tax dividends, interest or capital gains for people with adjusted gross income below $200,000; Cain’s catchy 9-9-9 plan and Rick Perry’s 20 percent tax on post card idea.

Bachmann told reporters that every person needs to pay and sacrifice to get the country on back on its feet. “People who make more should be paying more and I believe that people who are at the upper end of the income stream need to be paying more,” Bachmann said, adding that the highest income people already do that.

WP

The Palestinian and Arab refusal to accept a U.N. plan to partition the then-British-controlled mandate of Palestine sparked widespread fighting, then Arab military intervention after Israel declared independence the following year. The Arabs lost the war.

“It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Channel 2 TV in a rare interview to the Israeli media. “But do they (the Israelis) punish us for this mistake 64 years?
Abbas also addressed his negotiations with former Israeli leader Ehud Olmert, now in the spotlight because of the publication of the memoirs of former U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Rice backs Israel’s account that Olmert made a peace offer that was rejected, while Palestinians say that talks never actually reached a point where a firm offer was on the table.

Abbas claimed that he and Olmert were “very close” to reaching a peace agreement in 2008, before the Israeli leader left office under the cloud of corruption allegations.

“It was a very good opportunity,” he said. “If he stayed two, three months, I believe in that time we could have concluded an agreement.”

He confirmed Olmert’s account that the Israeli leader was prepared to withdraw from 93.5 percent of the West Bank. The Palestinians, Abbas added, responded by offering to let Israel retain 1.9 percent of the West Bank.

In her forthcoming book, “No Higher Honor,” excerpted in Newsweek this week, Rice claims that the Palestinians rejected Olmert’s proposal.

Rice said Olmert proposed in a May 2008 conversation with her to cede about 94 percent of the West Bank, and to share sovereignty over the disputed holy city of Jerusalem and put an international body in charge of its religious shrines.

In its waning days, Rice wrote, the administration of President George W. Bush tried one last time to wrest a peace deal: “To have an Israeli prime minister on record offering those remarkable elements and a Palestinian president accepting them would have pushed the peace process to a new level. Abbas refused.”

In their last meeting before Bush left office in December 2008, “The President took Abbas into the Oval Office alone and appealed to him to reconsider. The Palestinian stood firm, and the idea died,” Rice wrote.

On Friday, the chief Palestinian negotiator told The Associated Press that the Palestinians had never rejected the Israeli offer.

With Abbas offering in his counter-proposal to let Israel annex 1.9 percent of the West Bank, Bush set a meeting for Jan. 3, 2009, to lock in the positions, which had been delivered verbally, “so the next administration could begin where we left off,” he said.

That meeting was scuttled because of Israel’s December 2008 invasion of Gaza, Erekat said, and Olmert was soon out of office. Since that time, talks revived for only a brief three weeks last year.

Last month, Abbas bypassed the troubled negotiations route to ask the U.N. to recognize an independent state of Palestine.

In his interview with Channel 2, Abbas acknowledged the Palestinians might not be able to muster the necessary nine votes in the 15-member Security Council to approve the statehood bid.

But majority support would be a moot point, anyway, because the United States has threatened to veto the statehood petition. Israel also opposes the U.N. bid, arguing, like the U.S., that only negotiations can yield a Palestinian state.

Abbas said “it is difficult … to launch any kind of negotiations” with the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who takes a hawkish stand on territorial concessions.

He said Netanyahu wants to retain an Israeli military presence along the West Bank’s eastern border with Jordan for 40 years, even after the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“I told him, I prefer occupation,” Abbas said.

Netanyahu has never publicly specified how long he wants to hold on to that territory, known as the Jordan Valley, and his office had no reaction to Abbas’ comment.

AP

Thomas was forced to resign last summer from her job as a columnist for Hearst after the controversy over her comments about Israel. But she has now secured a home for her weekly column in the Falls Church News-Press, which is located in Falls Church, Virginia.

In a statement, Nicholas Benton, owner and editor of the News-Press, said he had spoken with Thomas for over eight hours before deciding to take her on. He called her “progressive” and said that he is “firmly convinced that she is neither bigoted, nor racist, nor anti-Semitic.”

Benton called Thomas’ comments about Israel “intemperate and inappropriate,” but said that they were “in response to a question about Israel, not Jews, and were intended to mean that in these times, Jewish people are free to live wherever they wish, because the era of anti-Jewish persecution is ended. That was not adequately expressed because of the impromptu nature of the incident.”

Thomas did not issue a statement. Her first column for the News-Press focused on Social Security. Huffington Post

The open letter comes three weeks after the uproar caused by another letter, which was written by 50 state-appointed rabbis and told Jews not to rent or sell property to non-Jews.

The latest missive, which was published by some websites and news outlets, says Arab men act polite around Jewish girls and “act as if they really care about you,” but it says that’s a ruse. The men, it says, even change their Arab names to Hebrew forms like Yossi and Ami in order to get close to the girls.

The letter's signatories include: Daughter-in-law of Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, wife of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, Nitzhiya Yosef, Rabbanit Esther Lior – the wife of Rabbi Lior from Kiryat Arba, Rabbanit Shlomit Melamed – the wife of Rabbi Zalman Melamed of Beit El, Rabbanit Esther Levanon – the wife of Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of Elon Moreh, Rabbanit Starena Druckman – wife of Rabbi Meir Druckman of Kiryat Motzkin and others.

“This behavior is temporary,” the letter says. “As soon as you are in their hands, in their villages under their control, everything becomes different. You can ask dozens of girls who have been there. They will tell you it is all an act.

“As soon as you arrive at the village, your life will never be the same. The attention will be replaced with curses, beatings, and humiliations. Even if you want to leave the village it will be much harder. They won’t let you, they will chase you, they won’t let you come back.”

It urges Jewish girls not to go out with non-Jews or work in places that employ non-Jews.

“Your grandmothers never dreamt that their descendants would do something that will take the next generations of her family out of the Jewish people,” it says.

The letter was initiated by the head of Lehava, an extreme right-wing group that says it aims to prevent the “assimilation of the Jewish people” and works at “saving Jewish girls from Arab villages.”

“It’s known that girls who go out with Arabs are beaten, these girls are in danger. … There is a violent social trend and everyone ignores it,” said the head of the group, Anat Gopstein, in a radio interview Wednesday morning.

The head of Israel’s Reform movement, Rabbi Gilad Kariv, harshly condemned the letter and said, “Israeli society is falling into a deep, dark pit of racism and xenophobia,” according to spokeswoman Yuli Goren.

More than 30 female rabbis from the Reform movement published a counter-letter harshly condemning the one released Wednesday, Goren said. Kariv also called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yaacov Neeman to speak out against it.

Among the rabbis’ wives who signed the letter is Nitzchia Yossef, the daughter-in-law of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the ultra-orthodox Shas political party. Esther Lior, the wife of extreme right-wing Rabbi Dov Lior, was another signatory.

Rabbi Yosef was one of the authors of the letter written earlier this month that urged Jews not to sell or rent property to non-Jews. It prompted widespread condemnation from politicians, human rights groups and leading rabbis in both Israel and the United States.

The letter, which was distributed to synagogues and published in some religious newspapers, had warned that those who defied the religious ruling should be ostracized. It said if one apartment is taken by a non-Jew, it devalues all the neighbors’ apartments.

More than 800 rabbis from around the world signed a petition against the letter, saying “statements like these do great damage to our efforts to encourage people to love and support Israel.”

The petition said “the attempt to root discriminatory policies based on religion or ethnicity in Torah is a painful distortion of our tradition. Am Yisrael (the Jewish people) knows the sting of discrimination, and we still bear the scars of hatred. When those who represent the official rabbinic leadership of the state of Israel express such positions, we are distressed by this … desecration of God’s name.”

Nearly 1.5 million Arab residents live inside Israel, making up 23% of the population.

A poll published Tuesday by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed that 48% of Israelis oppose the call to avoid renting or selling property to Arabs. CNN

*By: Paul Craig Roberts

The propagandists for the Israel Lobby, who occupy the Wall Street Journal editorial page while pretending to be journalists, are determined to remove Helen Thomas from the annals of journalism. In case you have already forgotten, a few days ago the distinguished career of Helen Thomas, the 89-year-old doyen of the White House Press Corps, was ended by the Israel Lobby, which made an issue about her opinion that immigrant Jews should leave Palestine and go back to their home countries.

The White House Correspondents’ Association fell in line with the demands of the Israel Lobby, and the cowardly president of the organization added the association’s disapprobation to that of the neoconservative cabal.

Thomas interviews President-elect John F. Kennedy on December. 1, 1960

Having removed Helen Thomas from the journalism scene, the Israel Lobby is now working with its agents on the Wall Street Journal editorial page to eliminate the Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists.

A nonentity in the world of journalism, James Taranto, apparently is associated with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, although Wikipedia reports that he was incapable of graduating from journalism school at California State University, Northridge. On a Wall Street Journal web site, Taranto writes: “We’ve been calling Thomas ‘American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic’ for years,” and he asks who would now accept the Helen Thomas award after Ms. Thomas revealed she really was crazy by criticizing Israel.

I would for one. Of course the Society of Professional Journalists would never give the award, assuming the distinguished award survives the assault of the Israel Lobby’s assassins, to a critic of Israel. Helen excepted, American journalists are cowards. With the concentrated ownership of the corporate media today, no independently-minded journalist can have a career in print or TV media. You defend the Washington/Tel Aviv line, or you are out of work.

The absence of independently-minded journalists on the Wall Street Journal editorial page is an extraordinary change from my days as Associate Editor of that page. The editorial page editor, Robert Bartley was ambitious and forced himself to tolerate talented colleagues. Mere opinion was not our task. Often we scooped the reporters on the news side of the paper. Our editorials reported new developments and provided factual analysis.

I was hired as Jude Wanniski’s replacement. Jude, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, was fired, allegedly because the journal’s brass caught him handing out election campaign literature on a train platform, but if you believe American journalism was ever that pure, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

Jude was fired, because the neoconservatives got rid of him by telling Bartley that Wanniski was over-shadowing him. That was too much for Bob’s ego. Jude, of course, being a real journalist, was objective toward the Palestinians and thus had earned the enmity of the Israel Lobby.

Once Bob was rapidly declining with prostate cancer, neoconservatives engineered the takeover of the editorial page. Today the once proud Wall Street Journal editorial page is a leading apologist for Israeli/American war crimes and police states.

To return to the nonentity, James Taranto, who wants to throw Helen Thomas down the memory hole: Helen Thomas’ opinion that Israelis should stop stealing the villages, homes, and lands of Palestinians, while confining Palestinians to the equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto, is equated by Taranto to the advocacy of “ethnic cleansing” by Helen.

Of course, it is the Israelis who are doing the ethnic cleansing. Many Jews have documented Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, such as Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli terrorist organization, Irgun, Ilan Pappe, Israel’s most distinguished historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli peace group, ICHAD, who have been my house guests. The Israeli newspaper, Haaratz, is far more critical of Israeli policy than Helen Thomas, and so is MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the distinguished British journalist and film maker John Pilger, and the distinguished scholar, Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors.

But Taranto prefers an 89-year old adversary.

Israel is an unnatural state. It was created by terror that was accommodated by craven British and US “diplomacy.” Israel exists for one reason only: the US government provides the money, weapons, and diplomatic protection. Any other government that murdered thousands of civilians in other countries, as Israel does routinely in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, would have its entire government and military on trial before the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Israelis have no worst enemy than their own government.

Every time the rest of the world tries to hold the Israeli government accountable for its crimes, the US vetoes the UN resolution. America has become the enabler of the Zionist-hijacked Israeli government. And the Israeli government knows it. Israeli government leaders have publicly bragged for decades about their control over the US government. US Admiral Tom Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after whom the F-14 “Tomcat” jet fighter was named, declared publicly: “No American President can stand up to Israel.” Apparently no American journalist can either.

I am a critic of Israel’s heartless policy toward the Palestinians, but I do not want Israel destroyed. I want it moved or reformed. Bring the small number of Israelis to America before there is a nuclear war over the fact that they are where they should not be. To try to claim a land and dispossess its people on the basis of a spurious two thousand year year old deed is an audacious act of conquest and dispossession.

My proposal to relocate Israelis in the US is rhetorical, but why not insist that the Israelis, who are heavily dependent on US largess, reform? Why should Americans support an apartheid racist state that denies citizenship to the rightful inhabitants? What kind of morality, if any, does the Wall Street Journal editorial page represent when it defends Israelis who force Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettos, deprived of water, food, medical care and schools? Why must Palestinians live in dread of Israeli bulldozers arriving to flatten their homes in order to create space for Zionist “settlers.”

Allegedly, the US is a superpower, but in fact it is a puppet state of the Israeli government. Witness, for example (the examples are numerous), the fate of the Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed in Israel’s assault on Gaza during December 2008-January 2009. Goldstone is a Zionist Jew and a distinguished judge. He was given the task by the United Nations to investigate the Israeli attack on Gaza. Being an honest person, he provided evidence of Israeli war crimes.

What was the result? The bought-and-paid-for US Congress voted, on the instructions of their master, the Israel Lobby, to deep-six the Goldstone Report by a vote of 344 to 36.

Amazing, isn’t it, there were only 36 US Representatives who were not owned by the Israel Lobby.

Of course, James Taranto serves the Israel Lobby. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, not even a shadow of its former self, when it speaks, speaks for Israel and for the Bush/Cheney militarist police state.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has fallen into the low ranks of Brownshirt propaganda. The fact that management tolerates the continuation of totally nonobjective journalism shows why print newspapers are failing everywhere.

The hubris of Taranto, a mere propagandist who will never come close to the league in which Helen Thomas resides, causes him to think that he is fit to pass judgment on a real journalist. Taranto epitomizes the hubris of the neoconservatives. Not a single one of them has the smallest accomplishment. Yet, blinded with arrogance, they remain in ignorant bliss of their status as prostitutes.

infowars

*Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as a co-founder of Reaganomics.” He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. Roberts has been a critic of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Vienna’s Jewish community said Wednesday that its members were increasingly being harassed after the bloody Gaza aid ship incident some two weeks ago.

The group said it was mainly a small minority of Muslims who were hassling Jews.

“Almost daily we see verbal abuse, spitting, incidents against people who are recognizable as Jews through their clothes,” the community’s president Ariel Muzicant was quoted as saying by broadcaster ORF.

There had been no physical violence, he said.

Muzicant’s organization also announced that it had filed cases against the organizers of recent large anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, because anti-Semitic slogans appeared at those venues.

The protesters, mostly of Turkish and Arab origin, had gathered to condemn Israel’s stopping of an aid flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip, that included the killing on May 31 of nine activists by Israeli forces.

On one transparent documented by the Vienna Jewish community, demonstrators equated the Star of David with the swastika, putting Jews and Israelis on the same level as National Socialists.

A leading member of the Austrian Muslim community, Omar Al-Rawi, on Tuesday sharply condemned any attacks on Jews. “Should Muslim citizens have carried out such attacks, we clearly distance ourselves from them,” he said.

The Jewish community criticized Al-Rawi for having helped to organize one of the demonstrations.

Protests in Vienna
Following the Gaza aid ship raid hundreds of demonstrators gathered in front of the Israeli embassy in Vienna to protest against Israel’s deadly raid , according to police.

Shouting slogans such as “Terrorist Israel” and “End the blockade of Gaza,” protesters called for the immediate release of the several hundred activists who were on board the ships and who are now in Israeli detention.

Nine people were killed and dozens injured last month when Israeli naval commandos boarded the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara. Most of the victims were reportedly Turkish.

“We are not against Jews. We are with the peace-loving Jews,” said Abdulla, an Austrian of Turkish origin. “This is not about religion, this is about humans,” he told the German Press Agency dpa.

DPA

In a short interview on May 27 with Rabbi David Nesenoff at RabbiLive.com, Thomas suggested that Jews “go home” to Poland and Germany and America and “everywhere else.” Thomas, 89, has a front-row, center seat at the White House press briefings — due to her long-time career as a White House correspondent.

Former Clinton special counsel and spokesman Lanny J. Davis issued a statement Sunday calling on the White House to suspend Thomas’ privileges in the White House press room, and for Hearst to consider a similar suspension of her position as a nationally syndicated columnist.

“Of course Helen has the right as a private citizen under the First Amendment to speak her mind, even as an anti-Jewish bigot — but not as a member, much less privileged member with a reserved seat, in the WH press corps,” Davis wrote.

On Sunday, Thomas was dropped from her speaking agency, Nine Speakers, Inc.

The agency’s president Diane Nine issued a statement saying, “Ms. Thomas has had an esteemed career as a journalist, and she has been a trailblazer for women, helping others in her profession, and beyond. However, in light of recent events, Nine Speakers is no longer able to represent Ms. Thomas, nor can we condone her comments on the Middle East.”

Thomas issued a statement of apology after her comments became public, saying, “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

Thomas was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the White House Correspondents Association, and first female member of the Gridiron Club. She has covered nine presidents, since John F. Kennedy, and is considered the “dean of Washington press corps.”

Last August, President Obama made a special visit to the briefing room with cupcakes to wish her a happy birthday.

But Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti Defamation League, said Sunday that her apology “does not go far enough.”

“Her remarks were outrageous, offensive and inappropriate, especially since she uttered them on a day the White House had set aside to celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments of American Jews during Jewish America Heritage Month,” Foxman said.

“We believe Thomas needs to make a more forceful and sincere apology for the pain her remarks have caused,” he said.

Thomas has also come under criticism for her pointed questioning of U.S. support of Israel to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs , a day after a violent clash between Israeli commandos and international activists aboard a flotilla of six ships purportedly filled with humanitarian aid headed for the Gaza Strip.

Fellow columnists, such as Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, have also called for her removal from her front-row position at the White House press briefings.

Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer has gone further, calling for Hearst to fire Thomas.

“She should lose her job over this,” Fleischer said in an email to the Huffington Post. “As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.

“She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”

Hearst Newspapers spokesman Paul Luthringer emailed the Washington Post: “We deeply regret Helen Thomas’ remarks, which in no way reflect the views of Hearst Newspapers or its employees. Helen has expressed her own profound regret over the incident.”

Update:Thomas resigns
Helen Thomas announced her resignation .
Just before Thomas announced her resignation, the White House Correspondents’ Association called a “special meeting” to consider “whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front-row seat” in the briefing room.

The journalists who sit by her side covering the White House issued a rebuke, praising her career as a “trailblazer” but calling her comments “indefensible.”

It isn’t the first time Helen Thomas has been outspoken. Since 1960 she’s been facing down presidents.

There’s a photo of her smiling in China with President Nixon but at press conferences she would yell, “Mr. President, when are you going to stop bombing Cambodia?”

For President Bush she said, “Your decision to go to war has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraq is…”

He replied, “To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect.”

Then Thomas shared an opinion of the current president while promoting her latest book on realnews.com. She was asked, “What do you make of Obama’s whole Middle East policy? Is there a break here with Bush or not?”

Thomas said, “Too one-sided in favor of Israel. He ignores all the horrors that have happened to Palestinians. Their country taken away. Thousands imprisoned for many many years.”

When Thomas became even more open about her views as a columnist for Hearst there was talk of removing her from her front row seat but out of deference to her longevity she remained.

Monday night she remained inside her home in Woodley Park. But friends and relatives we spoke to say they are saddened by the way this illustrious career has come to an end.

ABC

Nearby olive trees were uprooted and cars burned in the attack that occurred in the early hours of Wednesday morning, according to reports.

The Israeli Defence Forces confirmed the incident occurred and said it was being investigated.

The attack comes months after another mosque was hit by an arson attack.

The mosque, in the village of Huwara near Nablus, had Jewish stars of David sprayed alongside the name of the prophet Muhammad, written in Hebrew.

Two cars outside the mosque were burned, and more than 300 olive trees uprooted, Israeli media reported.

“The Israeli Defence Force takes the matter of harming or vandalising holy sites very seriously”, the military said in a statement.

An investigation had been launched “and those responsible should be brought to justice”, the statement said.

‘Price tag’

The village is near the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar.

Settlers from there are believed to be responsible for an arson attack on a mosque in the village of Yasuf in December 2009.

A Rabbi was arrested but then released after security services failed to bring any evidence against him to court.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered a 10-month lull in permits for new settlement homes in the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem.

The order followed US and Palestinian calls for a total freeze in settlement building.

Palestinian officials have refused to rejoin peace talks until a total freeze is imposed.

Some hard-line settlers say they will attack Palestinians in retaliation for any Israeli government measure they see as threatening Jewish settlements.

It is a policy they call the “price tag”.

All Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. BBC

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) greets Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, right, on Capitol Hill

By Glenn Kessler

The two-week-old dispute between Israel and the United States over housing construction in East Jerusalem has exposed the limits of American power to pressure Israeli leaders to make decisions they consider politically untenable. But the blowup also shows that the relationship between the two allies is changing, in ways that are unsettling for Israel’s supporters.

President Obama and his aides have cast the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not just the relationship with Israel, as a core U.S. national security interest. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the military’s Central Command, put it starkly in recent testimony on Capitol Hill: “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel.” His comments raised eyebrows in official Washington — and overseas — because they suggested that U.S. military officials were embracing the idea that failure to resolve the conflict had begun to imperil American lives.

Visiting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu received warm applause at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference on Monday night when he bluntly dismissed U.S. demands to end housing construction in the disputed part of Jerusalem. He was greeted as a hero when he visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

But the administration has been strikingly muted in its reception. No reporters, or even photographers, were invited when Netanyahu met with Secretary of State Clinton Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Biden on Monday or when he met with Obama on Tuesday night. There was no grand Rose Garden ceremony. Official spokesmen issued only the blandest of statements.

The cooling in the U.S.-Israel relationship coincides with an apparent deepening of Israel’s diplomatic isolation. Anger has grown in Europe in the wake of Israel’s suspected misuse of European passports to kill a Palestinian militant in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. On Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced the expulsion of a senior diplomat over the incident, an unusually drastic step for an ally. Relations with Turkey, a rare Muslim friend of Israel for decades, have hit a new low.

Obama and his aides have strongly pledged support for Israel’s security — including a reiteration by Clinton when she addressed AIPAC on Monday — but they have continued to criticize its settlement policies in tough terms. Clinton notably did not pull her punches on the issue when she addressed the pro-Israel group, warning that whether Israelis like it or not, “the status quo” is not sustainable. The drawing of such lines by the administration has been noticed in the Middle East.

A Palestinian youth throws a stone at Israeli troops during clashes in the West Bank village of Iraq Burin on March 20. Talks between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to end the dispute of the settlement issue

“Israeli policies have transcended personal affront or embarrassment to American officials and are causing the United States real pain beyond the Arab-Israeli arena. This is something new, and therefore the U.S. is reacting with unusually strong, public and repeated criticisms of Israel’s settlement policies and its general peace-negotiating posture,” Rami Khouri, editor at large of Beirut’s Daily Star, wrote this week. “At the same time Washington repeats it ironclad commitment to Israel’s basic security in its 1967 borders, suggesting that the U.S. is finally clarifying that its support for Israel does not include unconditional support for Israel’s colonization policies.”
Problems from the start

The Obama administration has struggled from the start to find its footing with Israel and the Palestinians. Obama took office soon after Israel’s three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip, which had ruptured peace talks nurtured by the George W. Bush administration. Obama appointed a special envoy, former senator George J. Mitchell, on his second day in office. But then the administration tried to pressure Israel to freeze all settlement expansion — and failed. The United States further lost credibility when Clinton embraced Netanyahu’s compromise proposal, which fell short of Palestinian expectations, as “unprecedented.”

U.S. pressure at the time also backfired because it appeared to let the Palestinians off the hook. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refused to enter into direct talks before a settlement freeze, even though he had done so before. The administration had to settle for indirect talks, with Mitchell shuttling back and forth. The recent disagreement has set back that effort.

Administration officials have been careful to turn down the heat in their latest exchanges with Netanyahu over Jerusalem, even as they continue to express their displeasure. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley spoke in clipped sentences Tuesday when asked to describe the hours of private conversations with Netanyahu this week: “We have outlined some concerns to the Israeli government. They have responded to our concerns. That conversation continues. This is a dynamic process. There’s a lot of give-and-take involved in these conversations.”

Crowley argued that “the only way to ultimately resolve competing claims, on the future of Jerusalem, is to get to direct negotiations.” He said the administration faces a series of “pass-fail” tests: Can it get the two parties to join direct talks? Can it persuade them to address the vexing issues surrounding the final status of Jerusalem? And ultimately, “do we get to an agreement that is in the Israeli interest, in the Palestinian interest, in the interest of the rest of the region and clearly in the interest of the United States?”

Arab leaders have long said that a peace deal would be possible if the United States pressured Israel. But many experts say such hope is often misplaced. In the case of East Jerusalem, Netanyahu believes that a halt to construction represents political suicide for his coalition, so no amount of U.S. pressure will lead him to impose a freeze — at least until he is in the final throes of peace talks.

“U.S. pressure can work, but it needs to be at the right time, on the right issue and in the right political context,” said Robert Malley, a peace negotiator in the Clinton White House. “The latest episode was an apt illustration. The administration is ready for a fight, but it realized the issue, timing and context were wrong. The crisis has been deferred, not resolved.” Washington Post