I was going to title this post "Abrams: I Can't Believe What A Shameless Liar Hillary Clinton Is"...

Despite fervent denials by Obama administration officials, there were indeed agreements between Israel and the United States regarding the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. As the Obama administration has made the settlements issue a major bone of contention between Israel and the U.S., it is necessary that we review the recent history.

... but Steve Rosen's take is a little more subtle. As opposed to seeing this as a straightforward continuation of decades of anti-Israel bait-and-switch diplomacy, he thinks that it's an extension of Bush-era battles that the anti-Israel side is now pretending they won:

A little history here will help to explain the contradiction between Abrams and Kurtzer. Abrams and Steve Hadley, the Deputy National Security Adviser to Bush at the time, crafted the settlements growth understandings. Dan Kurtzer, then U.S. Ambassador to Israel, opposed them. He confirmed to Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post in April 2008, that he had opposed accepting an April 2004 letter from Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, reconfirming U.S.-Israeli understandings that restrictions on the growth of settlements would be made "within the agreed principles of settlement activities"... So these dueling op-eds by Kurtzer and Abrams are a continuation of a policy war withing the Bush Administration, a war that Kurtzer lost at the time but is trying to win now.

So you see? This isn't just an unblinking campaign of anti-Israel diplomacy, complete with four consecutive days of Washington Post articles attacking Israel's position (including one that reached for Carter-era memos to discover an anti-Israel nugget!) There's also vindictive personal animus at stake.

Anyway, Clinton just explicitly said that East Jerusalem construction must stop as part of the administration's blanket ban on natural growth. Israeli officials were already in mild disbelief that the Obama administration would detonate a decades-old alliance over an issue as stupid as stopping natural, above and beyond how the position itself is counterproductive. Now they're just kind of like "well, if that's actually their stance, we suppose the US isn't really serious about the peace process after all."

And yes, of course there was a Bush agreement on settlements in exchange for Sharon's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. And of course the US is straightforwardly abrogating it, which makes a mockery of Obama's insistence that now Israel can afford to take risks for peace because this time US security assurances will be reliable.

References and previously after the jump...