"Most Israeli settlement announcements, including this one, are pure symbolism: No ground will be broken anytime soon, and even if the homes are eventually constructed they won’t stand in the way of a Palestinian state. By that measure, Biden flunked. Interrupted in the middle of what was supposed to be a day of love-bombing Israelis with speeches and other demonstrations of U.S. support, he kept Netanyahu and his wife waiting for 90 minutes into a scheduled dinner before issuing a statement that harshly criticized the interior ministry’s announcement. Biden chose to use a word -- “condemn” -- that is very rarely employed in U.S. statements about Israel, even though he and his staff knew that Netanyahu himself had been blindsided by the settlement announcement. So much for love bombs," - Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post.
Check out his columns here. One of his recent beauts: a diatribe against the "unlovable" Iranian Greens. Another: a dissent on any notion that the US should seek a moratorium on all new settlement construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
A bleg: can anyone find me a regular Washington Post columnist - not op-ed author - who supported the Obama administration against the Netanyahu government on the question of a temporary total freeze on all settlement construction?