If Netanyahu indeed did not promise Obama to freeze building on E-1, it must have been written in some kind of Hieroglyphics. Six months after he agreed to keep E-1 off the chessboard, PA negotiator Saeb Erekat said on at least two different public occasions that Obama forced Israel to commit to prevent any construction there.
In the Israeli elections after the fall of the Obama-Livni administration in 2009, Netanyahu campaigned by boasting, “I will link Jerusalem to Ma’aleh Adumim through the neighborhood of… E1. I want to see neighborhoods in one contiguous Jewish construction.”
Ho-ho and Happy Hanukkah, but a great miracle did not happen in E-1.
It will happen one day, but only after the curtains close on the Peace Talks Follies, which so far has won the applause only of journalists who need good copy for other journalists and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to read.
