Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to give a speech this Sunday at Bar-Ilan University outlining his government’s policy toward Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s Haaretz reports Netanyahu is expected to embrace the 2003 road map while adding new conditions to its implementation, and rebuffing the Obama administration’s call to freeze all settlement construction. While acceptance of the road map –- and therefore the existence of a future Palestinian state -– represents a significant step by Netanyahu, it should by no means be recognized as a “concession.” It is simply a recognition of Israel’s past commitments.

But by accepting the road map without acceding to one of its key components –- halting all settlement growth –- Netanyahu is in effect undermining the viability of the road map. President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have rightly held fast to a settlement freeze, fending off the dubious arguments for “natural growth” (which is impermissible under the road map anyway). Despite whatever concessions Netanyahu offers in his speech this weekend, the Obama administration should not bend in its insistence that all settlement growth stop and both the spirit and letter of the road map be adhered to.

It seems clear that Netanyahu is playing a difficult two-level game now: he is attempting to appease Israel’s indispensable patron, the U.S., which has taken a harder line on settlements and other issues relating to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, while maintaining his governing coalition in Israel, which doesn’t like the idea of a Palestinian state at all. This balancing act is tricky, and Netanyahu’s track record suggests he might not be able to pull it off.

Some of Netanyahu’s other conditions -– demilitarization of a Palestinian state, airspace control, and the like –- have been discussed as part of negotiations. Presenting these as conditions for negotiation rather than subjects for negotiation simply adds an additional, unnecessary hurdle to restarting serious negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s basically asking the Palestinians to surrender some of their bargaining chips before entering into negotiations.

Netanyahu’s last and most contentious condition is largely symbolic –- the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Considering that the Israelis themselves haven’t been able to pin down what a Jewish state is –- religious? ethno-nationalist? -– putting the Palestinians on the spot to recognize it as such simply confuses the primary issue of Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist, which the PLO has done since the late 1980s. After all, if Israel has a right to exist, who outside of Israel cares whether or not it defines itself as a Jewish state or not? That should properly be a matter for Israelis themselves. Ironically, by demanding the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Netanyahu is basically inviting the Palestinians to become intimately involved in the domestic debate over the self-identity of the Israeli state. This does not strike me as a smart move for an Israeli leader concerned about his country’s long-term future.

From a domestic political perspective, such a recognition demand simply amounts to red meat for Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners. And it may work to keep Netanyahu in power by stalling Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over an ultimately pointless semantic distinction. But for U.S. interests, such an impasse would have deeply negative consequences.

Unless Netanyahu surprises everyone this weekend and fully embraces the road map without further conditions, the Obama administration should stick to its current policy of demanding a settlement freeze. It cannot allow the Israeli government obfuscate and play semantic games in order to break free from the obligations it has assumed over the years.

Harold “Hal” Turner, a white supremacist New Jersey blogger and former radio host who frequented the same right-wing circles as Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan turned himself into police today after encouraging his audience to “take up arms” against two lawmakers and a state official. The comments that lead to Turner’s arrest were made because he was reportedly “angry over legislation that would have given lay members of Roman Catholic churches in Connecticut more control over their parish’s finances.”

Aside from serving as the North Jersey coordinator for Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign, a 2005 article by The Nation points out that Hannity “offered his top-rated radio show as a regular forum for Turner’s occasionally racist, always over-the-top rants.” The Nation also reported that Turner and Hannity’s conversations continued off-the-air as Hannity offered Turner “encouragement” while he struggled to kick his cocaine habit and overcome his “homosexual leanings.” In 2007, Hannity backed away from his association with Turner in a tit-for-tat debate with Black Panther leader Malik Shabazz. Watch it:

Much like Wednesday’s Holocaust Museum shooter (who Hannity conveniently didn’t cover on on the day of the attack), Turner has promoted violence in the name of racism, anti-semitism and white nationalism. In 2006, Turner left former Jersey City Deputy Mayor, Jaime Vazquez, with a back injury and a fractured wrist when Vasquez began publicly protesting his anti-immigrant comments:

TURNER: “(T)he illegal immigrants are breaking the law, and people like me should break the law as well by shooting them down.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Turner as:

“A belligerent, foul-mouthed talk show host, Turner is the maestro of radio hate — a man who rants about a ‘Portable Nigger Lyncher’ machine, ‘faggots,’ ‘savage Negro beasts,’ ‘bull-dyke lesbians’ and ‘lazy-ass Latinos … slithering across the border.’”

This much is clear: President Obama’s speech last week in Cairo has Charles Krauthammer really, really steamed. In addition to last Friday’s extraordinarily dishonest (even for Krauthammer, whose respect for fact has always been negotiable) review, and various television appearances in which he recited a version of Middle East history that seemed derived mainly from watching Exodus a bunch of times, this morning he uses his valuable journalistic real estate to raise questions about the President of the United States’ true feelings toward the country that he leads.

Deploying once again the tired and false charge of “moral equivalence” — a term that has done quite a bit of work over the years as a life-raft for sinking conservative foreign policy arguments — Krauthammer writes:

Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

Krauthammer may not fall on the ground and foam at the mouth like Frank Gaffney, but the message is the same: President Obama doesn’t quite feel like we do about this country — he may not be one of us.

Questioning a president’s policies, vigorously and even with invective, is fine and appropriate. Questioning a president’s commitment to his country, and thus to his country’s security, is, in my view, something different. Sen. John McCain memorably and admirably shut down this sort of talk when it started cropping up at his campaign rallies. But yanking the mic from some yokel at a town hall meeting is one thing — calling out the most prominent conservative foreign policy columnist in the country is another. Are conservatives up to it?