In a debate last night with Jeremy Ben Ami of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, neoconservative don Bill Kristol told the audience in the New York synagogue that he had no problems with President Obama’s Israel policies. But just two months ago, a right-wing pro-Israel group Kristol heads rolled out the latest of its serial attacks on Obama’s policies toward Israel.

The Weekly Standard editor praised Obama and said the difference between Obama’s Israel policies and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s “is not that great.” Kristol stated that he was “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree.” He went on:

I’ve been mostly supportive of the Obama administration in the last couple of years…

I think President Obama has moved sufficiently on these issues from the Cairo speech in 2009 to the AIPAC speech of two months ago, that the difference between the parties is less than it was.

But as Haaretz and WNYC pointed out, the Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) consistently lambasts Obama on Israel. The group ran ads in Washington around its campaign asserting Obama was “not pro-israel.” In December, Kristol, in an ECI statement, said Obama “keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.” (Earlier that year, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Kristol frequently praises, said that under the Obama administration “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”)

Just two months ago — far from the “last couple years” Kristol has been “supportive” of Obama’s policies — the hedge fund-bankrolled ECI released a 30-minute anti-Obama online film, complete with ominous music. In the film, Kristol associate Liz Cheney says Obama attempted to “put distance” between the U.S. and Israel. Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer says Obama “delegitimized” Israel, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Lee Smith said Obama’s “narrative fit [a] rejectionist and resentful narrative.”

This isn’t the first time ECI’s attacks on the Obama administration’s Israel policies have been revealed as disingenuous political maneuvers. Last May, ECI executive director Noah Pollak, commenting via Twitter, publicly praised Obama’s speech on the Middle East, but ECI later condemned the speech in an attack ad. When ThinkProgress revealed the hypocrisy, Kristol disowned the tweets in comments to the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. Rubin added: “Kristol graciously avoided pointing out that while Pollak has the executive director title, the group is firmly under the control of Kristol and his two co-founders.”

With ECI “firmly under the control of Kristol,” and with Kristol now “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree” on Israel, will the organization lay off its right-wing attacks on the president? “We’re trying to decide,” Kristol told WNYC.

The European Union’s foreign ministers harshly denounced Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, writing that settlement expansion is threatening a potential two-state deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The statement comes as some analysts speculate that a broad national unity government announced could give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government political space to slow settlement expansion or even cut a deal — though few view such moves as overwhelmingly likely.

The E.U. Foreign Affairs Council statement, however, stressed the importance of slowing the settlement enterprise before the Israeli communities jutting deep into a future Palestinian state forclose the possibility of peace. Noting that “settlements remain illegal under international law, irrespective of recent decisions by the government of Israel,” the 27 E.U. foreign ministers wrote:

The viability of a two-state solution must be maintained. The EU expresses deep concern about developments on the ground which threaten to make a two-state solution impossible…

The EU expresses deep concern regarding settler extremism and incitement by settlers in the West Bank. The EU condemns continuous settler violence and deliberate provocations against Palestinian civilians. It calls on the government of Israel to bring the perpetrators to justice and to comply with its obligations under international law.

Settler extremism has not only affected Palestinians, but also the Israeli army, which last year was subjected to a reprisal attack by ideological settlers.

The document also cited rapid settlement expansion — settlement construction increased 660 percent in the first six months after 2010′s settlement freeze — and the legalizing of so-called outpost settlements that are at inception considered illegal by Israeli law. The Israeli government said the E.U. statement was “based on a partial, biased and one-sided depiction of realities on the ground.”

Palestinians, too, share some blame in the failure to get a two-state solution off the ground. The Second Intifada, an often violent Palestinian uprising after the Oslo peace process stalled in the late 1990s, shook Israeli confidence that peace was possible. Just last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmood Abbas rebuffed Israeli overtures for talks without preconditions, insisting on an Israeli settlement freeze.

The international community and the U.S. consider the settlements “illegitimate.” Several high profile figues, including top current and former Israeli officials, recently called for various forms of halting settlement activity.

The New York Times published two articles this weekend highlighting the disarray that is Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. Romney not only appears “out of touch,” for example, on his Russia policy and “all over the map” on the war in Afghanistan, but also, the former Massachusetts governor has demonstrated a “perplexing pattern,” the Times reported, of being at odds with many of his own foreign policy advisers.

Moreover, seeming to concede President Obama’s dominance of national security issues this campaign season, a Romney adviser told the Times that Romney isn’t interested in talking about foreign policy. “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office,” the adviser said.

And there’s good reason. Romney’s inexperience on foreign policy and national security issues has dogged his campaign with confusion, ignorance and private and public disagreements among Romney’s campaign advisers and surrogates:

AFGHANISTAN

Romney has been “all over the map” on Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported late last year, Romney “has not explained what he thinks the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is at this point and what would constitute success.” And keeping with his adviser’s above statement, Romney said in a major foreign policy speech that he’d wait until becomes president to “order a full review of our transition to the Afghan military.”

Romney also says that the U.S. should not be negotiating with the Taliban, a position that puts him at odds with his top national security campaign surrogate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), his own advisers and even former top Bush administration officials. “Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement,” the Times noted.

IRAN

Romney said that if Obama is re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon. “If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. That line “caused some of his advisers to cringe” the Times reported this weekend. But overall, again, Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. Romney has proposed much of what Obama is already doing. The Times noted that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”

But Romney does occasionally ramp up bellicose rhetoric on Iran which prompted a former Israeli Mossad director to say the former Massachusetts governor “is making the situation worse” with Iran. Romney has ignored what the IAEA, U.S. and Israeli intelligence think about Iran’s nuclear program and his campaign advisers even attacked the Obama administration for public discussion of the consequences of attacking Iran.

Read more

Following on reports late last night and early this morning, Israel made concessions aimed at ending hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners in an Egyptian-mediated deal. The agreement won approval today from key hunger-striking prisoners, some of whom are detained indefinitely without charge.

Earlier today, before the prisoners accepted the deal, the New York Times reported on the concessions made by Israel to the hunger-striking prisoners:

Israel had accepted three of the prisoners’ main demands: to restrict the military courts’ ability to extend the terms of some 300 inmates being held without charge or trial under what is known as administrative detention; to end the solitary confinement of 17 prisoners who have been kept in isolation; and to permit family visits for prisoners in the West Bank who come from Gaza.

Prisoner Khader Adnan sparked the mass protest of around 1,600 prisoners after he refused food and was released 66 days later. Last week, the Israeli HIgh Court rejected appeals from two prisoners who went even longer and are reportedly in danger of death.

The hunger strikes stoked fear in Israel because of protests in their support; prisoner deaths could inflame this movement. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour covered the hunger strikes and other non-violent pro-Palestinian activism on her CNN show last week:

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch called on Israel to end detentions without charges, a practice some Israeli figures have admitted is often unnecessary.

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor has emerged as a moderate voice in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. Last month, he split with many of his Likud party colleagues, in arguing that “An attack on Iran wouldn’t add anything to [Israel's] security.” Today, in an interview published in the Times Of Israel, Meridor delivered harsh words to his colleagues who have overseen the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Meridor warned that the current calm in relations with the Palestinians might be producing “an illusion” among Israelis “that this is sustainable in the long term. It is not. It is an anomaly. We need to change it.”

The deputy prime minister urged the government to freeze further settlements “across the line of the [settlement] blocs or the fence or whatever you call it,” a reference to the Israeli West Bank barrier which is partially built along the 1949 armistice line, or “Green Line.”

Meridor emphasized that he was not advocating for a freeze in construction in East Jerusalem, but urged the Prime Minister’s office:

[D]on’t build all over the place, because this is the most damaging of all the things that we are doing to ourselves in the world. Because people say: ‘You offer the Palestinians a state. But if you build there in every place, you don’t really mean it.’

The views expressed in the interview are closer to the Obama administration’s policy of opposing all settlement construction and endorsing a negotiated border between Israel and a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders but with mutually agreed upon land swaps. Meridor said:

I think we are at the beginning of being able to do it. Because President Obama spoke of swaps, not of [an Israel withdrawn to the lines of] ’67… And Bush spoke of it… So we already see a basic understanding of the paradigm. The state won’t be along the ’67 lines. No way. It will be different, with some compensation. But if we build all over the place, we lose. Even if we don’t have an agreement [with the Palestinians], we need to have a rational policy.

Meridor criticized Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for not accepting the proposal offered by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert four years ago but acknowledged that global public opinion had turned against the Israeli government because of its continued approval of settlement constructions.

While some members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, such as Deputy PM Moshe Ya’alon, and right-wing pro-Israel advocates in Washington have suggested that Israel should not allow a Palestinian state, Meridor countered that such a policy could spell the end of Israeli democracy:

The whole land is Jewish historically… I am fully attached to this. There’s no rhetoric. It’s really what I think. But the reality now is that we can’t get all of it and stay a democratic state or a Jewish state, in terms of numbers and in terms of regime. And this is why we need to cut, and I’m ready to cut…

Despite admonitions from the State Department, Netanyahu’s government has continued to approve and/or legalize settlement constructions in Jerusalem and the West Bank following the expiration of a freeze on settlement construction in September, 2010.