Free Republic

Britain scolded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for describing the Israeli government as the most right-wing in Israeli history, a move that aligns Prime Minister Theresa May more closely with President-elect Donald Trump. After U.S. President Barack Obama enraged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by refusing to veto a UN Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement building, Kerry's public rebuke of Israel has unsettled some allies such as Britain. Amid one of the United States' sharpest confrontations with Israel since the 1956 Suez crisis, Kerry said in a speech that Israel jeopardizeds hopes of peace in...

Di Leo: Sabotage: The US-Israel Alliance Under Assault from Within By John F. Di Leo - On December 28, 2016, the outgoing Secretary of State of the outgoing Obama administration held a press conference. He spoke to the cameras for almost an hour and a half, hoping to wear down his opposition on one of the great political miscalculations of modern times. The prior week, the Obama administration’s representative at the United Nations – Ambassador Samantha Power – engineered the passage of a remarkably anti-Israel resolution at the UN. The resolution condemns Israel for building housing units on its own...

No 10 says it was inappropriate of Kerry to attack the make-up of the democratically-elected Israeli government Rebukes US Secretary of State for focusing on the single issue of settlements Says Kerry's remarks have been unhelpful in the pursuit of two-state solution Increasingly bitter row came after Kerry's strongly-worded attack on Israeli government's illegal construction of settlements in the West Bank The UK Government today launched an unprecedented attack on the US, its closest ally, over John Kerry's condemnation of the Israeli regime as the 'most right-wing in history'. In a highly critical speech on foreign policy yesterday the US...

… A spokesman for the British Prime Minister issued a statement criticizing Kerry’s focus on the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. “We do not… believe that the way to negotiate peace is by focusing on only one issue, in this case the construction of settlements, when clearly the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is so deeply complex.” The spokesman also criticized Kerry’s description of the current government in Israel as “the most right-wing government” in Israeli history. “And we do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically-elected government of an...

Will they ever be out of our hair? At the State Department on Wednesday, John Kerry tried to emulate the late Fidel Castro with a tedious, whiny, self-absorbed and self-serving 72-minute marathon of musings about Israeli-Palestinian peace. Contrary to the event’s title and hype, Kerry’s homily was light on “vision.” That part of the speech was summarized, an hour into the thing, in a sketchy, six-point plan only a political theoretician could like, which will soon join numerous other peace plans now collecting dust in forgotten archives. Most of the speech was a defense of President Obama’s decision to allow...

Secretary of State John Kerry continues to hold shares in a luxury Chinese bottling company operating in occupied Tibet amid escalating human rights protests, including a gruesome self-immolation by a former Tibetan monk, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned. Kerry and the U.S. State Department said nothing about the Dec. 8 suicide by Tashi Rabten, a 30-year old former monk who set himself on fire in Machu County in Eastern Tibet to protest Chinese occupation of the country, according to department Lauren Hickey. Rabten was seen running down a roadway, his body engulfed in flames as a...

It took eight years of backbiting and pretending they got along for relations between President Barack Obama’s administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to finally hit rock bottom. Though they’ve clashed bitterly before, mostly notably over Iran, the two governments seemed further apart than ever after a speech Wednesday by Secretary of State John Kerry and last week’s United Nations resolution. The key question for the Obama administration, newly willing to air grievances with Israel on live television, is why now? …

Weaponizes UN Human Rights Council blacklist and BDS movement. In all the fury over the anti-Israel UN Resolution 2334 the Obama administration marshalled through the Security Council, with an "abstain" vote providing cover for the perfidy, few people have focused on a particularly pernicious and dangerous provision.I'm not talking about the provisions effectively declaring it illegal for Jews to live in Jewish Quarter of the Old City or to worship at the Western Wall.Here is the provision I'm talking about in Resolution 2334 (pdf.): 5. Calls upon all States, bearing in mind paragraph 1 of this resolution, to distinguish, in...

During the Secretary of State’s browbeating Israel speech this morning, he stuck his tongue out, often bizarrely, dozens times during the roughly 73-minute address. Watch these highlights from just the first half of the address:

Following speech by Kerry, chairman of pro-settler party says idea of two-state solution is no longer relevant The Israeli government will "remove Palestine from the agenda" when Donald Trump takes office as US president, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett told Israeli news site Ynet on Thursday. The chairman of the pro-settler Jewish Home party dismissed a speech delivered by US Secretary of State John Kerry a day earlier, which warned that Israeli policy was undermining the chance for a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict. "Kerry may have good intentions," said Bennett, "but the speech was like his policy –...

Secretary of State John Kerry did his best to explain America’s decision to abstain from the UN resolution vote to condemn Israel from its settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Critic after critic slammed the White House’s inaction, calling it a slap in the face to our friend in the Middle East. At the State Department on Wednesday, Kerry said that a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians is the “only path to peace.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said allies of the United States will not be "swayed and intimidated by a tweet" from President-elect Donald Trump. Trump recently commented on the U.S.'s role in the condemnation of Israel's settlements in disputed territories by the United Nations, telling Israel to "stay strong" until his inauguration. In an interview with NBC News, Kerry told Andrea Mitchell he would not "debate" Trump on this issue

"While Secretary Kerry mentioned Gaza in his speech, he seems to have forgotten the history of the settlements in Gaza, where the Israeli government forced settlers to withdraw from all settlements and the Palestinians responded by sending rockets from Gaza into Israel," Schumer said in a statement. "This is something that people of all political stripes in Israel vividly remember.

Headline of the Day Poll Why did the U.S. abstain from the U.N. vote on Israeli settlements? Obama thinks it will bring peace to the Middle East Obama wishes to harm Israel 1VC

On Dec. 21, amid his morning workout, an afternoon round of golf and a family dinner with friends, President Obama interrupted his Hawaii vacation to consult by phone with his top national security team in Washington. Egypt had introduced a resolution at the U.N. Security Council condemning Israeli settlements as illegal, and a vote was scheduled for the next day. The idea had been circulating at the council for months, but the abrupt timing was a surprise. Obama was open to abstaining, he said on the call, provided the measure was “balanced” in its censure of terrorism and Palestinian violence...

Full title : Kerry: “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic. It cannot be both. And it won’t ever really be at peace.” …”The truth is that trends on the ground, violence, terrorism, settlement expansion and the seemingly endless occupation, they are combining to destroy hopes for peace on both sides and increasingly cementing any reversible — an irreversible one state reality that most people do not actually want."Today, there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. They have a choice. They can choose to live together in one state...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded earlier today to the hour long speech by Secretary John Kerry and the clarified stance of the U.S. position toward Israel as outlined in the past several days.

I’m excited for him. It’s no small thing for a man to realize a fantasy he’s cherished for decades, even though literally no one cares what he has to say. Obama’s a sport for letting him live the dream. That sounds like a joke but it isn’t. What explanation could there be for this except that Kerry badly wanted to extend a rhetorical middle finger to Netanyahu’s government, whose agenda he attacked today as being “driven by its most extreme elements,” on behalf of the Obama administration as they head out the door? Nothing will flow from it policy-wise. The...

Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Wednesday offered a harsh and detailed assessment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying their growth threatens to destroy the viability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the United States was obliged to allow passage of a U.N. resolution condemning the activity in order to preserve the possibility of peace. Kerry noted that the number of Israelis living in settlements has grown significantly and that their outposts are extending farther into the West Bank — “in the middle of what by any reasonable definition would be the future...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday said Israel's building of settlements on occupied land was endangering Middle East peace, voicing unusually frank frustration with America's longtime ally. In a swiftly issued statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Kerry of bias. He said Israel did not need to be lectured to by foreign leaders and looked forward to working with incoming President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to pursue more pro-Israeli policies.