Abrams again says Hillary’s wrong

Former Bush administration deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams told a Washington, D.C. area forum I attended last week that he believed there were agreements on settlements made between George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. In the Wall Street Journal today, he expands on those remarks in a column entitled "Hillary is Wrong About the Settlements":

Regardless of what Mrs. Clinton has said, there was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to break the deadlock, withdraw from Gaza, remove settlements — and confront his former allies on Israel’s right by abandoning the "Greater Israel" position to endorse Palestinian statehood and limits on settlement growth. He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze.

For reasons that remain unclear, the Obama administration has decided to abandon the understandings about settlements reached by the previous administration with the Israeli government. We may be abandoning the deal now, but we cannot rewrite history and make believe it did not exist.

This contradicts former U.S. ambassdor to Israel Dan Kurtzer, who wrote earlier this month in the Washington Post that there was "no such understanding" on settlements.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post’s Herb Keinon writes Israeli officials believe the whole debate doesn’t matter much:

Diplomatic officials in Jerusalem described the debate over whether the Bush Administration did or did not have tacit agreements with Israel as interesting, but largely "academic."

"Let’s say that the Obama Administration is backtracking on previous agreements, what are we going to do?" the official asked.

He said that with Obama’s popularity in the US still soaring, and the settlements not an issue with much support in Congress, no one is going to go battle with the president over backtracking on tacit understandings on settlement construction.

"Do you see anyone in the US really going to war with him over this?" he asked.