U.S. Weighs Tactics on Israeli Settlements

[Orion]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01prexy.html?ref=world

The measures under discussion — all largely symbolic — include stepping back from America’s near-uniform support for Israel in the United Nations if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel does not agree to a settlement freeze, administration officials said.

Other measures include refraining from the instant Security Council veto of United Nations resolutions that Israel opposes and making use of Mr. Obama’s bully pulpit to criticize the settlements, officials said. Placing conditions on loan guarantees to Israel, as the first President Bush did nearly 20 years ago, is not under discussion, officials said.

Still, talk of even symbolic actions that would publicly show the United States’ ire with Israel, its longtime ally, would be a sharp departure from the previous administration, which limited its distaste with Israel’s settlement expansions to carefully worded diplomatic statements that called them “unhelpful.”

This is the kind of foreign policy reform I have been hoping for with Obama. I'm firmly against Hamas' repeated violent attacks against Israel, but we have also witnessed Israel using those attacks as a pretext for expansion of its settlements. Even if only symbolic, it shows Israel that there are limits to what it can reasonably do in this conflict.

The decision by Obama to refrain from using an instant veto at the UN is crucial to future international policy in the region.