MARRAKESH, Morocco - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's message on Israel-Palestinian peace talks this weekend was not notably different than what President Barack Obama himself said in New York in September at a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. But the prevailing perception and coverage in the wake of Clinton's meetings in Israel and Abu Dhabi Saturday is that the U.S. has once again returned to its traditional default position of tolerating Israeli unwillingness to abide by demands for a total settlement freeze and once again decided that the way forward is to pressure the Palestinians to cave.
While U.S. officials on Sunday pushed back forcefully on the veracity of that impression, news headlines have been uniformly grim in the region since Clinton appeared at a news conference in Jerusalem with a confident-looking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the late night news conference, Clinton said that Netanyahu's offer to agree to a partial settlement moratorium in advance of actually entering negotiations with the Palestinians would be an "unprecedented" step.
In fact, U.S. negotiators have been privately saying the same thing for the past few weeks -- that an agreement they had reached with Netanyahu for a nine month moratorium on new settlement construction or further land expropriations before entering negotiations was far reaching and unprecedented, if not the full freeze they had been pushing for months to achieve.
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