Peace, Endless Peace

After watching riots all day in Tehran, i fell asleep to a 2 am C-Span rerun of Benjamin Netanyahu's foreign policy speech.  Here is the text and here is a video.  Netanyahu declared that the Palestinian state he imagines must " truly recognize" Israel--with its 20% arab population and 4% immigrant population--as the state of the Jewish people, as well as be demilitarized, entailing no army, no control of airspace, no military treaties, and no weapons, all in order to prevent his proposed Palestinian State from becoming "another Hamastan." 

Haaretz  reports on the outcome of U.S. Special Envoy George Mitchell's visit to Israel last week.  It seems that the Israeli settlements on the now-mentioned Palestinian state are the first issue under on the agenda.  Mitchell says that the U.S. is not at the point of sanctioning Israel over construction, and an Israeli source says the expectation is that the U.S. will be stringent on new projects but flexible on construction already underway.  Evidently, "discussion revolves around what the "point of no return" is regarding construction...the American's understood that even if Netanyahu agreed to a full freeze, the governemt did not have the legal ability to force private construction companies to stop building."