Obama and the Settlement Freeze

Robert Satloff on an Obama mistake:

Washington's fixation on stopping settlement activity did have a powerful echo in at least one Middle East country: Israel. America's freeze-mania managed to transform Israel's deep national ambivalence about the wisdom of expanding West Bank settlements into patriotic support for the right of Jews to live in their ancient capital. By giving off vibes that it wanted a freeze even more than the Arabs themselves, and that it wanted to halt building even in Israel's capital, the administration succeeded in making Netanyahu more popular than when he came to office in March. Obama's own approval ratings among Israeli voters fell to single digits--and this is before he had shown whether he had the mettle to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions, the region's real strategic threat. Getting into a fight with Israel without having anything to show for it from the Arabs was not what the president bargained for.