He has given Obama and Kerry the chance of their political lives to do the same.
The United States later today will thoroughly condemn the new building plans.
The Palestinian Authority has already declared it as “provocative.” “East Jerusalem is Arab territories,” responded Jibril Rajoub, a senior leader in Abbas’ Fatah party.
The United Nations, and the European Union, of course, will condemn it.
Abbas will shout even louder that he is going to the United Nations to bury Israel.
The introduction to a book called the “Peace Process by William B. Quandt, in the introduction of his book Peace Process, says: “Sometime in the mid-1970s the term peace process began widely used to describe the American-led efforts to bring about a negotiated peace between Israel and its neighbors.
“The phrase stuck, and ever since it has been synonymous with the gradual, step-by-step approach to resolving one of the world’s most difficult conflicts….
The United States has provided both a sense of direction and a mechanism. That, at its best, is what the peace process has been about. At worst, it has been little more than a slogan used to mask the marking of time.”
The mask has come off.