U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport around 3 p.m. Thursday, bringing with him the usual traffic headache for motorists who are kept away from the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway while his cavalcade takes him for a meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Kerry is scheduled to meet with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas later in the evening and has brought in his suitcase a “framework” agreement.
No one really understand how this “framework” is different from “outlines” and previous roses by another name that state the same core issues between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and which both sides were supposed to have been talking about for about a decade.
This is the 10th time since last February that Kerry has travelled to Israel. He succeeded in resurrecting the “peace talks” after three years in which it was buried and now is trying to keep his diplomatic racecar speeding ahead in neutral.
The only tangible results of his efforts have been the Palestinian Authority’s winning the freedom of 86 terrorists, with another 18 to be freed in the spring, and lots of Israeli announcements but nothing beyond that for new homes for Jews in Judea and Samaria and in areas of Jerusalem where the Obama administration considers Jews to be “illegitimate.”