Beginning Wednesday night, October 8th, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot begins. During the week-long holiday, Jews build a special kind of home to dwell in for the week, called a sukkah. The sukkah is a deliberately temporary house, which can have no more than one permanent wall, and whose roof must be open to the sky, covered only partially by natural materials such as branches. Over the course of the week, the Sukkah is supposed to be one’s home: to eat meals in, to celebrate, and even to sleep in.

Our Israeli sister organization, Peace  Now,  broke the news that on the eve of Rosh Hashana, when the Netanyahu government hoped that nobody was paying attention it went ahead with final approval of a plan for construction of a new settlement in East Jerusalem –2,610 housing units in Givat Hamatos.

White House fumes at PM’s 'American values' statement that echoes malicious rhetoric of birthers and other crazy Obama-haters.

Chemi Shalev

You want to give Benjamin Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt. You prefer to assume that he knew not what he was doing, that he fell in love with his own wisecrack, as he is wont to do, and simply didn’t think things through. You want to believe that we have not reached the stage when the Israeli prime minister would wantonly detonate a stink bomb in an American president’s face, as if he couldn’t care less.

Nonetheless, you have to wonder. You can say a lot of things about Netanyahu: Stupid isn’t one of them. So how could have gone down the route of declaring White House criticism of his government’s moves in East Jerusalem “un-American”? How could he have ignored the multiple numerous alarm bells and whistles that should have warned him to think twice and even thrice before taking this road? How could he have exposed himself to the kind of withering reaction issued by the White House yesterday, summed it up in one loaded little word: “odd.”

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Approving new settlement construction on the eve of his meeting with Obama wasn’t enough. Blaming Peace Now for the White House’s criticism of settlement expansion wasn’t enough either. Prime Minister Netanyahu just had to stick a finger in President Obama’s eye by accusing him of being un-American.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a rough meeting in the Oval Office on October 1st.

President Obama chided him for Israel’s settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Right after the meeting, administration officials provided a glance into what Netanyahu probably heard from Obama. New settlement activity “will only draw condemnation from the international community, distance Israel from even its closest allies, poison the atmosphere not only with the Palestinians, but also with the very Arab governments with which Prime Minister Netanyahu said he wanted to build relations,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

Netanyahu was fuming as he left the White House for New York, where he told Israeli reporters who he thinks is responsible for the rocky meeting with President Obama.

Please join us for a briefing call with Yariv Oppenheimer, the Director of Israel’s Peace Now movement, on Monday, October 13, at 11:00 AM Eastern Time.

For a holiday change of pace, Alpher discusses some recent books about the Israel-Arab dispute, starting with the two best sellers by Shavit and Klein Halevy.