TEL AVIV, Israel — U.S. Ambassador Daniel Shapiro told a conference attended by Israeli politicians and military officials that the Obama administration questions whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government really wants peace with the Palestinians.
Israel needs to halt settlement expansion, mount a “more credible” campaign to control settler violence and open more West Bank land to Palestinians to show its commitment to peace efforts, Shapiro said at the conference organized by the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
“Too much vigilantism goes unchecked, and at times there seems to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law, one for Israelis, and another for Palestinians,” he said. “Hovering over all these questions is the larger one about Israel’s political strategy vis-a-vis its conflict with the Palestinians.”
The ambassador’s criticism comes two months after Netanyahu’s latest trip to the White House, where he and President Barack Obama pledged to cooperate and put angry disputes over the nuclear deal with Iran behind them.
