NYT tries to carry water for the Obama campaign against Israel and ends up proving Israel is right:

“One of the public misimpressions is that it’s all been about settlements,” Mr. Mitchell, the administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in a rare interview Friday after six months on the job. “It is completely inaccurate to portray this as, ‘We’re only asking the Israelis to do things.’ We are asking everybody to do things.”…

Maybe because the perception is true:

Saudi Arabia, by all accounts the central player in developing a consensus among Arab countries, appears utterly unmoved by the American argument that “confidence-building” gestures can open the door to more substantive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Incrementalism and the step-by-step approach have not, and we believe will not, achieve peace,” the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said after meeting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Temporary security, confidence-building measures, will also not bring peace.”

But, hey, maybe the Arabs will talk to Haaratz:

He declined to discuss what kinds of steps, but other officials said the United States was pushing for a package of measures ranging from Arab countries’ opening commercial offices in Tel Aviv to their leaders’ granting interviews to Israeli journalists…

nytimes.com