Further, we need the United Nations, because robust and consistent U.S. engagement with the rest of the world through the UN is imperative to the advancement of our nation's foreign policy, as well as critical to achieving our priorities in national security, economic, and humanitarian matters.

Finally, the United States has long recognized that those Israeli settlements are illegitimate, and that their presence in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights constitutes a violation of international law. That is also the official position of the reconvened Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Doing away with or otherwise undermining that particular longstanding policy would be entirely counterproductive to our short- and long-term interests in not only the Middle East, but in Europe as well.

The US abstained on UN Resolution in 1322 in 2000. Sponsored by Malaysia it deplored the visit of Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount. The resolution referenced former resolutions such as 242 and 228 and in that sense called on Israel to return to the 1967 lines. The US worked to water-down the resolution's deep anti-Israel language, but still abstained at the end.

Green26: "Trump has been elected president and will be the president in about 4 weeks. You continue to seem not to realize that Trump has been elected president, and the US and people like you are going to have to learn to deal with it."

... the issue at hand, which is the UN resolution censuring Israel for its ongoing Jewish resettlement policy in its occupied territories. More to the point, is the purpose of your presence here to engage in a policy discussion, or to bait Democrats and liberals by taking political potshots at them?

Personally, I believe it's the latter because from my perspective, you don't appear to know very much at all about the fine art of public policy development. Most certainly, you fail to grasp how handing Israel a blank check is now completely antithetical to our own national interests, regardless of whoever happens to be president.

You act as though you believe both the United States and Israel to be omnipotent and omnipresent forces in the Middle East which are wholly incapable of error by moral design, and therefore entitled to act as they wish with little or no due regard for the other inhabitants of the region. That's less a wise and practical policy directive, than it is a myopic and foolhardy pursuit of raw power that reeks of unbridled contempt and arrogance.

It's that very sort of imperialistic hubris which throughout history has led many a great nation to incur some very serious but otherwise avoidable grief, including our own most recently in Vietnam and Iraq. Moreover, Israel is not the U.S.'s equal; it is very much a junior partner which is very much dependent upon our support for its survival. I think both Republicans and Democrats all too often seem to forget that particular dynamic in American-Israeli relations and diplomacy. We allow Israel to dictate U.S. policy at our own risk and peril.

If Israel is to survive over the long haul as a nation, it needs to come to terms of understanding with its neighbors, starting with the Palestinians. Farsighted Israeli leaders such as Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzak Rabin and Ehud Barak all grasped that very basic concept, which is that the Jewish settlement of Arab territories seized in the 1967 Six-Day War is counterproductive to Israel's pursuit of a longstanding and stable peace in the region.

Unfortunately, right-wing Israelis and their white-wing American friends have long had other ideas, seeing Israel's continued existence and expansion as some sort of fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy, whose meaning is otherwise lost to the rest of us due to our own Godless secularism.

Their policies have had the opposite effect, rousing the Palestinians to Intifada and gaining the attention and enmity of larger Mideast neighbors such as Iran. And the primary reason why they continue to pursue these policies is because of their continued confidence in our own longstanding sympathy for the Jewish state, which dates back to the Israeli War of Independence in 1948-49.

This has been foolish on our country's part, particularly as Israel has transformed itself with our substantial financial and military aid over the decades, from an embattled but feisty underdog to the region's proverbial 900-lb. gorilla - one which now possesses nuclear capabilities.

Our own policy toward Israel has failed to adapt itself over those same decades to that new regional dynamic and changed reality. Rather than providing that nation with sufficient means to defend itself from aggression, we've instead been increasingly enabling its own questionable and bad behavior as it threatens its neighbors militarily.

We should be telling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where to get off, not vice versa. It's essential that the United States reassert its own role as the senior and dominant partner in the U.S.-Israel alliance, and use our leverage to compel right-wing Israelis to neither take our own country's continued good will for granted, nor treat that good will as a blank check to be cashed at their own whim, regardless whatever shortsighted purchase they wish to make.

No one, or certainly not I, said anything about expanding settlements. No one, and certainly not I, connected the two or compared them.

You too are part of the little cabal that can't counter what certain other posters say without creating a straw man.

Unnecessary and spiteful act.

That's a very black and white, utterly unnuanced, and intellectually untenable picture you're painting, Trevor.

You eyes-glazed-over Neocon True Believers have done enough harm already in stimulating a wave of radicalization in the ME, including the empowerment of Hamas, that happened in the wake of your regime change jack off fantasies in the early 2000s.