Obama mulling ways to rebuke Israel on settlements

From Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Barack Obama has already gotten a rebuke from Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue of settlements, and perhaps he’s looking for revenge.  According to the New York Times, the White House has spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to make Israel pay for not following the Road Map’s prohibition on settlement growth:

As President Obama prepares to head to the Middle East this week, administration officials are debating how to toughen their stance against any expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The measures under discussion — all largely symbolic — include stepping back from America’s near-uniform support for Israel in the United Nations if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel does not agree to a settlement freeze, administration officials said.

Other measures include refraining from the instant Security Council veto of United Nations resolutions that Israel opposes and making use of Mr. Obama’s bully pulpit to criticize the settlements, officials said. Placing conditions on loan guarantees to Israel, as the first President Bush did nearly 20 years ago, is not under discussion, officials said.

Still, talk of even symbolic actions that would publicly show the United States’ ire with Israel, its longtime ally, would be a sharp departure from the previous administration, which limited its distaste with Israel’s settlement expansions to carefully worded diplomatic statements that called them “unhelpful.”

I wonder how much time the White House spends on finding ways to penalize the Palestinians for not adhering to the Road Map? After all, Hamas has spent the last couple of years launching rockets from Gaza. Barack Obama responded by giving them almost a billion dollars for rebuilding after the Israelis finally had enough and stomped on Hamas.

Go read the whole thing.