“‘What started out as a bunch of pins thrown up on a map became a deep network crisscrossing the West Bank of Israeli Jewish settlements, established in strategic locations,’ Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told me. Those new informal communities grew into developments and cities, ‘erasing the Green Line, so you can no longer see what is Israel,’ according to Friedman. She says that settlers deliberately sought to ‘prevent the connection and expansion of Palestinian localities in the West Bank.’”…’The political animals around Biden have learned all the wrong lessons from the Obama era,’ Friedman told me. ‘The main lesson they learned was, ‘We don’t want to fight with Israel over settlements, or anything really.’’…For Friedman, a former State Department official who has been monitoring Israeli settlements since she worked at the US consulate in Jerusalem from 1992 to 1994, the Biden administration is simply not doing enough. ‘Since Biden came into office, we have seen a surge in settlement activity in the West Bank, we have seen a surge in settler violence, we’ve seen a surge in targeting in East Jerusalem,’ she told me. ‘And there’s nothing — all you’ll get is the most empty rhetoric. It’s as empty as we had under Trump.’”