Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad (AP)
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, USA Today Editorial Board Roundtable, December 11, 2007:
“This is a time to build confidence between the parties and it’s — something like the Har Homa activity undermines confidence. It doesn’t help to build confidence. And it’s really important that as they go into negotiations, there isn’t a sense that one party or the other is trying to take steps on the ground that can prejudge final status, a sort of creating facts on the ground. …
"And so I got clarification about what was going on there, you know, that this was in the context of a plan that had been in place for a long time and so forth. But all of that said, the obligation to be very careful about activities that undermine confidence, that admonition remains and that was the admonition that I communicated.”
