FULL ARTICLES

UK GOVERNMENT WATCHDOG BANS ISRAELI WESTERN WALL TOURISM AD

[This item was first published on April 14 on The National Review (America) and The National Post (Canada)]

UK government watchdog bans Israeli Western Wall tourism advert
By Tom Gross
NRO / The National Post
April 14, 2010

In recent years, Israel-bashing has become something of a national sport among Britain’s chattering classes, but a fresh development today might just mark a new low.

The UK’s official Advertising Standards Authority has banned an Israeli tourism advert showing the Western Wall, saying it is “misleading” since (in the British government’s eyes) the wall should not be part of Israel.

In fact the Western Wall, which (together with the Temple Mount) is Judaism’s holiest site, is the number one tourist destination for visitors to Israel.

The advert (above) coupled a picture of the wall with a picture of surfers in Tel Aviv. It reads: “You can travel the length of Israel in six hours, imagine what you can do in four days.”

Israel’s Ministry of Tourism (which yesterday announced records numbers of tourists visiting Israel in March) said it was flabbergasted by the decision. “It is entirely accurate to assert that a visitor to Israel could visit Jerusalem as part of a short visit,” it said in a statement. “The advert provides basic, accurate information to a prospective UK visitor.”

One gets the feeling that there are some people in Britain who not only want to keep visitors from going to Israel, but wish there was no Israel to visit.

YA’ALON: NO NEED EVER TO REMOVE ANY SETTLEMENTS

Ya’alon: No need ever to remove any settlements
By Herb Keinon
The Jerusalem Post
April 16, 2010

“Jews should be able to remain in Palestinian entity under any peace accord,” strategic affairs minister tells ‘Post’.

Israel should not have to remove any settlements in a peace agreement with the Palestinians, Deputy Prime Minister and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon has told The Jerusalem Post, adding that just as Arabs live in Israel, so, too, should Jews be able to live in a future Palestinian entity.

“If we are talking about coexistence and peace, why the [Palestinian] insistence that the territory they receive be ethnically cleansed of Jews?” Ya’alon asked during a wide-ranging interview that will appear in the Post’s Yom Ha’atzmaut [Independence Day] supplement on Monday April 19.

“Why do those areas have to be Judenrein?” he asked. “Don’t Arabs live here, in the Negev and the Galilee ? Why isn’t that part of our public discussion? Why doesn’t that scream to the heavens?”

Ya’alon said that if Israel and the Palestinians were truly headed down the path of peace and coexistence, “Jews living in Judea and Samaria under Israeli sovereignty and citizenship” should be possible.

He stressed that “no settlement” should be removed, and that the country’s previous withdrawals – from Lebanon and from Gaza – strengthened Hizbullah and Hamas, respectively.

“That is opposed to our strategic interest and to the strategic interests of the West,” he said.

Ya’alon, who sits on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s top decision-making body, known as the septet, and is among those deliberating on how to reply to US President Barack Obama’s reported demands for a construction freeze in east Jerusalem, said Israel must not give in on the issue.

“We cannot fold on Jerusalem. What is Jerusalem ? It is Zion,” he said.

“We disengaged politically in Judea and Samaria, and physically from Gaza,” Ya’alon pointed out. “The policy of the Netanyahu government is that we don’t want to rule over them [the Palestinians]. But not ruling over them does not mean we have to withdraw to the 1967 borders, which are indefensible borders; or that we have to divide Jerusalem in order to bring Hamas snipers into Jerusalem.”

Ya’alon, like the other members of the septet, is very discreet about the discussions regarding the answers to be given to the Americans, and would not even discuss what it was exactly that Obama was demanding.

And while stressing that the US and Israel had a deep, strategic alliance, Ya’alon acknowledged significant conceptual gaps regarding how each side saw the region.

“In order for there to be a proper prognosis, you need a proper diagnosis,” he said, adding that the US administration had misdiagnosed the root of the conflict here as territorial, when in reality it was about the failure of the Palestinians to recognize the right of the Jews to be here in any permutation.

“Those who want to continue the Oslo process, who want us to continue to give and give and give, without a Palestinian willingness to recognize our right to a national home, are cooperating with the phased plan for Israel’s destruction,” Ya’alon said.

Amid reports that Obama may, in a few months, try to impose a peace plan on Israel and the Palestinians, Ya’alon – who has accompanied the diplomatic process from up close since he was the head of Military Intelligence in 1995 – said that anyone who thought it was possible to “impose peace just like that” is “detached from reality.”

The government must work closely with the Obama administration to prevent the imposition of any such plan, he said.

Turning to Iran, Ya’alon said that country’s rulers must be faced with a determined West that placed the following dilemma before them: the bomb or regime survival.

Asked who in the West was showing the most determination against Iran these days, Ya’alon replied with France and Britain.

“Something has happened here that we haven’t seen in the past,” he said.

“Previously, the US led the aggressive line. Today, as I said, the president of France and prime minister of Britain are leading a more aggressive line than the president of the US.”

Asked if there were people in Jerusalem charged with coming up with plans on how to contain Iran if it eventually got the bomb, Ya’alon replied, “By one way or another, the Iranian military nuclear project should be stopped. And we should not discuss any other possibility.”

WHEN ARMAGEDDON LIVES NEXT DOOR

When Armageddon lives next door: Obama is denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America’s, life that is on the line
By Benny Morris
The Los Angeles Times (Opinion)
April 16, 2010

I take it personally: Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to murder me, my family and my people. Day in, day out, he announces the imminent demise of the “Zionist regime,” by which he means Israel. And day in, day out, his scientists and technicians are advancing toward the atomic weaponry that will enable him to bring this about.

The Jews of Europe (and Poles, Russians, Czechs, the French, etc.) should likewise have taken personally Adolf Hitler’s threats and his serial defiance of the international community from 1933 to 1939. But he was allowed, by the major powers and the League of Nations, to flex his muscles, rearm, remilitarize the Rhineland and then gobble up neighboring countries. Had he been stopped before the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, the lives of many millions, Jews and Gentiles, would have been saved. But he wasn’t.

And it doesn’t look like Ahmadinejad will be either. Not by the United States and the international community, at any rate. President Obama, when not obsessing over the fate of the ever- aggrieved Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, proposes to halt Ahmadinejad’s nuclear program by means of international sanctions. But here’s the paradox: The wider Obama casts his net to mobilize as many of the world’s key players as he can, the weaker the sanctions and the more remote their implementation. China, it appears, will only agree to a U.N. Security Council resolution if the sanctions are diluted to the point of meaninglessness (and maybe not even then). The same appears to apply to the Russians. Meanwhile, Iran advances toward the bomb. Most of the world’s intelligence agencies believe that it is only one to three years away.

Perhaps Obama hopes to unilaterally implement far more biting American (and, perhaps, European) sanctions. But if China and Russia (and some European Union members) don’t play ball, the sanctions will remain ineffective. And Iran will continue on its deadly course.

At the end of 2007, the U.S. intelligence community, driven by wishful thinking, expediency and incompetence, announced that the Iranians had in 2003 halted the weaponization part of their nuclear program. Last week, Obama explicitly contradicted that assessment. At least the American administration now publicly acknowledges where it is the Iranians are headed, while not yet acknowledging what it is they are after – primarily Israel’s destruction.

Granted, Obama has indeed tried to mobilize the international community for sanctions. But it has been a hopeless task, given the selfishness and shortsightedness of governments and peoples. Sanctions were supposed to kick in in autumn 2009; then it was December; now it is sometime late this year. Obama is still pushing the rock up the hill – and Ahmadinejad, understandably, has taken to publicly scoffing at the West and its “sanctions.”

He does this because he knows that sanctions, if they are ever passed, are likely to be toothless, and because the American military option has been removed from the table. Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates – driven by a military that feels overstretched in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and a public that has no stomach for more war – have made this last point crystal clear.

But at the same time, Obama insists that Israel may not launch a preemptive military strike of its own. Give sanctions a chance, he says. (Last year he argued that diplomacy and “engagement” with Tehran should be given a chance. Tehran wasn’t impressed then and isn’t impressed now.) The problem is that even if severe sanctions are imposed, they likely won’t have time to have serious effect before Iran succeeds at making a bomb.

Obama is, no doubt, well aware of this asymmetric timetable. Which makes his prohibition against an Israeli preemptive strike all the more immoral. He knows that any sanctions he manages to orchestrate will not stop the Iranians. (Indeed, Ahmadinejad last week said sanctions would only fortify Iran’s resolve and consolidate its technological prowess.) Obama is effectively denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America’s, life that is on the line.

Perhaps Obama has privately resigned himself to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and believes, or hopes, that deterrence will prevent Tehran from unleashing its nuclear arsenal. But what if deterrence won’t do the trick? What if the mullahs, believing they are carrying out Allah’s will and enjoy divine protection, are undeterred?

The American veto may ultimately consign millions of Israelis, including me and my family, to a premature death and Israel to politicide. It would then be comparable to Britain and France’s veto in the fall of 1938 of the Czechs defending their territorial integrity against their rapacious Nazi neighbors. Within six months, Czechoslovakia was gobbled up by Germany.

But will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follow in Czech President Edvard Benes’ footsteps? Will he allow an American veto to override Israel’s existential interests? And can Israel go it alone, without an American green (or even yellow) light, without American political cover and overflight permissions and additional American equipment? Much depends on what the Israeli military and intelligence chiefs believe their forces – air force, navy, commandos – can achieve. Full destruction of the Iranian nuclear project? A long-term delay? And on how they view Israel’s ability (with or without U.S. support) to weather the reaction from Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria.

An Israeli attack might harm U.S. interests and disrupt international oil supplies (though I doubt it would cause direct attacks on U.S. installations, troops or vessels). But, from the Israeli perspective, these are necessarily marginal considerations when compared with the mortal hurt Israel and Israelis would suffer from an Iranian nuclear attack. Netanyahu’s calculations will, in the end, be governed by his perception of Israel’s existential imperatives. And the clock is ticking.

“TAKING SOLACE IN THE ADMINISTRATION’S BLUNDERS”

(For background to this U.S.-Israel dispute, please see: Obama: I have seen the enemy and it is Jewish housing.)

The solace of Israel’s poor U.S. relations
By Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
April 13, 2010

The silver lining of this relationship’s deterioration: Israel makes its worst mistakes when U.S.-Israel ties are strong.

Things are not always as simple as they seem; the current crisis in U.S.-Israel relations has a silver lining. Four observations, all derived from historical patterns, prompt this conclusion.

First, the “peace process” is in actuality a “war process.” Diplomatic negotiations through the 1990s led to a parade of Israeli retreats that had the perverse effect of turning the middling-bad situation of 1993 into the awful one of 2000. Painful Israeli concessions, we now know, stimulate not reciprocal Palestinian goodwill but rather irredentism, ambition, fury, and violence.

Second, Israeli concessions to the Arabs are effectively forever, while relations with Washington fluctuate. Once the Israelis left south Lebanon and Gaza, they did so for good, as would be the case with the Golan Heights or eastern Jerusalem. Undoing these steps would be prohibitively costly. In contrast, U.S.-Israel tensions depend on personalities and circumstances, so they go up and down and the stakes are relatively lower. Each president or prime minister can refute his predecessor’s views and tone. Problems can be repaired quickly.

More broadly, the U.S.-Israel bond has strengths that go far beyond politicians and issues of the moment. Nothing on earth resembles this bilateral, “the family relationship of international politics” and “the most special” of special relationships. Like any family tie, it has high points (Israel ranks second, behind only the United States, in number of companies listed on NASDAQ) and low ones (the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair continues to rankle a quarter-century after it broke). The tie has a unique intensity when it comes to strategic cooperation, economic connections, intellectual ties, shared values, United Nations voting records, religious commonalities, and even mutual interference in each other’s internal affairs.

From Israel’s perspective, then, political relations with the Arabs are freighted but those with Washington have a lightness and flexibility.

Third, when Israeli leaders enjoy strong, trusting relations with Washington, they give more to the Arabs. Golda Meir made concessions to Richard Nixon, Menachem Begin to Jimmy Carter, Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak to Bill Clinton, and Ariel Sharon to George W. Bush.

Conversely, mistrust of Washington tightens Israelis and closes their willingness to take chances. That was the case with George H. W. Bush and is even more so with Barack Obama. The current unease began even before Obama reached the Oval Office, given his public association with prominent Israel-haters (e.g., Ali Abunimah, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Jeremiah Wright). Relations degenerated in March, when his administration simulated outrage on the 9th over an announcement of routine construction work in Jerusalem, followed by a brutal telephone call from the secretary of state on the 12th and a tense White House summit meeting on the 23rd.

To make matters worse, the Obama-administration figure most identified with maintaining good U.S.-Israel relations, Dennis Ross, was anonymously accused by a colleague on March 28 of being “far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.” A prominent foreign-policy analyst used this to raise questions about Ross having a “dual loyalty” to Israel, impugning Ross’s policy advice.

These ugly and virtually unprecedented tensions have had a predictable effect on the Israeli public, making it mistrustful of Obama and resistant to U.S. pressure, and have inspired usually squabbling politicians to work together to resist Obama’s policies.

Fourth, U.S.-Israel tensions increase Palestinian intransigence and demands. When Israel is in bad standing, it empowers their leaders; if those tensions arise from U.S. pressure for concessions to the Palestinians, the latter sit back and enjoy the show. This happened in mid-2009, when Mahmoud Abbas instructed Americans what to extract from Jerusalem. Conversely, when U.S.-Israel relations flourish, Palestinian leaders feel pressure to meet Israelis, pretend to negotiate, and sign documents.

Combining these four presumptions results in a counterintuitive conclusion: Strong U.S.-Israel ties induce irreversible Israeli mistakes. Poor U.S.-Israel ties abort this process. Obama may expect that picking a fight with Israel will produce negotiations, but it will have the opposite effect. He may think he is approaching a diplomatic breakthrough, but in fact he is rendering that less likely. Those who fear more “war process” can thus take some solace in the administration’s blunders.

The complexity of U.S.-Israel relations leaves much room for paradox and inadvertency. A look beyond a worrisome turn of events suggests that good may come of it.

SUMMITS IN WASHINGTON ARE FINE, BUT IRAN IS MOVING MUCH FASTER THAN THAT. SO WE’D BETTER CATCH UP

Iran’s Ticking Bomb: Solana, Straw, Fischer, and de Villepin have a lot to answer for since their policy bought Tehran crucial time
By Alejo Vidal-Quadras
Wall Street Journal Europe
April 14, 2010

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasted last week that the regime would install 60,000 new, “third-generation” centrifuges to enrich uranium. As world leaders met in Washington this week to discuss how to prevent nuclear terrorism, there was little doubt that time is running out to deal with Iran’s nuclear weapons threat.

It is now eight years since the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran blew the lid on the mullahs’ secret atom program and disclosed the existence of a uranium enrichment plant in Natanz and a heavy water plant for the production of plutonium in Arak. The NCRI also blew the whistle on the secret enrichment site in Qom back in 2005, a fact that was confirmed by world powers only last September. And yet, during all that time, Tehran has been allowed to make steady progress toward developing nuclear weapons.

Iran has had a lot of help along the way from what can only be described as appeasing policymakers who offered concessions and incentives, while telling the world that they could get the regime to change its behavior. And the regime did change its behavior: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei replaced the supposedly moderate President Mohammad Khatami with the fanatical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while Iranian officials continuously vowed not to back down one “iota” from their nuclear projects.

Regrettably, the European Union was one of the main culprits in facilitating Iran’s nuclear progress. Particularly the EU’s former high representative for foreign policy, Javier Solana, as well as the former British, French and German foreign ministers – Jack Straw, Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer – have a lot to answer for. It was they who devised this policy of “constructive engagement” and thus bought the regime many of the eight years they have had to advance their nuclear program.

The most popular excuse for the failure of their Iran policy was that U.S. reluctance to negotiate directly with Iran supposedly prevented a breakthrough with the mullahs. When President Obama took office, there was much hope in Europe. Last year, he extended his hand to the Iranian leadership and set a number of deadlines for a negotiated settlement of the dispute. Iran, though, quickly repelled Mr. Obama’s hand. The President’s deadlines came and went without any Iranian “engagement.”

Now it was Washington that bought the regime additional time. The White House failed to quickly gather a coalition of the willing to implement the “biting” sanctions it had threatened. Instead, more than three months after the end of the last deadline the U.S. administration had set, “biting” sanctions are not even on the horizon. At best we can expect that after weeks of haggling in the United Nations Security Council, there will eventually be much watered-down sanctions that won’t be able to stop Tehran.

Engagement with Iran has been based on the false premise that the mullahs would respond to carrots and somehow act in Iran’s national interest. In diplomacy, there is only one thing more dangerous than failing to respond firmly to threats to international security, and that is threatening to respond firmly, but failing to follow through. The Iranian regime knows now, if it had any doubts before, that the international community lacks the courage or conviction to confront its nuclear program.

One reason why our leaders pursued a policy of appeasement toward Iran over the past decade was that they argued, falsely, that the only alternative was a military attack on Iran. Biting sanctions, though, could have and still could work. Of course, a military confrontation with Iran would be devastating for its 70 million people. But allowing the regime to gain weapons of mass destruction could in the end be even more devastating for Iran and the entire region if it triggered a wider war. Engaging the mullahs only had the effect of legitimizing them and extending their brutal reign.

It is time for Europe and the United States to redouble their efforts for winning as broad a coalition as possible for biting sanctions that stand a chance of changing the regime’s behavior. Equally important will be to politically support the opposition and the millions of brave Iranians marching on the streets and demanding change and democracy. Summits in Washington are fine, but Iran is moving much faster than that. So we’d better catch up.

FULL ARTICLE

WHY DO ISRAEL’S ARABS LIKE EATING MATZOH?

Why do Israel’s Arabs like eating matzoh?
The Associated Press
April 3, 2010

UMM EL-FAHM: Many Jewish Israelis can’t stand the stuff, so there’s something mind-boggling about their Arab compatriots: Why in the world do they choose to eat matzoh?

Despite decades of uneasiness in their coexistence with the Jewish majority, Israel’s Arabs have developed a love affair with matzoh, the dry, crunchy wafers that observant Jews eat as a substitute for leavened bread during the weeklong Passover holiday.

Weeks in advance, Arab-owned stores across Israel stock up on matzoh, knowing their customers will clean it out.

The matzoh craving among Israel’s Arab citizens – about 20 percent of the population – reflects their ambiguous place in the Jewish state. While they speak Hebrew, carry Israeli passports and wear Israeli brands, many say they suffer discrimination and identify themselves as Palestinians.

Still, they love matzoh.

“We eat it from the start of the holiday to the end, and when we run out we buy more,” said Umaima Igbaria, a 35-year-old Muslim woman who lugged a carton of matzoh out of a supermarket in the Arab town of Umm el-Fahm in northern Israel.

She said she, her husband and their three sons all eat matzoh, usually with tea and slathered with chocolate sauce. She said they didn’t care if it was “Jewish food.”

Inside the store, a 5-foot-tall (1.5-meter-tall) stack of matzoh boxes stood in the entryway, all that remained of the more than 4 tons that owner Tariq Ifin ordered for the holiday, which began Monday night. He had no doubts the rest would sell.

In the Passover tradition, matzoh commemorates the biblical story of the Jews fleeing Egypt so quickly they had no time to let their bread rise. Jews also consider matzoh poor man’s bread, eaten to remind them of their ancestors’ hardships. Few consider it a culinary delight.

“I don’t like it much, but it’s part of the holiday,” said Simon Mizrahi, 44, an observant Jew from Jerusalem who eats his matzoh with soup, cheese or butter.

Mizrahi said matzoh doesn’t fill him up like bread, and he worries its carbs will make him fat. Many other Jews share his ambivalence, recognizing its traditional role while saying they get tired of it.

To prevent matzoh burnout, many have developed alternative recipes. Some stir crushed matzoh into warm milk or coffee to make porridge. Others add an Italian twist, topping it with tomato sauce and cheese to make matzoh-pizza or substituting it for noodles to make matzoh lasagna, or “matzagna.”

Outside of the holiday, few eat it and few stores stock it. Many say they wouldn’t eat it if they had other options.

Thus their surprise when informed that Israel’s Muslim and Christian Arabs – who don’t observe Passover and can eat any bread they like – choose matzoh.

The answer to the mystery is simple, said Arabs in several mainly Arab towns in Israel. They just like the taste.

“The kids love it. They eat it like cookies,” said Wisad Jamil, a 43-year-old woman lugging a carton of matzoh and tub of chocolate spread to her car for her husband and five kids at the Umm el-Fahm store.

“Don’t the Jews eat our bread? Fine, we eat their matzoh,” she said.

Indeed, the mixing goes both ways, with Arab dishes like hummus and felafel now favorites of Jewish Israelis. And during Passover, nonobservant Jews often turn to Arab shops for leavened bread, which disappears from most Jewish-owned stores in the season.

Ifin, the supermarket owner, said some of his Arab customers once refused matzoh on ideological grounds, though fewer do now because of years of mixing.

“You can’t say Arabs and Jews are one people, but we share the same land, so why not share the same food?” Ifin said.

While Israel’s 1.5 million Arabs hold citizenship and vote in elections, they strongly identify with their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Most still call themselves Palestinians.

Palestinians in the territories and east Jerusalem largely don’t share the matzoh craze, and shops there don’t sell it. Israel captured the predominantly Arab east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, and Palestinians claim it as the capital of their future state.

“We don’t like anything that comes from them,” said Jerusalem taxi driver Firas Salem, 27, when asked if he ate matzoh.

“And besides,” he said – expressing a sentiment shared by many Jews – “bread tastes better.”

FULL ARTICLE

A RARE INTERVIEW WITH SALAM FAYAAD

Palestinian PM to Ha’aretz: We will have a state next year
By Akiva Eldar
Ha’aretz
April 2, 2010

RAMALLAH - Next year, “the birth of a Palestinian state will be celebrated as a day of joy by the entire community of nations,” says Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in an exclusive interview to Ha’aretz.

Relaying Passover greetings to the Jewish community, Fayyad hopes Israelis will also participate in the celebrations for the birth of a new state.

“The time for this baby to be born will come,” he says, “and we estimate it will come around 2011. That is our vision, and a reflection of our will to exercise our right to live in freedom and dignity in the country [where] we are born, alongside the State of Israel in complete harmony,” says Fayyad, 58.

He also welcomed the Quartet’s announcement of two weeks ago in Moscow, which supports the PA’s August 2009 plan to establish a state within 24 months.

Fayyad says the Palestinians want an independent and sovereign state, emphasizing they are “not looking for a state of leftovers - a Mickey Mouse state.” He and his aides plan for the state to be born during the first term of Barack Obama; he notes that previous U.S. administrations seriously tackled the conflict only toward the end of their second term.

“If for one reason or another, by August 2011 [the plan] will have failed... I believe we will have amassed such credit, in form of positive facts on the ground, that the reality is bound to force itself on the political process to produce the outcome,” Fayyad says.

The prime minister adds: “I envision that we will be so mature in terms of positive facts on the ground, and along the way have grown on our Israeli neighbors, we will have begun a process of transformation from a concept, to a possibility, to a reality.

Fayyad says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has succumbed to the settlers who, he says, do not reflect the vision of the majority of Israelis. “We have universally shared values,” he says, and notes that “peace will be made between equals, not between masters and slaves.”

Fayyad, who has positioned himself at the forefront of popular opposition to occupation, criticizes Israel’s policies on protests at Bil’in and Na’alin and for targeting demonstrators. “It is expecting too much of Palestinians not to react,” he says.

“It is the right of an oppressed nation to say ‘enough’,” says Fayyad. “No one should be expected to stand for injustice, not least the Palestinians, who have endured long decades of occupation. Is it not what Gandhi stood for, what Martin Luther King stood for?

“The settlers have a tremendous pull on the Israeli government. It’s pure self-righteousness: the exclusion of the possibility that someone out there might have a slightly different opinion - in an indignant way and often times in a violent way.

“Related to the Zionist ethos, fine, Israel is a biblical country, there are lots of hilltops, lots of vacant space, why don’t they use that, and let us get on with it?”

Q: Are the American demands of Israel moving us in the right direction? Do you agree with the argument that putting an end to our conflict will help to contain Iran?

A: “The conflict of the region is not about us at all; it’s between radicals and moderates. It is clear to me that ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an American national interest. The world should be able to do what they want to do to help - in their own interest as well but they can’t do it.

“The issue should not be looked at as if the United States wants to take a position, it is doing so to favor the Palestinians, at the expense of Israelis. And for the U.S. to succeed it should not be the other way around, either. Basically, for the world to succeed in helping us get to where we want, both sides should be held accountable.

Q: Officials around Netanyahu keep arguing that you are using the settlement issue to avoid a negotiated agreement and gain time until the international community imposes your plan on Israel.”

A: “This is one way in which this government attempts to trivialize the issue, as if it’s a question of taking turns - that we Palestinians somehow just woke up to this reality and decided to make it an issue.

“If the whole world is unable to secure something as basic as stopping this, preventing this from continuing to happen, how sure can we be the political process, once relaunched, will be capable of delivering on those bigger, permanent issues? It is a question of credibility.

“Anyone would be a fool to say that it was right for us to accept a situation that we were not able to stop the expansion of the settlements during negotiations. In hindsight, that is obvious. But a lot of things were not expected in the euphoria of 1993.”

Q: According to your information, is there a real moratorium on settlement activity in the West Bank?

A: “All indications show that it’s not working. There was a serious flaw in the moratorium itself, before the 1,600 units in Ramat Shlomo and even before the Gilo affair. That underscored the deep flaw associated with the moratorium concept that was put forward by the Israeli government.

“We knew from the beginning that excluding East Jerusalem from the moratorium concept would become a problem, a flaw associated with that.

“Essentially the way the moratorium concept was put forward, in the way Jerusalem is defined by Israel, is a loophole. It is certainly not something that is taken seriously by the government of Israel. It should be, and yet it is contrived that the Palestinians looked for an issue - to use it as a pretext not to negotiate. “

Q: How do you get out of this? No Israeli leader could promise to stop building in East Jerusalem.

A: “A way can be found, particularly since the inherent structure of weakness associated with the moratorium concept that was proposed by Netanyahu was exposed.

“At some point somebody has to stand up and assume responsibility for what’s going on. Isn’t that what is expected of us Palestinians?

“We need to lift each other up, not drag each other down. You need a full understanding of where the other side is coming from. I maintain that we have that, we understand that these are completely different, diametrically opposed narratives. I don’t expect, ever, for our narrative to be accepted by Israel, but likewise, for Netanyahu to say that the Israeli historical narrative is basis for a just settlement, is expecting too much. “

Q: Can you build a Palestinian state as long as Hamas controls Gaza and you are not able to hold elections?

A. “People in Gaza are looking at us as well, and saying they also want to have a better life. Look at how fragmented we are in the West Bank, but Gaza you can cover from north, south, east, and west 10-20 times a day. What took us a year to do in the West Bank can be accomplished in two months in Gaza.

“Who would have thought a couple years ago there would be this transformation in the mind-set? Not many thought that possible. All you have to do is travel beyond Ramallah and see for yourself. It’s a changed reality.

Q: What are you doing to stop incitement against Israel?

A: Incitement can take the form of many things - things said, things done, provocations - but there are ways for dealing with this. We are dealing with this. “

Q: Would you agree to leave the issue of Jerusalem to a later stage of the process?

A: “Not at all. It should be handled at the very beginning. The negotiations should not be about principles, they should be about arrangements, accommodations, access.

“We look at this politically. Politically, we feel a right to have a state of Palestine on the land that was occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem.

“But this is a political conflict, and I do not believe it should be allowed to spill over into any other sphere, be it cultural or religious. That would be most counterproductive and wrong.”

Q: Your plan takes into consideration the need to absorb refugees.

A: Of course, Palestinians would have the right to reside within the State of Palestine.

FULL ARTICLES

OBAMA’S ANTI-ISRAELI HYSTERIA DANGEROUS AND DESTRUCTIVE

Obama’s anti-Israeli hysteria dangerous and destructive
By Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor
The Australian
March 27, 2010

www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/obamas-anti-israeli-hysteria-dangerous-and-destructive/story-e6frg6zo-1225846153221

BARACK Obama’s anti-Israel jihad is one of the most irresponsible policy lurches by any modern American president. It rightly earns Obama the epithet of the U.S. president least sympathetic to Israel in Israel’s history. Jimmy Carter became a great hater of Israel, but only after he left office.

Obama’s dangerous new lurch into anti-Israel populism changes global politics in extremely dangerous ways, and poses a challenge for Kevin Rudd.

Perhaps Obama’s most distinctive contribution to the foreign policy debate in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election was his avowed determination to talk to and engage the U.S.’s enemies if he became president. He was happy in principle to talk to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but did not know for sure that the Iranian president wielded real power. But he sent all manner of felicitations and greetings to Iran and its government. When that government stole an election on Ahmadinejad’s behalf and viciously brutalised its citizens, Obama refrained from speaking too much or too forcefully, as, he said, he didn’t want to be seen to be interfering in Iranian internal affairs.

When Obama met the king of Saudi Arabia, a nation in which no one votes, women are subject to severe and demeaning restrictions and it is against the law to have a Christian church, Obama bowed in deep respect.

When Obama ran into Venezuela’s murderous despot, Hugo Chavez, at a summit, there was a friendly greeting observed by all.

But there is one leader whom Obama draws the line at. He will not be seen in public with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Astonishingly, when Netanyahu saw Obama at the White House this week, all photographers and all TV cameras were banned, a level of humiliation almost completely unique in modern White House practice.

You might even conclude that Obama is trying to interfere in internal Israeli politics and bring down a government. This is something post-colonial, post-multicultural Obama would never do with Iran, but with Israel, the U.S.’s longstanding ally, it’s fine.
And what was Netanyahu’s crime, this act of infamy that Obama’s senior staff described as an “affront” to America? It was that the relevant housing authority passed another stage of approval for 1600 Israeli housing units to be built in East Jerusalem in about three years’ time. It was very foolish that the Israelis allowed this announcement to take place while U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden was in Israel. But they apologised to Biden at the time, Biden kissed and made up with the Israelis and was back to delivering fulsome pro-Israel speeches before he left.

After that point, though, the U.S. reaction went into overdrive. Impeccable American sources tell me this reaction was driven by Obama, and to a lesser extent the Chicago mafia around him.

We must ask why this is so, but first let’s get Netanyahu’s infamous crime into perspective.

Last November Netanyahu announced a 10-month moratorium on all building activity in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Israel has already promised not to take any more land for settlements but there is the question of renovating existing buildings and constructing new ones in existing settlements.

As Hillary Clinton acknowledged in her speech this week to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, East Jerusalem was never part of this agreement. The two main peace offers Israel has made to the Palestinians in recent years were the Camp David/Taba proposals and the accompanying Clinton parameters in 2000, and Ehud Olmert’s offer to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. Both plans offered essentially the same formula. The Palestinians get all of the Gaza Strip, about 95 per cent of the West Bank and a compensating parcel of territory from Israel proper to make up for the small amount of territory in the West Bank that Israel would keep which houses the main Jewish population blocks. The Palestinians also get some parts of East Jerusalem as their capital. This principle of territorial swaps was accepted by Yasser Arafat and Abbas.

East Jerusalem has always had a different status from the West Bank and some Israelis certainly don’t want to give any of it to a new Palestinian state. But everyone accepts that some Jewish neighbourhoods would remain part of Israel. These are mostly neighbourhoods, as Netanyahu pointed out this week, which are five minutes from the Knesset and a couple of blocks beyond the 1949 armistice line. The administration of George W. Bush had formally agreed with the Israelis that these areas would be permanently part of Israel. Bill Clinton had negotiated an offer to the Palestinians in 2000 which accepted this.

It would be a radical change of policy for an Israeli government to decree that no building would ever take place in Jewish areas of Jerusalem. It would also be a change of American policy.

Moreover, no serious analyst could believe that such building is a roadblock to peace. Peace negotiations have gone on with such building taking place in the past. And all the things that truly make peace impossible – Arab and Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy of any Jewish state, Palestinian insistence on certain deal breakers such as the right of return of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel proper, the insistent and violent anti-Semitism of Palestinian and Arab propaganda and the regional ambitions of players such as Iran and Syria – will be completely unaffected by any decision to build apartments in a Jewish neighbourhood in East Jerusalem in three years time.

So why has Obama gone into full jihad mode against Israel? Three explanations suggest themselves. Obama has had a terrible year in foreign policy. He has achieved nothing on Iran or China or anything else of consequence. He is too smart to believe this intimidation of Israel will advance peace, but it might get peace talks going again. The Palestinians only made settlements a roadblock after Obama did. They are refusing to join Israel in peace talks, which Netanyahu would be happy to participate in. They have said they might engage in proximity talks – which means not talking to the Israelis directly but to mediators who will shuttle back and forth carrying messages between them and the Israelis. This is primitive and ridiculous stuff, but if such talks get going Obama could claim some kind of victory, or at least progress.

And Obama is showing that his personal popularity, not America’s standing, still less matters of substance such as Iran’s nuclear program, is what motivates him.

This leads to the second explanation of his behaviour, and that is to make himself personally popular in the Muslim world. Beating up on Israel is the cheapest trick in the book on that score and it can earn him easy, worthless and no doubt temporary plaudits in some parts of the Muslim world.

And thirdly, Obama is the first post-multicultural president of America. In his autobiography he talks of seeking out the most radical political theorists he could at university. For these people Israel is an exercise in Western neo-imperialism. Obama makes their hearts sing with this anti-Israel jihad.

Accompanying Obama’s own actions has been some of the most dangerous rhetoric ever to come out of a U.S. administration, to the effect that Israeli intransigence endangers U.S. troops by inflaming extremists in the Islamic world. No serious analyst anywhere believes that Israel is an important source of the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq. Using this type of argument comes dangerously close to the administration licensing a mutant strain of anti-Semitism – it’s all the Jews’ fault. Why is all this a challenge for Rudd?

The anti-Israel hysteria is totally disproportionate and wildly over the top. The British decision to expel an Israeli diplomat because Israel is alleged to have used forged British passports in a Mossad operation is a case in point.

The British precedent pressures Rudd to do the same. Rudd should resist this pressure, as Opposition leader Tony Abbott has urged him to. 2010 is a critical year for the Middle East. Israel’s friends now should rally round it, or the spectre of wild and hysterical anti-Israel sentiment will be unleashed with all manner of destructive consequences.

Now is the time for anyone who cares about Middle East peace, or who claims as Rudd does to care about Israel, to stick close to Jerusalem. The Australian Federal Police inquiry will not be conclusive about whether Israel used Australian passports or not. Obama wants to be popular. Gordon Brown wants Muslim votes and to distract attention from the latest scandals of his government. Rudd could be tempted to bash Israel as a way of courting Arab League votes at the UN. But the path of statesmanship here does not lie in apeing these foolish American and British moves.

There would also be a gruesome comparison in the way Australia responds to big as to small nations. China imprisons one of our citizens, denies consular access to most of the trial and treats Canberra with contempt. In return Rudd changes policy and declines to see the Dalai Lama and similarly declines to send an Australian minister to Taiwan in the entire course of the government’s parliamentary term.

Yet Israel, our close friend, is alleged to misuse a passport and then gets the very big diplomatic penalty of having a diplomat expelled. It would be disproportionate and foolish and cowardly.

The Americans and Brits don’t always get things right. There are times when Canberra should definitely not follow their lead.

WHY DO WE HEAR THE SAME IDEAS OVER AND OVER AGAIN, EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER WORK?

Let my people stay
By David Suissa
Huffington Post
March 24, 2010

www.huffingtonpost.com/david-suissa/let-my-people-stay_b_511936.html

Why does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem so intractable? Why do we hear the same ideas over and over again, even though they never work?

At her AIPAC speech this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of the need to find “a new path” to the two-state solution. But nowhere in her speech did she actually challenge a key tenet of the current path: We can never have Jews living in Palestine.

She’s not alone. For decades now, the world’s most brilliant political minds have worked with this same unimaginative and racist assumption: To have peace with the Palestinians, we must have ethnic cleansing of the Jews.

As a result, a peace vocabulary has developed that suggests anything but peace: words like “freezing” and “dismantling” rather than “warming” and “creating.” The Jews themselves who live in the areas of a future Palestinian state have been globally demonized as the biggest obstacle to peace.

Sure, there may be terrorist entities like Hamas and Hezbollah that are sworn enemies of any peace agreement, but as far as the world is concerned, the soccer moms in Ariel and Efrat are bigger obstacles to peace.

Never mind that when Israel tried to cleanse Gaza of all Jews a few years ago, it got rewarded not with peace and quiet but with a few thousand rockets.

It’s gotten so absurd, that the headlines around the world two weeks ago weren’t about the terrorist rockets flying into Israel, but about interim zoning permits for apartments in East Jerusalem. Had those apartments been for Buddhists or Hindus or Hare Krishnas, no one would have flinched. But they were for Jews, which makes them obstacles to peace.

The Obama administration’s obsession with freezing Jewish settlements - including Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem - has further demonized the settlements, made the Palestinians even more intransigent and pretty much frozen the peace process.

But what if the peace processors took a different view of these settlements and saw them not as obstacles to peace but as potential contributors to Palestinian society? What if, instead of forcing Jewish settlers to leave as part of a peace agreement, they were invited to stay?

In all these failed peace meetings over the years, has anyone considered that a Jewish minority in a future Palestine may actually be a good thing? That it would encourage mutual dependency and co-existence and democracy - and help the Palestinian economy? And that for Israel, it’d be good to have Jewish representatives in a Palestinian parliament - just like we have supporters in Diaspora communities throughout the world?

I know what you’re thinking: How naive of you, Suissa! How many Jews would want to be part of a Palestinian state? Who would protect them? It’ll never work!

To which I reply: Maybe you’re right! But nothing else has worked, so why not shake things up and try something new? Let’s poll the Jews of the West Bank who’d be most likely to be evacuated and see how many would be interested in staying in a future Palestine, and under what conditions. Dual citizenship? Security guarantees? Equal voting rights? These are great questions for peace talks.

Even if you’re a cynic who believes peace with the Palestinians is impossible in our lifetime, pushing for the right of settlers to stay in a future Palestine is a game changer. It disarms critics who claim that settlements are the main obstacle to peace and shines a light on fundamental issues, like whether the Palestinians are willing or even able to deliver peace, and how they would protect a Jewish minority in their midst.

Just like Soviet Jewry was about the Jews’ “right to leave,” this new cause is about the Jews’ “right to stay.” And if the world ends up opposing the idea, well, we’ll finally have our PR homerun: An international movement fighting for “Human Rights for Palestinian Jews!” Our mantra: The Jews of Palestine deserve the same rights as the Muslims of Israel.

If you’re not a cynic but a hopeless romantic who believes in the power of co-existence, you should have been with me the other night at the Levantine Cultural Center, a storefront salon on Pico Boulevard co-founded four years ago by local activist Jordan Elgrably to foster harmony between all peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. The guest speaker was author and journalist Rachel Shabi, who was talking about her new book, “We Look Like the Enemy: the Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews From Arab Lands.”

Shabi, a Jew of Iraqi descent who grew up in London and now lives in Tel Aviv, has had a lifelong fascination with the story of Jews who come from Arab lands like Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Tunisia.

As she spoke about the long and complicated journey of these Jews of Arabia, she didn’t sugarcoat their struggles, but you could feel her passion for the golden moments and possibilities of cultural co-existence.

Stuck between my cynical and romantic sides, and perhaps caught up in the moment, I couldn’t help wondering whether there might be, one day, a Palestinian chapter to this Jewish-Arab odyssey – a chapter that wouldn’t be about Jews being kicked out, but about Jews being asked to stay.

WHAT ISRAEL’S PRIME MINISTER REALLY THINKS

The Netanyahu Diaries
What Israel’s prime minister really thinks
By Bret Stephens
The Wall Street Journal
March 23, 2010

[Note – This was written before Obama’s latest insults to neat at the White House]

The following note was discovered aboard the plane that brought Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington yesterday. It appears to be the Israeli prime minister’s personal talking points – with deletions in brackets – for his meeting today with President Obama. Handwriting experts are unable to confirm the note’s authenticity.

Good to see you again, Mr. President. [And thanks for not having me skulk out the side door like the last time I was here].

And congratulations on your big health care victory! Well done, Mr. President, on your historic achievement. As you probably know, we Israelis have a similar system, and it has worked out pretty well for decades [though our doctors don’t labor under ruinous medmal premiums and the constant threat of tort bar annihilation and also we’re a tiny country with a huge tax burden that drives one in nine people, including many doctors, to live abroad.]

Point is, we’re a nice little liberal democracy, with women’s rights and gay rights, and Arab Israelis and black Israelis in parliament, and welfare and universal health care. Even when we go to war we don’t just carpet bomb our enemies, [like your hero Franklin Roosevelt did to the innocent civilians of Dresden and Tokyo ]. I don’t get why we rate most-hated-nation status from all those so-called progressives [wearing your face on their tee-shirts].

[Question to self: Why are the same people who erupt at the thought of prayer in school so often more in sympathy with Hamas in Gaza than with us?]

But on to more pressing matters. We’ve had a bad few weeks, your administration and mine. I’m glad we can talk them over face-to-face. As Hillary told me the other day [isn’t she a charmer?], it takes a true friend to tell the hard truth. I’m sure you’ll agree that in our friendship that works both ways.

I know that, from your part, you think the hard truth is that we’ve got to get out of the settlements. You don’t have to sell me on that score. I’ve said repeatedly that we don’t want to rule over the Palestinians; I’m all for a two-state solution in theory. It’s the practice of it that’s got me concerned. In fact, it’s what got me elected.

So here’s the first hard truth: Just as you’ve got your Ben Nelsons and Bart Stupaks, I’ve got my Avigdor Lieberman ultra-nationalists and Eli Yishai ultra-Orthodox. Some of them have ideological red lines; some of them just want stuff. That’s how politics works. So what’s my Cornhusker kickback, or my executive order on abortion funding? I’d welcome your ideas; [you’re obviously good at this].

This brings me to the second hard truth, Mr. President: Most Israelis don’t trust you, the way they trusted George W. Bush or [even] Bill Clinton. And let me tell you why that’s a problem.

When my predecessor Arik Sharon pulled out of Gaza, he didn’t do so through negotiations with the Palestinians. Those negotiations fail time and again, in part because the Palestinians figure they can hold out for more, in part because they’re cutting their own deals with Hamas.

So what Sharon did was negotiate with you, the United States. And what he got was a promise, in writing, that the U.S. would not insist on a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines in any final settlement agreement.

My problem is that Hillary disavowed that promise last year, and you did so again by treating a neighborhood in Jerusalem as a “settlement.” So when you pledge your commitment to Israel’s everlasting security, how can we take your word for it, or know that your successor won’t also renege? We don’t want to wind up like Belgium before World War I, relying on phony guarantees of neutrality.

Mr. President, you need to start building some serious trust with Israelis if you mean to give me the political tools to negotiate with the Palestinians. Honestly, you didn’t help yourself by ratcheting up the rhetoric against us the way you did. If your purpose was to show the Palestinians that you’re going to play hardball with us, all you did was give them a reason to be even more uncompromising than before. And if your purpose was to try to drive me from office, it didn’t work either: To Israelis, you came across not as anti-Bibi, but as anti-Israel.

But the hardest truth is that Israelis are losing faith that you’ll do whatever it takes to stop Iran’s nuclear bid. The sanctions you promise keep getting delayed and watered down. Hillary gave a fine speech at AIPAC yesterday, but we all know that you’re already planning on containing a nuclear Iran. That’s not acceptable to me.

Let’s make a deal, Mr. President: Our settlements for your bombers. We can’t fully destroy Iran’s nuclear sites – but you can. You can’t dismantle our settlements – but we can. We’ll all come out the better for it, including the Palestinians. Think about it, Barack.

HOW ABOUT AN ARAB ‘SETTLEMENT’ FREEZE?

How about an Arab ‘settlement’ freeze?
Why are 21 countries with 800 times more land so obsessed with Israel?
By Ruth Wisse
The Wall Street Journal
March 17, 2010

When she is surrounded by a swirl of conversation she cannot understand, my two-year-old granddaughter turns to me expectantly: “What they talking about, Bubbe?” Right now, I would have to confess to her that the hubbub over 1,600 new housing units in Jerusalem defies rational explanation.

Of the children of Abraham, the descendants of Ishmael currently occupy at least 800 times more land than descendants of Isaac. The 21 states of the Arab League routinely announce plans of building expansion. Saudi Arabia estimates that 555,000 housing units were built over the past several years. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced during a meeting in Baghdad last year that “Some 10,000 units will be built in each province [of Iraq] with 100 square meters per unit” to accommodate citizens whose housing needs have not been met for a long time. Egypt has established 10 new cities since 1996. They are Tenth of Ramadan, Sixth of October, Al Sadat, Al Shurouq, Al Obour, New Damietta, New Beni Sueif, New Assiut, New Luxor, and New Cairo.

In 2006 the Syrian Prime Minister, Mohammad Naji Atri, announced a new five-year development plan that aims to supply 687,000 housing units. Kuwait expects to have a demand for approximately 100,000 private housing units by 2010. Last year Jordan’s King Abdullah launched a National Housing Initiative, which aims to build 120,000 properties for low-income Jordanians.

Arab populations grow. And neighborhoods expand to house them. What’s more, Arab countries benefited disproportionately from the exchange of populations between Jews and Arabs that resulted from the Arab wars against Israel. Since 1948 upward of 800,000 Jews abandoned their homes and forfeited their goods in Egypt, Iraq, Morocco and Yemen. In addition to assets valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, the property deeds of Jews from Arab lands is estimated at a total area of 100,000 square miles, which is five times the size of the state of Israel, and more than Israel would include even if it were to stretch over all the disputed territories of the West Bank.

These preposterous disparities are a result of contrasting political cultures. The Arab League was founded at the same time as Israel with the express aim of undoing the Jewish state’s existence. Although much has changed over the ensuing decades, opposition to the Jewish state remains the strongest unifying tool of inter-Arab and Arab-Muslim politics. Trying to eliminate the Jews rather than compete with them has never benefited nations.

It is unfortunate that Arabs obsess about building in Israel rather than aiming for the development of their own superabundant lands. But why should America encourage their hegemonic ambitions? In December the White House issued a statement opposing “new construction in East Jerusalem” without delineating where or what East Jerusalem is.

Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood at the center of the present altercation, is actually in northern Jerusalem, west of the Jewish neighborhoods of Ramot, home to 40,000 Jewish residents. Why does the White House take issue with the construction of housing for Jewish citizens within the boundaries of their own country? The same White House raised no objection when Jordan recently began systematically stripping citizenship from thousands of its Palestinian citizens rather than providing new housing units for them in a land much larger than Israel.

Perhaps Israel has been at fault for not doggedly insisting on unconditional acceptance of its sovereign existence, and for not demanding that Arab rulers adhere to the U.N. Charter’s guarantee of “equal rights of... nations large and small.” Preposterous as they would have thought it, perhaps Israelis ought to have called for a freeze on Arab settlements to correspond to unreasonable Arab demands on them.

Any peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict will begin with a hard look at the map of the region in which 21 countries with 800 times more land are consumed with their Jewish neighbors’ natural increase.

FULL ARTICLES

The Future of an Illusion
A piece of paper will not bring peace to the Middle East
By Elliott Abrams
The Weekly Standard
April 5, 2010 edition

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.

Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular “peace process” has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.

The patching-up efforts of the last two weeks were impressive, but perversely: They showed how much damage had been done and how little the administration cares about reversing it. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom Obama was said to be “boiling with rage” after the Jerusalem housing announcement, got the complete slate of Washington meetings: Clinton, Gates, Biden, Obama. But the meetings were virtually secret: The White House did not permit a single photo to be taken of the Oval Office session, an unprecedented snub. Same at State: no ceremony, no press conference.

For her part, Secretary Clinton told the giant AIPAC meeting, “Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don’t agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally.” Several recent Palestinian actions, she said, were “provocations” that are “wrong and must be condemned.” That was nice, but saying it to a Jewish audience in a kiss-and-make-up session in Washington fools no one, not after her famous 43-minute telephone call to Netanyahu. These “provocations.  .  . that must be condemned” (note the passive voice) did not after all elicit a timely call to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas condemning them, nor did she use the Quartet meeting in Moscow on March 19 for that purpose. And general administration protestations that the United States is committed to Israel’s security and that relations are “rock solid” now carry little persuasive power; they sound like Obama’s (and for that matter Clinton’s) campaign rhetoric, and everyone knows how useful a guide to administration policy all of that proved to be.

What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?

1. Israel’s flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.

Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, put it this way in his memoirs: “The record.  .  . suggests that American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission.” During the George W. Bush years, the leader of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon, decided to abandon the idea of a “Greater Israel,” impose constraints on settlement construction in the West Bank (no new settlements, no outward expansion of settlement territory), and remove every settlement in Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank. His closest advisers say all of this was possible for him only in the context of unwavering American support for Israel’s security steps – including the targeting and killing of Hamas terrorists and the refusal to deal with a terrorist leader like Arafat. What was the turning point for Sharon? Bush’s June 24, 2002, speech, where he abandoned Arafat, denounced Palestinian terrorism, and said thorough reforms were the only possible basis for Palestinian statehood. Reassured, Sharon began to act.

Contrast this with the Obama administration, where Israel has been “condemned” – the toughest word in the diplomatic dictionary – for a housing project. Instead of seeking practical and politically feasible limits to settlement activity, the Obama approach has been to say every brick cemented to another was “illegitimate.”

Israelis know that these American denunciations of Israel liberate Europeans and others to crank up their own, and so it has been this past year: Israel has been increasingly isolated and criticized internationally. Once we used “condemn,” it was impossible (even if we were trying, which we were not) to keep it out of Quartet and EU statements. Add a few other international assaults (the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, for instance) and American acts of distancing (the president visits Cairo and Riyadh but skips Israel, for example), and Israelis are in no mood for additional risktaking. Who, after all, will have their back if things get rough? Hillary Clinton told AIPAC that “the status quo is unsustainable,” as if just about anything we can get on paper would be better. Such phrases do not inspire Israeli confidence that their country’s security is anywhere near the top of the administration’s list. All this should be elementary, but it seems to have escaped the Obama White House.

2. The failure to set standards for Palestinian conduct hurts the cause of peace.

In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat – 13 times. Who can blame Arafat for failing to take seriously criticism of his “alleged links” to terrorism when the invitations kept on coming? For years, American officials of both parties have said the “incitement must end,” but they have imposed no penalty for its failure to end. When in March the Palestinian Authority (PA) named a square for a terrorist involved in an attack in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, Obama, Biden, and Clinton were silent. Lower-ranking officials tut-tutted. In Palestinian society, the veneration of this terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, is widespread; Fatah, not Hamas, is the one celebrating Mughrabi. PA radio and television incite hatred of Israel and Jews with regularity, as Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI document every month.

In recent weeks the Obama administration has stated that both sides have responsibilities to meet, but it made no serious demands of the PA. Had there been early and regular insistence that incitement end, the Mughrabi incident would never have taken place. The price for such negligence is being paid in both Israeli and Palestinian society: Every such action and every vicious broadcast helps persuade Israelis that Palestinians do not truly seek peace and helps raise a new generation of Palestinians who see Jews as enemies to hate, not neighbors with whom to reach an accommodation. This infantilization of Palestinian society, moreover, moves it further from the responsibilities of statehood, for it holds harmless the most destructive elements of West Bank life and suggests that standards of decency are not necessarily part of progress toward “peace.”

A tough demand that all the incitement end now – no more terrorist squares, a clean-up of Palestinian broadcasting, the replacement of offending school textbooks – would both help Palestinian moderates undertake these actions and reassure Israelis that President Obama shares at least some of their concerns about the ability of Palestinians to negotiate and sustain a peace deal. The silence thus far, the unconvincing and rote handling of this issue, leaves the impression that Obama simply wants a deal signed and doesn’t much care about what happens after that. Like his distancing himself from Israel and his apparent lack of concern for Israeli security, this undermines any chance of successful peace talks.

3. Israeli withdrawals do not lead to peace unless law and order can be maintained by responsible security forces.

Israelis learned this the hard way in South Lebanon and Gaza, and it is unquestionably the greatest factor leading them to oppose a similar withdrawal from the West Bank. The Labor party leader Ehud Barak is not viewed in Israel as a hardliner; when he was prime minister he offered Arafat a dramatic peace proposal in 2000. But when, as defense minister, he met with President Bush in 2008 he handed over, and raised repeatedly in later meetings with Secretary Rice, a list of Israel’s security needs in the West Bank. He and Netanyahu (and the vast majority of Israelis) are of one mind on this: Terrorism from Gaza is a security challenge for Israel, but terrorism from the West Bank threatens Israel’s survival. There has been considerable progress in training Palestinian security forces, but no one believes they can yet maintain order without the presence of the IDF and Shin Bet. Those who say, as George Mitchell – Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East – and the Quartet have, that there can be a peace deal in 24 months are saying that fundamental security issues can be finessed or forgotten. Of course they can if your goal is a piece of paper – or, perhaps better put, a paper peace. If you want a real and lasting peace, you must have the answer to the question: What will fill the vacuum when Israeli forces leave? Today the answer is chaos or Hamas, and any prediction that in 24 months these matters will be resolved shows a lack of seriousness. Palestinians who value law and order and seek to build a decent society, as well as Jordanians who worry what forces will be across the river from them, cannot be so cavalier. This brings us back to lesson one: If the United States is intent on a deal in 24 months no matter what, Israelis will understand that we are not going to protect their security and that we’ll complain when they assert the need to do it themselves.

4. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not the center of world, Arab, or Muslim politics.

George Mitchell once acknowledged that when he talks to Arab leaders they raise Iran first, but no one in the administration wants to allow mere facts to interfere with their ideology. George W. Bush was as close as any American president ever has been to Israel, but had excellent relations with the Moroccan, Algerian, Emirati, Omani, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Jordanian rulers – all except the Egyptians, who were annoyed that he thought they should have free elections. Paying attention to what Arab political leaders say publicly about Israel is foolish, for their real views consist of tough-minded assessments of the balance of power in the region. What they want most of all is calm; they do not want their streets riled up by Israeli-Palestinian violence. Palestinians are not at the center of their hearts or they would visit the West Bank and bring plenty of cash with them. What preoccupies them is survival and Iran. If they take any lesson from the current coldness between the United States and Israel, it is that the United States is not a reliable ally. If we can ditch Israel, they know we can far more easily ditch them.

The most perverse misunderstanding along these lines is the thought that supporting Israel is risking American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the war on terror. Vice President Biden is reported to have told Netanyahu that “this is starting to get dangerous for us. What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.” White House denials suggest that the quotation is not exact, but there has also been no flat-out denial of the sentiment. David Axelrod, the political hack who appears to be a key foreign policy strategist and spokesman for the president, was asked on one of the Sunday shows if he agreed that settlement construction puts U.S. troops’ lives at risk. He replied, “It is important for our own security that we move forward and resolve this very difficult issue.” Not exactly a resounding “no.” General David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, told the Senate that “clearly the tensions in these issues have an enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command area of responsibility.” Once again, not a “No way” or a “Get real.” Petraeus had a chance to say the Pakistanis are not thinking hard about West Bank settlement construction when they watch the Taliban and developments in Waziristan, and he failed to do so then or in later explanations. How hard would it have been for him or some other official to remind everyone that Osama bin Laden became a terrorist to overthrow the government in Riyadh, not the one in Jerusalem? The struggles between modernizers and traditionalists, Sunni and Shia, secularists and Islamists are tearing the Islamic and the Arab world apart. They would continue to do so if Israel no longer existed.

Israelis listening to official American remarks hear an amateurish interpretation of Arab politics, which as Lee Smith reminded us in his recent book (quoting bin Laden himself) is basically about backing the strong horse. Arab leaders want to know what we will do to stop Iran; they want to know if their ally in Washington is going to be the top power in the region. Israelis wonder where the “uh oh, this will make Islamic extremists angry” argument stops. Does anyone think al Qaeda or the Taliban would be mollified by a settlement freeze? The Islamists are not interested in “1967 issues” related to Israel’s size, but in “1948 issues” related to Israel’s existence. If henceforth we mean to engage such people rather than to defeat them, Israel’s existence – not its settlement policy – comes into play.

If this is not the Obama view of the world, the administration should say so quickly and very clearly. Otherwise his administration can fairly be said to be revisiting our own “1948 issues.” The argument that Israel would be a great burden and ruin our place in the Arab world was proffered then by George Marshall – and rejected by Harry Truman. In his memoirs, Clark Clifford wrote at length about the State Department’s efforts to stop Truman from recognizing the new State of Israel. Clifford quoted Marshall’s deputy Robert Lovett as saying on May 14, 1948 – the day Israel declared its independence and Truman offered recognition – “There will be a tremendous reaction in the Arab world. We might lose the effects of many years of hard work with the Arabs. We will lose our position with Arab leaders. It will put our diplomatic missions and consular representatives in personal jeopardy.” After 60 years of American leadership and military dominance in the Middle East, it should be as disturbing to Americans – not least to Democrats who venerate Truman – as it is to Israelis that traces of this approach are emerging again in Washington.

Netanyahu answered these poor arguments in his address to AIPAC:

“Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values. In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us. To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small, you are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan.”

5. The ‘peace process’ retards peace.

A single-minded concentration on “the peace process” hurts the cause of peace and moderation throughout the region and does little to build the necessary institutions of Palestinian society. It’s obvious that nearly two decades of negotiations have not produced peace. Instead this focus has had two deleterious effects.

First, it means we care more about getting Syria, Egypt, or others to endorse some negotiating plan than we do about their own internal situations. The people, the politics, the alliances of such countries become unimportant, as we focus on whether their rulers will deign to sit at some table we’ve laid. Human rights and democracy issues evaporate.

Second, we use all our chips for the negotiating sessions, instead of applying them to the hard work of nation building. We ask Arab states to reach out to Israel (which they will not do) when we should be demanding that they reach out to the Palestinians (which they might). We explode, and damage U.S.-Israeli relations, over a tiny construction announcement because it might slow “proximity talks” Mitchell has cooked up. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish (never Arab) construction in Israel’s capital city. This set of priorities is perverse and will not lead to peace. Instead, a pragmatic approach that seeks to create in the West Bank a decent society and a state that will maintain law and order should be our goals.

The last week of March brought talk of “reconciliation” between the Obama administration and the government of Israel. Relations are so strained that we, too, appear to need our own set of “proximity talks” now. But reconciliation is not a simple matter, as the Catholic Church knows. In that faith, it is a sacrament consisting of three elements: conversion, confession, and celebration. Conversion is the internal realization of wrongdoing, confession is the external admission of it, and celebration follows when (and only when) the sinner has converted, repented, confessed, and returned. Given the Obama administration’s view of Israel and the Middle East, celebration seems a long way off.

WILL OBAMA IGNITE 3RD INTIFADA?

Will Obama ignite 3rd intifada?
U.S. president gives those seeking another round of violence a powerful excuse
By Daniel Gordis
The Jerusalem Post
March 26, 2010

As I was departing the United States following a brief visit last week, the news being broadcast in the airport was preoccupied with Prime Minister Binyamin’s Netanyahu’s recent and apparently inadvertent snub of Vice President Joe Biden. Some 11 hours later, when I’d landed in Tel Aviv and was listening to the radio in the taxi on the way to Jerusalem, the news was of rioting in Jerusalem, the numbers of police officers injured, and the number of protesters detained during Hamas’s “Day of Rage.” On the American news, Hillary Clinton was calling for more than an apology, demanding “concrete steps” towards peace on Israel’s part. And in Israel, the fluent-Hebrew-speaking Arab protester interviewed on the radio was calling for armed resistance to Israel’s “assault on Jerusalem,” insisting that the time for a third intifada had now arrived.

The radical difference between the broadcasts is an apt metaphor for the wholly different ways in which the current crisis in Israeli-American relations is perceived on the two sides of the ocean. The Americans are quite right to be incensed at the way Biden was treated. Whether Netanyahu was sandbagged by Interior Minister Eli Yishai, or whether this was simply another example of Israeli bureaucratic incompetence is not yet entirely clear. But it should never have happened.

Having said that, however, it is also clear that in the context of a generally positive relationship, Israel’s insult to Biden would have been unfortunate, but it would have blown over almost immediately. The snub has had such massive repercussions because the relationship between the American and Israeli administrations is frayed, and wholly devoid of trust. The important question is why that is the case.

WHILE ISRAEL has obviously made some serious gaffes since Obama entered office, the real cause for this nadir in Washington-Jerusalem relations is the fact that Barack Obama seems to have little comprehension of the region on which he seeks to impose peace. The president’s ignorance of the world in which he is operating is apparent on at least three levels. He seems unaware of how profoundly troubled Israelis are by his indiscriminate use of the word “settlement,” he appears to have little comprehension of the history of Palestinian recalcitrance, and he has apparently learned little from decades of American involvement in the Middle East peace process.

First, there is the issue of the word “settlements.” To the Israeli ear, anyone who would use the same noun for both a small city with tens of thousands of inhabitants and for a tiny hilltop outpost consisting of a trailer and a portable generator simply does not understand the terrain. Gilo, to Israelis, is not a settlement. It is a huge neighborhood of Jerusalem, a part of the capital city. When Obama called Gilo a settlement after Israel announced new housing units there in November, Israelis drew the conclusion that the president of the United States is wholly out of his element.

Similarly, Obama’s demands for an absolute freeze on settlement construction strike Israelis as either foolish or unfair. Why, they ask, did all construction have to cease? Israelis who had planned to add a bedroom to their home for recently married children, who had already poured a foundation and ripped out the back wall of their home, were now told that nothing could proceed. When the president, who does not seem to know a city from an outpost, insists that houses remain open to the elements during the cold Israeli winter because of his desire to appease the very Palestinians who have never been serious about peace efforts, he does not win friends.

Nor, Israelis have noted, did Obama demand any similarly concrete concessions from the Palestinians or their puppet-president. That, too, has served Obama poorly in this country. And despite all this, Israelis believe the world has forgotten, Netanyahu acceded to Obama’s demands for a freeze, at no small political cost.

Thus, when the Americans decided to make the undeniably ill-timed announcement of the Ramat Shlomo housing plans into a cause célèbre, Israelis were hard-pressed to feel contrite about anything beyond the personal hurt caused to Biden. Ramat Shlomo is an enormous neighborhood that is already home to some 20,000 people, and which is situated between the even larger neighborhoods of Ramot and Sanhedria. Ramat Shlomo is Jerusalem, period. Building there may be wise or unwise for a whole array of reasons, but for the Americans to seize on this as a “settlement construction” issue only further confirmed Israeli suspicions that Obama couldn’t locate the neighborhood on a map.

THE SECOND major element that Obama appears not to understand is that the Palestinians’ current refusal to conduct face-to-face negotiations has a long history; their recalcitrance has nothing at all to do with the settlements. The settlements, like the refugee problem (on which Israel will never compromise), and the division of Jerusalem (where some accommodation will almost certainly be forced on Israel), will be addressed when the Israelis and Palestinians sit down for face-to-face negotiations.

But Abbas has agreed only to mediated talks because he is unwilling to countenance the concessions that direct talks might ultimately require of him. The Palestinians have balked at every attempt to sign a substantive agreement with Israel. There remains virtually no Israeli political Left, not because of the Israeli Right, but because Yasser Arafat unleashed the Second Intifada when Ehud Barak called his bluff and offered him just about everything he could have expected, proving beyond any doubt that the Palestinian leadership had no interest in “land for peace.”

For the Obama administration to suggest that the Palestinians cannot negotiate now because of settlement construction strikes Israelis as either hopelessly naïve, or worse, fundamentally hostile to the Jewish state.

And finally, despite his appreciable intellectual capacities, Barack Obama seems to have no appreciation of what America can and cannot do in the Middle East. He believes so deeply in the power of his own rhetoric that he imagines that he can evoke the passions of Grant Park on Election Day, or the Washington Mall on Inauguration Day, in a Muslim world that has disdain for the very democratic values that brought him to power. This is hubris at its most dangerous. Obama’s Cairo speech was rhetorically brilliant, but the president has been snubbed. Iran has yet to grasp Obama’s outstretched hand, and instead, proceeds apace in its quest for a nuclear weapon. The Palestinians have not budged. Yet Obama continues to believe that his eloquence will win the day.

Does Obama really not understand that this conflict has a long and consistent history? The Arabs rejected the UN Partition Plan in 1947, and refused a treaty at the end of Israel’s War of Independence in 1949. After their defeat in June 1967, they gathered in Khartoum and declared “no peace, no recognition and no negotiations.” Arafat said “no” at Camp David in 2000, and Abbas continues in that tradition. Why the American administration cannot or will not acknowledge that is one of the great wonders of this most recent train wreck.

WITH HIS laser focus on the settlements, Obama is ignoring the fact that Abbas wouldn’t negotiate even if not a single settlement existed. In so doing, Obama has not only not moved the process forward, but he has afforded Abbas a refuge from responsibility, and he has given those who would like to ignite a third intifada an empty but symbolically powerful excuse for doing just that. A third intifada remains unlikely at present (though, it’s worth noting, the IAF attacked Gaza targets this week and the IDF killed a Palestinian teenager during a scuffle – precisely the sort of innocuous events that could one day be seen as the first events of the third intifada), but should it happen, it will be, first and foremost, the product of Washington’s naïveté.

Obama would be well-served to recognize that the history of this region is clear. Peace emerges when the two primary sides do the work themselves, with the United States entering late in the process to iron out stubborn details. Sadat went to Jerusalem without American urging, and though Jimmy Carter ultimately brought the two sides together to conclude the deal, the bulk of the work had been done by Sadat and Begin long before Carter entered the picture. The Nobel Committee, which once exercised much more subtle judgment, essentially acknowledged that fact by having Sadat and Begin split the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, without including Carter.

The same was true with Rabin and Hussein, who worked on the Israeli-Jordanian peace deal. Clinton orchestrated the ceremony; but the principals had done most of the work without him.

And history suggests that only Israeli right-wingers can forge a deal. Israelis do not trust the Left to be security-conscious, and a left-wing government always has a right-wing flank blocking it. Obama may bristle at Netanyahu’s hawkish rhetoric, but the more Obama weakens this prime minister, the less likely a deal will become. The U.S. cannot wish democracy on Iraq, or peace on the Middle East. There will be a settlement of this conflict when the Palestinians are ready, not when Barack Obama decides to impose one.

SO, WHERE do we go from here? To begin to pull out of the present nose-dive, each of the parties will need to shift gears.

The Palestinians have to decide if they will take risks for peace, and if they can elect a president who is more than a figurehead. Last week’s “Day of Rage,” it should be noted, was called by Hamas – yet it unfolded not in Hamas’ Gaza, but in Fatah’s Jerusalem. Fatah needs a genuine leader, perhaps someone like Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who is now saying that the Palestinians should first build the trappings of statehood, and only then declare independence down the road. It is no surprise that Shimon Peres recently compared Fayyad to David Ben-Gurion, the creator of the modern State of Israel.

The Israelis need to learn to play in the major leagues. When the American vice president visits, you need to have your act together. If Israeli leaders continue to act as if they run a banana republic, they will deservedly be so treated. But much more significantly, Netanyahu needs to apprise Israelis of his vision. Does he favor a two-state solution? What are his plans for Jerusalem? For the settlements? Let him tell us, and then we can decide. If we approve, he’ll stay in office. And if we don’t, he’ll be gone. But we deserve to know what our prime minister has in mind.

In some respects, though, Barack Obama has the hardest job, at least in the short term. When he took office, there was no love lost between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Gaza was still smoldering from the recently concluded Operation Cast Lead. But there was reasonable quiet on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, and a renewed Intifada was nowhere on our radar screen. Obama’s blunderings have now restored the region’s previous tinderbox qualities.

The president needs to back down from his relentless and fruitless focus on settlements, and concentrate more on what he doesn’t yet know than on the power of his rhetoric. Should another intifada erupt, it will have had its seeds in a Washington more interested in the magic of its words than in the painful lessons of a century of history.

“I GUESS WE’LL FIND OUT PRETTY SOON”

The single-payer option
It seems the Obama administration envisions having Israel pay for everything
By Barry Rubin
The Jerusalem Post
March 28, 2010

Has the Obama administration, against U.S. interests, declared diplomatic war on Israel? Up until now my view has been that the U.S. government didn’t want a crisis but merely sought to get indirect negotiations going between Israel and Palestinians in order to look good. Even assuming this limited goal, the technique – to keep getting concessions from Israel without asking the Palestinian Authority to do or give anything – has been foolish, but at least it was a generally rational strategy.

But now it has become reasonable to ask whether the Obama White House is running amok, whether it is pushing friction so far out of proportion that it is starting to look like a vendetta based on hostility and ideology.

Part of the framework for such behavior can be called, to borrow a phrase from the health care debate, a “single-payer option.” That is, the administration seems to envision Israel paying for everything: supposedly getting the PA to negotiate, doing away with any Islamist desire to commit acts of terrorism or revolt, keeping Iraq quiet, making Afghanistan stable and solving just about every other global problem.

What makes this even more absurd is that at the very moment when it is coddling Syria and losing the battle for anything but the most minimal sanctions on Iran, the administration has chosen to bash Israel.

During his visit to Washington last week, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tried to defuse the tension. His partners in government, we should never forget, are Defense Minister Ehud Barak, leader of the Labor Party, and President Shimon Peres, who has done more to promote Middle East peace than any other living Israeli leader.

But according to reliable sources, Obama went out of his way to be personally hostile, treating Netanyahu like some colonial minion who could be ordered around.

Judging from the evidence, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC speech, the administration thinks it knows better what Israelis want than do Netanyahu, Barak and Peres.

Actually, a poll by the highly respected Smith Research company for The Jerusalem Post, found that only 9 percent of Israeli Jews considered the administration more pro-Israel, while 48% said it was more pro-Palestinian. To understand these figures, you have to know that most Israelis are very reluctant to say anything critical of the U.S., out of genuine respect and concern not to damage relations.

So does the administration want to resolve this issue or to pile on demands in hope of giving the PA so much that it will agree to talk about getting even more unilateral Israeli concessions? Is the goal to overthrow Netanyahu – which isn’t going to happen – or break his spirit so he will follow orders in future – which also isn’t going to happen?

Doesn’t this U.S. government understand that if you prove yourself to be anti-Israel, you will destroy any incentive Israel has to enter negotiations with you as the mediator? Can it not comprehend that it is giving the PA every incentive to keep raising the price?

Can it not sense that if it undermines Israel’s trust in Washington, it will push the whole country further to the Right? If the U.S. government politely asks to stop building in east Jerusalem in exchange for some tangible benefit and for a limited time, many Israelis would be willing to agree. But if this happens in a framework of enmity and threat, with the “reward” being no benefit and even more concessions to follow, even doves will grow sharp beaks.

IT SEEMS as if the Obama administration has chosen just one country to try to pressure and intimidate. And it has picked the worst possible target in this respect, both because of how Israelis think and also given very strong domestic U.S. support for Israel (especially in Congress).

It bashes Israel while ignoring the PA’s naming of a major square in honor of a terrorist who murdered a score of Israeli civilians, with Clinton even claiming this was done by Hamas and not the PA. And as the administration betrays Israel’s main priority – failing to put serious pressure on Iran to stop building nuclear weapons – why should Israel want to do big favors and take big risks for this president?

Finally, since this administration has already unilaterally abrogated two major U.S. promises – the previous president’s recognition that settlement blocs could be absorbed as part of a peace agreement, and the Obama administration’s own pledge to let Israel build in east Jerusalem if it stopped in the West Bank – why should Israel put its faith in some new set of promises?

The Obama administration will have to decide in the coming days: Does it want to try to get some limited concessions from Israel to use as capital in trying to get talks started, using these to brag – futilely, of course – to Arabs and Muslims how they should be nicer to the administration in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Or does it want to live up to the negative stereotypes held by its worst enemies while simultaneously committing political suicide and destroying U.S. credibility in the Middle East.

I guess we’ll find out pretty soon.

FULL ARTICLES

“AMERICA AND ISRAEL: THE END OF A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP”?

America and Israel: the end of a special relationship
The fall-out between America and Israel is a serious threat to world peace
By Benny Morris
The Sunday Telegraph
March 28, 2010

BENNY MORRIS explains why this is a threat to world peace. Without doubt, the Middle East’s rogue or terrorist leaders, from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah to Hamas’s Khalid Mashal, are rubbing their hands with glee.

The year-long rift between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations over Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is threatening to turn into a political rupture – just as Israel faces an existential threat which it needs every ounce of American support to counter.

In the first decades of Israel’s existence, when it fought and defeated Egyptian armies, the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations twice twisted arms in Tel Aviv to force Israeli forces to withdraw -– first from the Sinai Peninsula (1956-57), then from territory west of the Suez Canal which it had occupied during the October War (1973). But the Americans continued to provide Israel with strategic cover to counter Soviet threats of nuclear destruction and direct military intervention.

Today, Israel faces an Israel-hating Islamist coalition, of Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas, which may soon have nuclear weapons – but does so without any certainty about American goodwill and protection.

Barack Obama may say that the United States supports Israel and will not countenance a “nuclear Iran”. But most Israelis see Obama as lacking in that basic commitment to and sympathy for Israel that characterised American presidents from Truman through Kennedy to Clinton and George W Bush.

As recently as 2000 and 2005, Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon felt able to offer or make major territorial concessions to the Palestinians because they knew that Washington would make up any shortfall in security that withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza might entail.

Obama’s deliberate coldness toward America’s traditional ally has not been lost on the Israeli public. He spoke in Cairo last year to the Muslim world, while avoiding a “balancing” visit to Jerusalem. He pettily humiliated Netanyahu during last week’s visit to America (on the evening of their meeting, Obama left Netanyahu for more than an hour stranded in the White House while he dined without his guest). Nor will Washington’s overbearing tone be quickly forgotten.

And while, without doubt, Obama’s health care bill victory has bolstered his stature in American public opinion and enabled him to face off with Netanyahu, his Democratic Party may yet pay a price in the congressional elections in November.

The pro-Israel lobby in Washington remains powerful, despite recent knocks and the emergence of a small, Obama-supporting dissident Jewish lobby called J-Street.

While American Jews traditionally vote Democrat, Obama’s trouncing of Israel may well affect campaign contributions and votes (American Jews, who number more than 5 million, tend to contribute and vote disproportionately).

In the coming weeks, it will become clear whether Israelis interpret Obama’s behaviour toward Netanyahu as a personal issue or whether it reflects a deeper disaffection with Israel itself.

Israelis have recently been given grounds for feeling that Netanyahu is an incompetent (and unlucky) prime minister: the international political fallout from the assassination he authorised of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, including Britain’s expulsion of the Mossad head of station in London, is still reverberating.

And while most Israelis approve of the killing of a Hamas general and condemn Western and Arab hypocrisy in this regard (MI6 agents have never used non-British passports? Did Dubai’s rulers really support Hamas’s gun-running activities, in cahoots with Iran, on its soil?), many question the wisdom of the cost-benefit calculus.

Many Israelis have been wary of Netanyahu since his first tenure as prime minister in the late 1990s, when his relations with Clinton were poor. But they will not endorse American interference in Israel’s politics or with its vital interests.

Did the Obama administration embark on its confrontation with Netanyahu in order to force him to switch coalition partners from the two main Right-wing parties –Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas – to the more agreeable centrist Kadima Party? Or is it merely seeking to freeze the Israeli settlement enterprise, to pave the way for Palestinian re-entry into peace negotiations?

Either way, most Israelis resent Obama’s arm-twisting, and it is by no means clear that Israel will soften the widespread desire to retain East Jerusalem while opposing the settlement enterprise in the wider West Bank.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad speaks of the destruction of “the Zionist regime”, and Iran has spent a decade fashioning the tools with which to achieve this – nuclear weapons and the Shihab III rockets to deliver them.

Washington may still be beyond Iranian reach and the Arab Gulf states, while nervous about Iran’s bid for regional hegemony and atomic bombs, may rightly feel that they are not the intended targets. But Israelis are keenly aware that they are in Tehran’s sights.

Iran is an estimated one to three years away from building the bomb. And its local clients and proxies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Hamas in Gaza, have been equipped by Tehran (and Syria) with rockets with which to pound Israel’s cities and air bases.

The White House and State Department still speak about mobilising the world community for sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear programme. But Russia and China are not on board for effective sanctions, while Obama and the American military have manifestly no stomach for a military confrontation with Iran.

Indeed, Netanyahu by now may suspect that the Americans have resigned themselves to a nuclear-armed Iran and are relying on deterrence to fend off an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. But many Israelis fear that the anti-Semitic mullahs may prove less rational than the ageing apparatchiks who ran the Kremlin during the Cold War nuclear stand-off.

The only action that could halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry is a strike by Israel. Whether Israel can do so effectively without a green light and some assistance from Washington is unclear.

At a minimum, Israel would need American permission to overfly Iraq and perhaps landing rights, for refuelling and repair, in regional U.S. air bases. Israel may also need additional equipment and weaponry. After an air assault, Israel would need American political backing to prevent Security Council condemnation and sanctions resolutions, and a promise of support and supplies if a wider Middle East war ensued.

While many Arab and Western governments would no doubt privately welcome the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities, their public posturing would be different.

So far, Obama – like George W Bush before him – has vetoed an Israeli pre-emptive strike. The Americans are fearful of the chaos that might engulf the Middle East and are aware of their vulnerability in the region. They assume that the Iranians would charge them with complicity, whether or not they were complicit.

It is possible that Netanyahu hoped to reach an agreement with Obama based on a trade-off – Israeli concessions on the Palestinians in exchange for America agreeing to an attack on the Iranian installations. But Obama apparently offered Netanyahu nothing, while demanding everything on the Palestinian front.

Washington believes that Palestinian-Israeli friction helps fuel Muslim antagonism towards the U.S.. In its view, the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations or, better still, an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord would reduce this antagonism.

Which brings us to Netanyahu and the problem of Jerusalem. In December 2000, Clinton called for a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would have the Gaza Strip and about 95 per cent of the West Bank. The Arab-populated neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem would constitute the Palestinian state’s capital.

Ehud Barak, prime minister at the time, accepted the Clinton parameters, including on Jerusalem. The Palestinians rejected them. And while Netanyahu, under pressure from Obama, may have agreed to the principle of a two-state solution and to limit construction around the West Bank, he has never accepted the principle of dividing Jerusalem. Hence his insistence that Israel continue constructing housing.

For Obama, this means that Netanyahu is not serious about peace and a two-state solution. He is right to the extent that there can be no two-state solution without Palestinian sovereignty over Arab East Jerusalem.

A the same time, Obama has ignored evidence that the Palestinians are averse to a two-state solution. How else to explain the majority Palestinian vote in 2006 for Hamas, which advocates Israel’s destruction? Or the rejection by Yasser Arafat (with his colleagues, including Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian “president”) of Clinton’s two-state proposals six years before? Or Abbas’s effective “no” to the peace proposals in 2008 of Ehud Olmert? Or Abbas’s refusal to recognise Israel as “a Jewish state” while insisting on the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” (which would give Israel an Arab-majority)?

In short, Netanyahu has given Obama ample grounds for frustration and anger – and Obama has given Netanyahu ample grounds for suspicion about his real sympathies. And this has happened at a crucial moment in Middle Eastern history, when a nuclear cloud looms over the region.

“TRUST BETWEEN THE TWO SIDES SEEMS TO BE AT A LOW EBB”

With U.S.-Israel ties strained, Obama may make bold move
By Warren P. Strobel
McClatchy Newspapers
The Miami Herald
March 28, 2010

WASHINGTON -- After 14 months of frustration over the moribund Mideast peace process and nearly three weeks of open confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama shows no sign of backing down – and may be about to double his bets.

The clash began when Vice President Joe Biden visited Jerusalem on March 9 and Israel announced construction of 1,600 new apartments for Jews in disputed East Jerusalem. Biden condemned the decision, and Obama’s top aides publicly dressed down Netanyahu for a step they called “insulting.”

Hoping to capitalize on Israel’s embarrassment, the administration sought concessions on Jewish settlements and other issues to set the stage for renewed talks with the Palestinians.

That, too, didn’t work. This past week, first Obama, then his aides held closed talks with Netanyahu at the White House for two days running. No reporter was allowed near the talks, no joint appearances were made and no statements were released afterward.

An Israeli newspaper commented that Netanyahu had been treated as if he were the leader of Equatorial Guinea.

Obama, fresh from his legislative victory on health care, is planning an attempt to turn the current disaster into a diplomatic opportunity, according to U.S. officials, former officials and diplomats.

The administration is said to be preparing a major peace initiative that would be Obama’s most direct involvement in the conflict to date, and would go far beyond the tentative, indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks that were torpedoed earlier in the month.

“It is crystallizing that we have to do something now. That this can’t go on this way,” said one of the officials who, like the others, wouldn’t speak for the record because of the issue’s sensitivity.

Because of the U.S. political calendar, Obama has limited time to press Israel before it becomes a major domestic political issue during midterm elections. Netanyahu, who this weekend confers with his closest allies, has limited political space in which to operate, if he wants to stay in power.

His coalition at home is populated with Israeli politicians who support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, oppose any concessions on Jerusalem and are skeptical of an independent Palestinian state next door.

One irony of the current confrontation is that the administration, which had laboriously organized indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians, had planned to use Biden’s visit to provide “strategic reassurance” to Israel, in hopes of improving relations with the closest U.S. ally in the Middle East after a year of strains.

Now, trust between the two sides seems to be at a low ebb.

“There’s not a great deal of trust that he believes deeply in the two-state solution,” a former senior U.S. official in touch with the White House said of Netanyahu. “There’s a belief that he’s a reluctant peacemaker here.”

The Obama administration is said to believe that Netanyahu has more control over Jewish settlements than he admits, and political flexibility to dump his right-wing partners and form a government with the moderate Kadima party if he chose.

“Fundamentally, he’s going to have to decide between his coalition and his relationship with the United States,” the former official said.

From the day of his inauguration and his first major appointment - former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine as his special Middle East envoy - efforts by Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mitchell have been a study in frustration.

Netanyahu turned aside a U.S. demand last year for a comprehensive settlement freeze, offering a 10-month moratorium that excluded East Jerusalem. Even under President George W. Bush, whose interest was episodic, Israeli and Palestinian leaders held direct talks. Obama has struggled just to start “proximity talks,” in which U.S. mediators would shuttle between the two sides.

So American anger was white-hot when the March 9 announcement left the proximity talks stillborn.

Mitchell, who labored for months during frequent Mideast shuttles “is a patient man. ... but this has to be aggravating,” one State Department official said.

Senior U.S. officials are said to debate whether the unveiling of the 1,600 new apartments at Ramat Shlomo was a deliberate attempt by Netanyahu to avoid peace negotiations, or merely symptomatic of his tenuous control over his own government. The Interior Ministry is run by the ultra-orthodox Shas party.

Either conclusion bodes poorly for Obama’s attempts at diplomacy. Israeli officials say Netanyahu was as blindsided by the announcement as Biden was.

On Friday, March 12, Clinton and Netanyahu spoke by phone in a tense conservation, in which the secretary of state relayed U.S. anger at the move in Ramat Shlomo. She demanded that Israel take steps to revive hopes for peace.

The U.S. government has declined to list them, but they’re said to include an end to provocative moves in East Jerusalem; removing checkpoints and otherwise easing conditions on the West Bank; and agreeing to immediately negotiate core disputes with the Palestinians.

Clinton and Netanyahu were both keenly aware that they were scheduled to speak on March 22 in Washington at the annual conference of the powerful Jewish-American lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Netanyahu called Clinton, who was in Moscow, on March 18 and delivered his response to the American demands. Israeli officials say he insisted that the Palestinians had to make concessions too, not just Israel.

Publicly, the administration moved to tone down the rhetoric, and meetings were arranged with Clinton and Obama, who had canceled an Asia trip to be in Washington for the health care vote.

Netanyahu’s speech at AIPAC gave no ground. He declared, “Jerusalem is not a settlement; it’s our capital,” and described a limited U.S. role in the peace talks. The next morning, he went to Capitol Hill, where Democrats and Republicans alike showered him with promises of support for Israel.

It looked for a moment like the Israeli prime minister had weathered the storm.

At the White House, however, distrust of Netanyahu ran deep. Maps were prepared, showing how Israel had all but encircled Jerusalem’s Old City with Jewish settlements and even religious theme parks - “facts on the ground” that would preclude a peace deal. Palestinians also claim the city as their capital.

By all accounts, the White House meetings went badly, both in substance and tone, as the Obama team pressed Netanyahu to make concessions on Jewish settlements and other issues. Netanyahu balked at some of the requests, which the administration hasn’t made public.

Now, the ball is in his court.