Quote:US and Israel in stand-off over settler homes

The diplomatic stand-off between the US and Israel continued on Wednesday as both sides waited for signs the other would give way in the row over plans for new settler homes in East Jerusalem.

By Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem
Published: 5:56PM GMT 17 Mar 2010



Benjamin Netanyahu Photo: AP
Benjamin Netanyahu delayed responding to Hillary Clinton's demands that he scrap the proposal for 1,600 buildings as the battle of wills escalated.
The Israeli prime minister had been expected to tell the US secretary of state yesterday whether he would accept a series of conditions designed to assuage American anger and revive the peace process.

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Clinton to call Netanyahu in bid to ease tensions
But as the Obama administration appeared to soften its stance in the row, Mr Netanyahu remained silent.
Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish foreign minister, indicated that Israel would never countenance an end to settlement construction in East Jerusalem.
"This demand to forbid Jews from building in East Jerusalem is totally unacceptable," he said at a joint press conference with Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign minister.
Mrs Clinton is expected to call Mr Netanyahu over the next 24 hours, US officials said. But with appetite for a prolonged dispute with Israel apparently waning, there seemed little prospect of a repeat of the angry lecture Mrs Clinton gave the prime minister last Friday.
In what has been interpreted as a conciliatory gesture, Mr Netanyahu did speak to Joe Biden, the US vice president whose visit to the Holy Land last week set the scene for the worst diplomatic spat between the United States and Israel in a generation. The contents of the discussion were not disclosed.
Mr Biden was in Jerusalem to announce the beginning of indirect talks between the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships, but his trip was soured with announcement of the settler homes plan.
After a series of public rebukes in which the United States made it clear that Israel had "insulted" its vice president, Mrs Clinton demanded Mr Netanyahu cancel the expansion and make a public gesture to win back Palestinian confidence in the talks.
In the past 48 hours, however, Mrs Clinton has toned down her language by stressing America's "unshakeable bond" with Israel. The change in rhetoric came after two dozen Congressmen, many of them Democrats, wrote to President Barack Obama demanding that he put an end to the vilification of Israel. :adore:$$$$
Even so, Mrs Clinton looks unlikely to let the Israeli prime minister off the hook entirely and she will seek the backing of the Quartet negotiating group – comprising the US, the United Nations, the EU and Russia – when it meets in Moscow on Friday.
Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian leader, has said he will reverse his acceptance of indirect negotiations until all Jewish settlement expansion in East Jerusalem, captured by Israel after the 1967 Six Day War, was halted.
Mr Obama himself is said to have grown increasingly convinced that further paralysis in the Middle East peace process could risk the lives of US soldiers overseas.
He was warned by Gen David Petraeus, commander of US security interests in the Middle East, last week that the lack of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks had created a sense in the Arab world that America is incapable of standing up to Israel.

Keith Millea Wrote:Why do I think this "family feud" is all a charade?If the US was really interested in fairness for the Palestinians,they would immediately break the blockade,and feed and provide the slaves there with medical supplies.Nope,not enough conscience for that..........

Quote:It's akin to the flickering oriental shadow puppets in the opium den scenes in Once Upon A Time In America.

It is an illusion of light and movement where nothing is as it seems.

Quote:Israel Hits Back At Settlements Criticism

11:26pm UK, Wednesday March 17, 2010
Dominic Waghorn, Middle East correspondent

Israel has defiantly condemned international criticism of its settlements activity in Jerusalem.
Israel's foreign minister chose a press conference with one of the Jewish state's critics on the issue, Baroness Ashton, to launch his attack.
"This demand to forbid Jews from building in east Jerusalem is totally unreasonable," Avigdor Lieberman said of international calls for Israel to cancel plans for 1,600 homes in East Jerualem.
"I think that this demand, it comes, in many ways, as an opportunity for the international community to jump on Israel and apply pressure to Israel and to demand things that are unreasonable."
Baroness Ashton refused to be drawn into an exchange with her host on the matter but she smiled awkwardly during the comments.
Last week in Cairo, she issued an uncompromising criticism of Israel's announcement of 1,600 new homes in disputed East Jerusalem.
"We are absolutely clear that this kind of action prejudices the potential of the proximity talks and the opportunity to move further into negotiation. And we are very clear that we want to see this stopped".
In a joint press conference with Mr Lieberman, she called for both Israelis and Palestinians to do what they can to restart negotiations but did not repeat her criticisms.
Palestinians are refusing to renew even indirect negotiations until Israel withdraws the 1,600-home plan.
America says it wants concessions from Israel to defuse the crisis, which began during US Vice President Joe Biden's visit here last week.
But despite their differences, US President Barack Obama has insisted the row has not damaged his country's relations with Israel.

Jan Klimkowski Wrote:

Keith Millea Wrote:Why do I think this "family feud" is all a charade?If the US was really interested in fairness for the Palestinians,they would immediately break the blockade,and feed and provide the slaves there with medical supplies.Nope,not enough conscience for that..........

Keith - I agree.

It's akin to the flickering oriental shadow puppets in the opium den scenes in Once Upon A Time In America.

It is an illusion of light and movement where nothing is as it seems.

Quote:
FOCUS: OPINION
Political umbrage in Washington?
By Robert Grenier


Despite a temporary freeze, construction on settlements, such as the one in Har Gilo, just outside of Jerusalem, has continued with little interruption [EPA]

The announcement last week by Eli Yishai, the Israeli interior minister, of plans to construct an additional 1,600 Israeli homes in East Jerusalem, appears to have generated quite the diplomatic row.

Coming as it did just before the start of a dinner offered by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in honour of Joe Biden, the US vice-president, the announcement threw the White House official into high dudgeon.

The US delegation must have burned up the proverbial phone lines between Israel and the West Wing of the White House, while Biden's Israeli host was kept waiting some 90 minutes until the vice-president and the Washington crowd could come up with suitable language to express their outrage.

"I condemn the decision by the government of Israel," Biden finally said, using a formulation virtually unknown in past US-Israeli diplomatic exchanges.

Days later, the White House was still apparently not finished. "This was an affront, it was an insult," intoned David Axelrod, chief White House political adviser on one of the Sunday political talk shows.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, appearing on yet another talk show, referred somewhat dismissively to Netanyahu's apology over the "timing" of the announcement: "A good start," he called it.

Goodness, what a fuss! Indeed, we would probably have to go all the way back to 1991, when George H Bush, the former US president, expressed his outrage over the settlement policies of Yitzhak Shamir, the then-Israeli prime minister,to find a similar level of US-Israeli discord.

Public umbrage?

But before we get carried away with all this operatic posturing and begin – God forbid – to take it seriously, we ought to stop a moment and examine what is really happening here.

First of all, why has Washington taken such public umbrage at this development?

Was East Jerusalem not clearly and specifically excluded from the agreement finally reached last November – after some five months of tortuous negotiations by US mediator George Mitchell – under which Netanyahu acceded to a 10-month "moratorium" on "most" new construction in the occupied West Bank?

The Israelis, as near as I can tell, were acting in complete conformity with the agreement when they announced the new units. So why the sudden histrionics? Had Washington neglected to read Mitchell's agreement? Had they forgotten that little squib about East Jerusalem?

The fact of the matter is that the Obama Administration feels humiliated over the November 2009 agreement on settlements – as well it might.

The statements made by Barack Obama, the US president, in Cairo in June 2009 concerning Israeli settlement policy were unprecedented in at least two generations, and could not have been more clear: "The United States," he said, "does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements … It is time for these settlements to stop."

The importance of these statements went well beyond the settlements themselves. Obama's statement was a reiteration, in effect, of US support for the core principle underlying all relevant UN resolutions concerning Palestine, and all Arab-Israeli agreements to that point: The principle of "land for peace."

In denouncing Israeli settlement construction on occupied land as "illegitimate," he was underscoring his belief that such actions undermine the very possibility of a negotiated settlement.

After all, the two sides can struggle for decades, while still maintaining the possibility of a legitimate negotiated peace; but if a substantial amount of the land – including all of Jerusalem - is taken in established settlements which no Israeli government could conceivably give up, and if the security requirements of those settlements mandate that the rest of the land be divided into non-contiguous parcels which preclude a viable state, there is simply nothing left to negotiate over.

Point of no return


Grenier: The best the US could do was negotiate a temporary and partial settlement freeze
We have long since passed that point; the possibility of a negotiated two-state solution even remotely acceptable to Palestinians is gone.

If that were not clear before, the November 2009 agreement on settlements made it unmistakably so.

Consider that in the aftermath of such a clear, unequivocal statement of US policy as came in Cairo, the best the Americans could do was to negotiate a temporary – and only partial – pause in settlement construction, with East Jerusalem exempted completely.

No one expects to see a negotiated settlement in 10 months, after which it will be as though the November agreement, such as it was, had never existed.

What the negotiations which finally ended in US capitulation last November made patently obvious was that Netanyahu is committed to the long-term Israeli policy initiated by Ariel Sharon in 2005, when he decided to evacuate Gaza.

Far from being a substantial "down payment" on a land-for-peace scheme, as many claimed – some naively, some cynically – the abandonment of Gaza was a strategic move to consolidate Israel and its West Bank settlements behind efficiently defensible lines, and to prepare for a unilaterally-imposed "settlement" which Israel could sustain without Palestinian acquiescence.

Since then, the policy has moved inexorably forward, through the so-called Security Fence (which serves to unilaterally confiscate yet more land), the continuation of settlements, and the completion of Israel's cordon sanitaire around East Jerusalem.

In short, the November agreement made plain that, for all the high-minded pretensions on display in Cairo, Israel's unilateralist policy is something Obama and his administration can do nothing about.

Under the circumstances, it is small wonder that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are interested in direct negotiations.

Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), the Palestinian president, has no interest in negotiating an agreement which his constituency will never accept.

For the Israelis, such negotiations are at best an irritant, and at worst a minor impediment to the achievement of their designs.

Sham proximity talks

The Obama administration, for its part, is under no illusions regarding the currently-proposed "proximity talks." They know that such talks are a sham and will lead nowhere – which is why they were reluctant to propose them for so long - but the lack of even seeming progress has become a serious political embarrassment for them.

Proximity talks, if they could get them, would at least convey the impression that the administration was doing something, no matter how substantively feckless.

All of which brings us back to last Tuesday.

As poor Joe Biden struggled gamely to initiate proximity talks (even the scope and structure of which had yet to be agreed between the parties), the Israeli allies whose unshakable closeness he had been celebrating all day, apparently not content with the substantive victory they had achieved over Obama, chose – whether with or without Netanyahu's complicity – to rub the Americans' collective nose in it, lest they fail to get the message.

As the Palestinians recoil from talks, and as tensions mount on the West Bank, the Americans are denied even the illusion of progress.

It is the insult the White House is reacting to, not the injury. When the recent diplomatic unpleasantness has faded into memory, the injury will remain. Notwithstanding his evident discomfort over the timing of Tuesday's announcement, Netanyahu clearly has no intention of reversing it.

The advice he administered to his cabinet on Sunday could as easily apply to us: "I suggest not to get carried away," he said, "and to calm down."

Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of CIA's counter-terrorism centre.

Quote:Netanyahu boasts of success in US row

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, boasted that he had faced down American demands to halt Jewish construction in East Jerusalem, raising the stakes in a diplomatic row with Washington.

By Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem
Published: 11:33AM GMT 22 Mar 2010

Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu Photo: REUTERS

Mr Netanyahu avoided a much feared snub after he was formally invited to hold talks with President Barack Obama at the White House on Tuesday despite the worst crisis in US-Israeli relations for more than a decade.
The invitation represented a victory Mr Netanyahu a two-week standoff with the United States triggered after Israel unveiled plans to expand a Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.

Despite intense pressure demands from Hillary Clinton, the US secretary, to reverse the expansion and refrain from all further building in East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day war, has so far been resisted. .
Mr Netanyahu appeared emboldened at a cabinet where he proclaimed he had forced the United States to accept that East Jerusalem, seen by the Palestinians as the capital of a future state, was as Jewish as the rest of Israel.
"As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv," he said. "I wrote a letter, at my own initiative, to the secretary of state so that things would be crystal clear."
Mr Netanyahu was given additional encouragement after George Mitchell, Mr Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, arrived in Jerusalem and hailed ties between Israel and the United States as "unshakeable".
Yet Mr Netanyahu has been forced to make some concessions.
He has agreed to make "confidence building" concessions to the Palestinians that include easing a three-year Israel blockade of Gaza.
Some observers have warned that Mr Netanyahu's confidence may be misplaced, predicting that President Obama could renew his demand for a settlement freeze in East Jerusalem when the two men meet.
But Mr Obama could be left open to potentially embarrassing accusations that he has twice backed down in confrontations with Israel.
Last year he reluctantly accepted a proposal from Mr Netanyahu for a partial slowdown of Jewish construction in the West Bank despite having previously demanded a total settlement freeze.
Mr Obama's efforts to revive the Middle East peace process have also foundered.
Highlighting the volatility that has arisen in the wake of row, Israeli troops shot dead four Palestinians in the West Bank over the weekend.
Israel also came under pressure from Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations secretary general, who used a visit to Gaza to warn that Israel's blockade was "empowering extremists".