This morning’s BBC story about the leaking of Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC speech gives some hints about the message, aside of the usual security guarantees, that she will present during the convention this week. For the most part, it does not look as if the Obama administration is backing down.
Hillary Clinton warns Israel faces ‘difficult’ choices
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to call on Israel to make “difficult but necessary choices” if it wants a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Mrs Clinton will warn that the status quo is “unsustainable” in a speech to the pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC. Her comments come amid a dispute between the US and Israel over plans for 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out halting settlement construction in the city. The Palestinian Authority is furious at Israel’s insistence on building on occupied territory. It sees it as a serious stumbling block to the resumption of talks, which have been stalled for more than a year.
Nearly 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are held to be illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
(Notice the BBC use of Frank Luntz’s talking point: they are “disputed, not occupied” territories.)
Netanyahu obviously remains intransigent about settlement building in East Jerusalem today, and probably in the West Bank in a few months when the partial pseudofreeze terminates.
Uri Avnery, founder of Gush Shalom, provided an insightful look at US-Israeli relations today with some analysis in his article, The Doomsday Weapon:
IT IS already a commonplace to say that people who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat their mistakes….
WHAT BEGAN as an insult to the Vice President of the United States is developing into something far bigger. The mouse has given birth to an elephant.
Lately, the ultra-right government in Jerusalem has started to treat President Barack Obama with thinly veiled contempt. The fears that arose in Jerusalem at the beginning of his term have dissipated. Obama looks to them like a paper black panther. He gave up his demand for a real settlement freeze. Every time he was spat on, he remarked that it was raining.
Yet now, ostensibly quite suddenly, the measure is full. Obama, his Vice President and his senior assistants condemn the Netanyahu government with growing severity. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has submitted an ultimatum: Netanyahu must stop all settlement activity, East Jerusalem included; he must agree to negotiate about all core problems of the conflict, including East Jerusalem, and more.
The surprise was complete. Obama, it seems, has crossed the Rubicon, much as the Egyptian army had crossed the Suez Canal in 1973. Netanyahu gave the order to mobilize all the reserves in America and to move forward all the diplomatic tanks. All Jewish organizations in the US were commanded to join the campaign. AIPAC blew the shofar and ordered its soldiers, the Senators and Congressmen, to storm the White House.
Read on HERE:
This will no doubt be an interesting week in US-Israeli relations. Netanyahu assumes he has the Congress in his pocket and this confrontation with Obama will just blow over, and the colonization of Palestine will just proceed as usual, as it has for the past 42 years, as Netanyahu put it. We shall see.
The speech has now been held, as the BBC article is updated to past tense. There is also a commentary box by Jeremy Bowen, the Middle East editor.
And that is likely the last word we are likely to hear about Palestine this week, except for some closure from Netanyahu, about how Jerusalem will be the eternal capital of Israel, no ifs ands or buts.
The rest is Iran.
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This comes as no surprise, I view Wilders more as a political agitator fulfilling a purpose as hasbara for Israel, antagonizing the Muslim community and creating division in European society vs Islam. From the blog: Hasbara for Israel – 613 … Geert Wilders Speech, House of Lords, London, Friday the 5th of March 2010
Although I disagree with Wilders about Islam (I respect the religion but fight Islamists with all I have), we stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the lawsuit. I reject the criminalization of political differences, particularly attempts to thwart a grassroots political movement via the courts. Accordingly, the Middle East Forum‘s Legal Project has worked on Wilders’ behalf, raising substantial funds for his defense and helping in other ways. We do so convinced of the paramount importance to talk freely in public during time of war about the nature of the enemy.
Geert Wilders and Daniel Pipes at the "Facing Jihad" conference in Jerusalem, Dec., 2008Wilders supported by the extreme right-wingers of the Horowitz-Geller-Spencer axis
≈ Cross-posted from Nomad’s diary @ET — Wilders’ Ideology ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."May Job Cohen become prime minister and slam Wilders completely unconscious. Wilders is a provocative, self-serving, self-primping/pimping piece of work who carries on the egotistm, narcissistic tradition of Ali Hirsi who did nothing but rip of the Netherlands and take the money and run. Now her smug face is plastered all over the train stations because she has evidently written a book called ‘Nomad’. Can anyone believe that anyone who has lived a life of such decadence and oppulence would dare to give a book such a meaningless name. But she has because she is an opportunist without parallel. No, and what has she ever accomplsiched except whine about herself. Now I’ve got that off my chest. What a dishonest creep she is. It makes even wonder if anything she has said about herself is true.
Passed on by Antony Loewenstein:
“AIPAC President Lee Rosenberg gave the Obama administration a piece of his mind Sunday and the AIPAC faithful loved it. Who is at fault for, well, pretty much everything? Those pesky Arabs:”
http://antonyloewenstein.com/
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(Mondoweiss) — Netanyahu’s speech to AIPAC tonight reminded me of Pat Buchanan’s famous culture wars speech in the `92 Republican convention, when he cooked his goose and then-President Bush’s too. Netanyahu is equally out of touch with the political zeitgeist. The Secretary of State comes into AIPAC and says, we need movement on the settlements because it’s killing our image worldwide, General Petraeus and Joe Biden were reported to have made even stronger statements on that score last week; and look, Netanyahu comes to the lobby and says Jerusalem is ours forever, Jerusalem is not a settlement. He made no movement at all.
Plus the weird Holocaust bender: FDR and Churchill didn’t save my people, the Jews of Europe, so we have learned not to rely on great men, but reserve the right to defend ourselves. Israel on its own, defiant, crazy.
Netanyahu believes in the Israel lobby even more than Walt and Mearsheimer do. He seems to think Jews run America. But even shrewd AIPAC’rs know the writing is on the wall, and this delegitimization thing everyone at AIPAC complains about reflects the world’s impatience with Israeli occupation and oppression, and still AIPAC’s speakers are red meat about Jerusalem undivided. Not one bone thrown in the direction of the Obama administration. The theme of the conference is, Jerusalem is not a settlement. (F– you, Obama.)
JPost — The best option is to ratify a unilateral Palestinian solution
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."There was a time when AIPAC supported whatever government, right or left, controlled Israel. A couple of decades ago, AIPAC went Likud, and along with ZOA and AJC, and now the ADL, it is the Likud Lobby, right wing, nationalist, and colonial, i.e., Zionist in the extreme, and, unfortunately, racist.
Netanyahu therefore told AIPAC (and his right wing constituents in Israel) what it wanted to hear, IMO.
There is coming a moment at which Obama or Clinton reminds Netayahu of the aid that the US has been providing and the cost that it has incurred in lives and dollars trying to ensure Israel’s security.
And then, one or the other of them will say, “But you know very well that the US is facing serious budget deficits.” If that hint doesn’t work, I’m sure Chuck Schumer will provide a translation.
“There is coming a moment at which Obama or Clinton reminds Netayahu of the aid that the US has been providing and the cost that it has incurred in lives and dollars trying to ensure Israel’s security.“
Keep dreaming! :o}