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.