Israel has been expanding illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land for decades, but it is only now emerging just how far-reaching this policy is. Israeli building in East Jerusalem as shown above has not skipped a beat.
It is really difficult in these times of political change, principally the election of Barak Obama as president of the US, to summarize the status of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one year later, except to assert that the status quo, Israeli colonialism, persists. Obama’s backtracking from his optimistic Cairo speech is pulling a black curtain over Palestinian aspirations for freedom and self-determination in a country of their own, Palestine.
A recent survey of Palestinian opinion makes clear that the Obama hope is practically dead.
Palestinian hopes that US President Barack Obama will bring an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory have significantly declined in recent months, a public opinion poll published Wednesday found.
Only 9.9 per cent of Palestinians now believe that Obama’s policies will increase chances of achieving a “just peace,” down from 23.7 per cent in October last year and 35.4 per cent in June. The poll also found that over 78 per cent of Palestinians interviewed believe the US-Israel dispute over the issue of West Bank settlements is “not serious.”
One crack in Likud government intransigence appeared when Labor ministers recently threatened to leave the government.
Labor party ministers threatened Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday that if significant steps won’t be taken soon to advance the peace process, they will consider quitting the government.
Senior Labor party officials have said that this was the first time Labor ministers discussed the diplomatic freeze since the formation of the Netanyahu government “The main message from the discussion was that the status quo cannot continue,” said a senior official. “We emphasized to Barak that in the coming weeks we will reach a political decision.”
Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer had the harshest criticism of the government and warned of Israel’s growing international isolation, and pointed at the crisis of relations with the United States, saying it will only strengthen Israel’s de-legitimization in the world. “We must make important decisions very soon.”
Last week, the leader of the Labor party, Ehud Barak also spoke at a Memorial Day ceremony
JERUSALEM — Israel must recognize that the world will not put up with decades more of Israeli rule over the Palestinian people, the country’s defense minister said in unusually frank remarks Monday. Ehud Barak’s comments came against the backdrop of severe friction between the U.S. and Israel’s hawkish government over an impasse in peacemaking. (snip)
Barak told Israel Radio that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has “done things that didn’t come naturally to it,” such as adopting the vision of two states for two peoples and curtailing settlement construction. “But we also shouldn’t delude ourselves,” he added. “The growing alienation between us and the United States is not good for the state of Israel.”
The way to narrow that gap is to embark on an Israeli diplomatic initiative “that doesn’t shy from dealing with all the core issues” dividing Israelis and Palestinians, he said. Chief among these are the status of contested Jerusalem, final borders and a solution for Palestinian refugees from the war around Israel’s 1948 independence.
In a New York Times op-ed published on Monday, even the Zionist hawk and Israel Lobby denier, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, spoke up in defense of the Obama administration concerns:
“This is no longer just about helping a special ally resolve a debilitating problem. With 200,000 American troops committed to two wars in the greater Middle East and the U.S. president leading a major international effort to block Iran’s nuclear program, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a U.S. strategic imperative.”
Today, all seems quiet on the Middle Eastern front, except for those bulldozers eating up more Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. But there are also stirrings behind the scene that we don’t hear much about.
