Poll: I-P Conflict Detrimental to U.S. Interests

(Haaretz) – As Netanyahu prepares his own speech on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he should be careful not to misjudge the situation yet again by misreading what stands behind Obama’s Middle East policies.

Obama might sound like a thoughtful university professor, but he and his closest aides are pragmatists who were schooled in the hard-knuckled politics of Chicago. They have obviously decided that the president’s quest for a new relationship with the Muslim world, along with his harsh criticism of Israeli settlement activity, offers potential political rewards that exceed the risks by a large margin.

As he plans his policy speech, Netanyahu would do well to also consider American voters, not just their president. According to a recent poll by Zogby International, 50 percent of those voters think that, given previous American calls for a halt to Israeli settlement construction, the U.S. should “get tough” with Israel. More importantly, 71 percent of Americans who voted for Obama feel that way and 89 percent of them say the conflict negatively affects U.S. interests. Obama’s political base is losing patience with the settlement enterprise and thinks it harms the United States.

Those voters include most American Jews, and that is another reason why Obama’s stance is politically astute. Netanyahu should not have been surprised by a survey published in March showing that six out of 10 American Jews were opposed to settlement expansion.

(Haaretz) – Nearly six of every 10 Israelis think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resist U.S. demands to completely freeze construction in Jewish West Bank settlements, according to a new poll released Friday.

The poll by the Maagar Mohot Polling Institute comes just ahead of Netanyahu’s major policy speech on Sunday that is expected to address a growing divide with Washington.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said he wants to aggressively pursue Mideast peacemaking, and the halt of all building on land the Palestinians claim for their future state has been a key U.S. demand.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said Netanyahu should not consent to the American demand to halt all settlement construction, as opposed to 37 percent who said he should. Fifty percent said failure to comply would not provoke a crisis with the U.S., while 32 percent said they thought the settlement freeze was a make or break issue for Washington.

Maagar Mohot also found in a separate poll that two-thirds of Israelis have little appetite for dismantling West Bank settlements. Thirty-six percent oppose any evacuation as part of a final peace deal and 30 percent said only a small number should be dismantled.  

“Nigger,” they call him, the Afro-American president. If they were not Jews by birth, all thanks to their mothers, they would probably be the worst of anti-Semites, too. But not to worry: They call one of the army’s regional commanders “Jew-boy.”

“All of us are Jews” – but for a long time now, it has been impossible to know who “all of us” are. There must be some mistake here: If all those who throw stones and call others Nazis, who burn and cut down, who spit and shoot – if all of these are Jews, then what am I?

The settlers’ “orange brotherhood” has stained others, and how can birthmarks be erased? Anyone who is not color-blind can still tell the difference between brown-and-orange and blue-and-white.

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“What will happen when they come to evict you?” a woman settler with covered head and veiled eyes was asked. “There will be war,” she replied without batting an eyelid. Perhaps she is right, perhaps there is no choice any more. In many nations, the war of independence also entailed a civil war. Here it was delayed, but now it has come. The Sicarii, who already destroyed a temple, are now getting ready to bring about a new destruction.

The Israeli army has been trying to take out water and electric systems of the small village Baq’a, north of the Southern West Bank city of Hebron. Around 5 people sustained injuries as they tried to stop the Israeli army from demolishing their water wells. Jeff Halper, from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) was arrested for trying to obstruct the military.

Six water wells were demolished by the Israeli army - Photo by Jaume d'Urgell

Colonization Activities in the West Bank – Month of May 1999