How they see us: Is there no criticizing Israel?

President Obama has chosen “oppor­tunism over morality,” said Akiva Eldar in Israel’s Ha’aretz. The U.S. has just vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank as an obstacle to peace. The Obama administration offered the “lame excuse” that denouncing settlements would harm the peace process. It’s hard to imagine just what harm could possibly come, since the peace process is going nowhere anyway. Obama had to have been motivated by a need to placate the U.S. House of Representatives, which is influenced by the Jewish lobby. It’s a “victory of domestic politics over foreign policy.”

And don’t think that Israel’s real interests have been served, said Gideon Levy, also in Ha’aretz. This veto—“a veto against the chance and promise of change, a veto against hope”—is actually “hostile to Israel.” Its meaning is unequivocal: America supports settlement-building, an activity that damages not only Israel’s chances for peace with its Palestinian neighbors but also its image abroad. Israel is an international “pariah state” condemned by everyone except a “weakening America.” Our neighbors in the Middle East are roiled by revolution, and as new regimes come to power, a peace agreement with the Palestinians has never been more urgent. “If the U.S. had been a responsible superpower, it would have voted for the resolution.”

It’s precisely because the Middle East is on fire that the U.S. had to support Israel in this way, said The Jerusalem Post in an editorial. Israel is America’s “only stable, dependable, and democratic ally” in the region. These days, it’s clearer than ever that “the main source of instability” in the Arab world isn’t the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather “repressive, bellicose, autocratic regimes.”

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With this veto, Obama has “lost whatever credibility he may have had in the Arab world,” said the United Arab Emirates’ Gulf News. Palestinians are furious, and rightly so. The U.S. “has effectively given Israel a green light to accelerate its land-grab policy.” If the peace process was stalled before, it is now certainly dead. That’s why we’ll have to “reconsider the entire peace process from A to Z,” said Jordan’s Al-Dustur. The U.S. has demonstrated its complete support of the settlers, those “criminal gangs of the Zionist enemy.” It is actively encouraging them to defy international law. Perhaps it’s time for the Arab world to quit the peace talks and find “another way to rein in the Zionist aggression.”