The Mideast: Are the U.S. and Israel going separate ways?

It started as “a spat over a single housing project,” said Paul Richter in the Los Angeles Times, but has now plunged U.S.-Israeli relations to what may be a new low. Vice President Joe Biden was in Israel last week touting America’s “enduring partnership” with the Jewish state when Israel announced its approval of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem. The Obama administration has repeatedly demanded that Israel stop expanding settlements in the disputed territories, so the announcement—coming during Biden’s visit—looked like a message. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have been surprised by the announcement, said Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post, but the White House nonetheless saw it as a deliberate slap in the face. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rebuked Netanyahu in an extraordinarily blunt, 45-minute phone call, telling him that Israel’s action was an insult and a “clearly negative signal’’ that “had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process.’’

Well, it’s about time, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. For far too long, our “joined-at-the-hip relationship with Israel” has helped fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world. In recent weeks, Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have both warned Obama that the perception that the U.S. supports whatever Israel does has undermined the U.S.’s credibility in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and is thus “jeopardizing American lives.” Israel’s contempt for U.S. interests is now clear, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. The hard-liners and religious fanatics now in power there have written off peace, and intend to use “raw military power” to enforce a system of “apartheid” in which Palestinians are forever penned up in crowded enclaves.

That’s an absurd reading of last week’s events, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Netanyahu immediately apologized for the timing of the settlement announcement, which was issued by a midlevel bureaucrat and is not final. But by taking personal offense, the administration “sparked a full-blown diplomatic crisis”—which suggests it was “looking for a pretext” to distance itself from Israel. Obama, after all, had already bought the line that the settlements are the “key obstacle” to peace; of course, this overlooks the fact that after Israel withdrew all settlers from Gaza in 2005, the area became “a Hamas statelet and a base for continuous rocket fire against Israeli civilians.” The main impediments to peace are the Palestinians—not the Israelis, said Douglas Feith in National Review Online. The Palestinian Authority “lacks authority,” since it’s involved in a power struggle with the terrorist fanatics of Hamas, and even so-called moderates continue to deny Israel’s right to exist.

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It’s a depressing state of affairs, said Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, but it’s not hopeless. Netanyahu has a real problem in “the Israeli religious Right,” which asserts a God-given right over all the disputed territories. But in the end, only “a right-wing prime minister like Netanyahu can make a deal over the West Bank.” Let’s remember, though, that peace will require a major change in mind-set from both the Israelis and the Palestinians, said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. The Palestinians have just named a public square after Dalal Mughrabi, a “martyr” who participated in a savage terrorist attack that killed 38 people, including 13 children. “The veneration of terrorists” is also an insult—not just to Israel but to humanity.