The U.S. again does Israel’s bidding

Has the Obama administration given up trying to rein in Israel? asked Lebanon’s Daily Star in an editorial. Just a few months ago, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were demanding that Israel stop building Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though, has simply ignored them, authorizing 450 new apartments in September alone. Now, in a “deeply cynical” turnabout, the Obama administration has managed to find that behavior admirable. In a joint press conference with Netanyahu last week, Clinton praised Netanyahu’s few feeble attempts to place limits on settlements as “unprecedented”—and then had the gall to call on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to agree to talks with Israel “without insisting on a settlement freeze as a precondition.” Faced with Arab outrage, Clinton later backtracked, saying she “could have been clearer” about the need for a settlement freeze. But the damage is done. We can see where her loyalties lie.

Abbas “for once let the Americans have a piece of his mind,” said the United Arab Emirates’ Khaleej Times. He told Clinton that his people would not continue talking while their land was being stolen out from under them. More and more Jews are moving into “this tiny piece of territory” that is supposed to one day form the heart of the Palestinian state. U.S. insistence that the Palestinians should continue to talk with Israel “settlements or no settlements” ignores that crucial fact. “What would the Palestinians talk about after the settlers have encroached and eaten away all their land?” The Palestinians are the victims here. It is not for them to make concessions.

If the U.S. thinks its new approach is helping Israel, said Gideon Levy in Israel’s Ha’aretz, it is mistaken. Obama spent “nearly a year fruitlessly lobbying for Israel to be so kind as to do something, anything,” to advance the peace process. Yet still he “heaps sticky-sweet praise on Israel.” For those of us who want to see progress toward peace, Obama’s servile approach is maddening. “Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this.” It didn’t occur to the Americans to beg Saddam Hussein to withdraw from occupied Kuwait—they simply bombed him out of there. “Now is the time to say to the United States: Enough flattery. If you don’t change the tone, nothing will change.”

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But why should the U.S. get to decide where Jews can settle? asked Moshe Dann in Israel’s Ynetnews.com. Judea and Samaria—what the world now calls the West Bank—are ancient provinces of Israel. They are not incidental to the Israeli homeland, they are its very heart. Rather than continuing to quibble about settlements, Israel should simply “extend full sovereignty” to all Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. That would affirm “the historical truth that Israel’s right to exist does not come from the Holocaust but from Scripture and history, millennia of Jewish civilization, documented by myriad ancient sources.” It cannot be bargained away.