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Israel Doesn't Need to Grovel for U.S. Forgiveness

(Ha'aretz) Moshe Arens - According to critics, the decision by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee to approve plans for putting up additional houses in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, just as Biden was arriving in the country, was ruining relations between the U.S. and Israel and causing irreparable damage to strategic cooperation between the two countries. If some years from now historians try to determine why the U.S. did not take any effective action to prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons, they will find that the responsibility lay on the shoulders of a minor Israeli civil servant who set the agenda of a local planning committee. It was well known in Washington that the Netanyahu government had not frozen building activity in Jerusalem, and that therefore not only construction there was continuing but also the routine planning activities that precede construction. On the subject of Jerusalem, the government of Israel and the administration in Washington simply disagree. Throughout the U.S.-Israeli relationship there have been disagreements on certain issues, but generally, the disagreements have not been taken public. President Obama has taken a new approach, which he signaled at his speech last June in Cairo, where he publicly called on Israel to stop settlement activity. Yet this approach is actually making it more difficult, if not impossible, for Abbas to come to the negotiating table. Whereas in the past he negotiated with Israel while settlement activity continued, Obama's Cairo speech left Abbas no choice but to demand the cessation of settlement activity as a condition for entering negotiations. After all, he cannot be less Palestinian than Obama.
2010-03-16 09:20:58
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