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A Counterproductive Tactic for Advancing Peace Negotiations

(Boston Globe) Jeff Jacoby - Last November the government of Israel agreed to a 10-month moratorium on new Jewish housing in the West Bank, with the caveat that the moratorium did not apply to eastern Jerusalem. So when Israel's Interior Ministry announced its interim approval for the construction of 1,600 new apartments in Jerusalem's Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, it was not reneging on any commitment. If anyone was guilty of bad faith in the diplomatic crisis that ensued, it was the Obama administration, which had explicitly accepted the terms of the building freeze, yet was now going back on its word. If the president's goal was to bring Israel and the Palestinians to the negotiating table, he couldn't have chosen a more counterproductive tactic. The Palestinian Authority promptly seized the opportunity to back out of the indirect talks it had agreed to - why negotiate for Israeli concessions if Washington can force Israel to deliver them on a silver platter? Israel will generally bend over backward to accommodate Washington, but there are some things no Israeli government can relinquish. One of them is the right of Jews to live in Jerusalem - in all of Jerusalem, including the parts of the city conquered by Jordan in 1948 and kept judenrein until 1967. Americans agree as well. The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 stated that it is U.S. policy that "Jerusalem should remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected."
2010-03-23 08:12:47
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