When will Obama act?

2015 ended with much grief following the attacks by Islamic militants in France and California, with well over 100 people losing their lives.

Whether the New Year will be more promising remains in doubt.

In a foreboding move, the Saudi government recently hanged 47 Saudis, including a prominent Shiite cleric who has been loudly praised by Saudi Arabia’s neighbour, Iran.

US President Barack Obama is planning trips during his last year in office to many countries to promote bilateral relations, but disappointingly he will be skipping Arab countries, particularly Israeli-occupied Palestine, now a non-member UN observer state, where he went in his early days in the White House but where he scored any significant achievement over the last seven years. 

Relations between Israel and the occupied West Bank, which is only 20 per cent of the original territory granted for the establishment of a Palestinian state, remains tense, and Israel never misses a chance to underline its usurpation of this part of the Holy Land.

One of the latest reprehensible actions of the Israeli government was undertaken by its US-born ambassador, Ron Dermer, who sent senior American officials at the White House and elsewhere in the government Christmas gifts made in the illegal Israeli settlements.

The PLO delegation in Washington urged on its website the unnamed American officials to return the gifts that Dermer arrogantly said were from “Judea” and “Samaria” — and not from Palestine or the occupied West Bank.

“His audacity”, the PLO underlined, “to misguide the gift recipients is both a cause and symptom of the occupation”.

The Palestinian response said: “Dermer’s attempt to make a gibe at the European Union’s policy of labelling settlements actually proves his ignorance of US regulations as set forth in a 1995 Notice of Policy by the US Department of Treasury, requiring that goods produced in settlements not be labelled as ‘Made in Israel’.”

The statement added that Dermer’s “attempt at mollifying Israeli violations through exploiting a revered holiday season is a representation of Israeli policies and official positions, highlighting Israel’s frivolous intentions about making peace”.

This statement coincided with another issued by Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel and the general secretary of the PLO, in which he confirmed that he had held two recent secret meetings with the Israelis in Amman and Cairo to discuss the resumption of negotiations between the two sides in a bid to stop the ongoing Intifada and to pave the way for final-status issues.

He revealed last week that the Palestinian side demanded the demarcation of the border as it was in 1967, a stop to settlement activity in Jerusalem and implementation of Israel’s obligation to return to the negotiating table.

Israel, he said, rejected the Palestinian demands. Israelis are seeking to present their policy to the US Congress in a way that suggests that it is the Palestinians who are refusing to return to the negotiations.

Uri Blau, an Israeli investigative journalist, wrote in a Washington Post column last month that “many from Israel’s far right and the settler’s community condemn the Obama administration as that ‘other’ side”, but “they should know better… while one American hand opposed development of settlement, the other keeps feeding it”. 

He said that he recently conducted a “thorough investigation into the complex network of tax-exempt donations helping to finance West Bank settlements look[ing] at almost 50 non-profit organisations that raise money in the United States for the settlement”.

Within five years, from 2009 to 2013, he said, “more than $220 million was sent across the ocean and into schools, synagogues and playground dotting” the West Bank.

He added: “Millions of tax-subsidised dollars have gone to Jewish settlements in Hebron, helping to sustain a grim reality in the segregated part of the [West Bank] city, where the Palestinian movement is sharply restricted and their economic life has been suffocated.”

Furthermore, he wrote, “donations from the United States also used to support families of Jews convicted in ideologically motivated violence against Palestinians. The spouse of Ami Popper, convicted of murdering seven Palestinians in 1990, received financial help from Honenu, an Israeli non-profit that drew 20 per cent of its income last year from US donations”.

In other words, he said, “the American donors to these groups are entitled to tax breaks on the money they give, and so this flow of funds means US taxpayer are indirectly supporting a policy of settlement expansion opposed by the current administration and every other administration — Democratic an Republican — since [president] Richard Nixon”.

In short, one wonders why Obama appears handcuffed and does not do anything to get Israel to the negotiating table and to accept a settlement based on the 1967 borders.

On the other hand, can the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, dismiss America’s generosity, which is essential to its survival?

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.