Promised hope

Once again the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, punched the Obama administration in the stomach and seems to have got away with it, as always.

This time around, he announced this week that Israel was planning to build 1,060 apartments for Jewish settlers in occupied East Jerusalem.

“But as often is the case,” The New York Times reported from Jerusalem, Netanyahu’s decision “prompted swift international condemnation at a time when Israel’s relations with Washington are already strained and risked further igniting  Palestinian anger and tensions in Jerusalem”.

Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the NY Times that “Netanyahu apparently has coalition problems and thought let’s throw them a bone in Jerusalem, which is easier to explain in the world and to the United States”.

Ben Meir added: “But you have to see it in the context of the crisis with the United States, the continuous erosion, which is very serious and very dangerous for Israel.”

But the State Department, as always, had the same mild and ineffective reaction.

“If Israel wants to live in a peaceful society, they need to take steps that will reduce tensions,” said Jen Psaki, the department’s spokeswoman.

“Moving forward with this sort of action would be incompatible with the pursuit of peace.”

Psaki’s disapproval was easily dismissed.

Israeli professor of political communications at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya Gadi Wolfsfeld, who hit the nail on the head when he told the NY Times: “The truth is he [Netanyahu] is not really nervous about America or the world anymore because until now nobody has done anything.”

But last July, the Times of Israel exposed Netanyahu’s shocking thinking when David Horovitz reported that “most Israelis would acknowledge that they’ve never been entirely sure how Netanyahu sees a potential resolution of the Palestinian conflict, which concessions he’s truly ready to make, what his long-term vision looks like”.

This second-longest serving Israeli prime minister “explicitly” made clear that he would “never, ever, countenance a full sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank”, reported Horovitz, adding that “he more than intimated that he considers the current American John Kerry-led diplomatic team to be, let’s be polite, naïve”. 

Many of whom are American Jews.

More bluntly, Netanyahu pointed out that “given the march of Islamic extremism” across the Middle East, “Israel simply cannot afford to give up control over the territory immediately to its east, including the eastern border — that is the border between Israel and Jordan, and the West Bank and Jordan”.

Even more appalling is Netanyahu’s failure to examine his administration that includes a party, the Likud, which refuses the two-state solution.

Hamas, on the other hand, recently said it was ready to accept this solution if the Palestinians endorse this outcome in a future election.

There are many other Israeli violations, including the recent killing of youngsters, one of whom an American-Palestinian. Disappointingly, the Obama administration failed to take any punitive countermeasures against the rightist regime in Israel.

Richard Falk, a former UN special rapporteur on human rights in occupied Palestine, made a sharp observation when he spoke last week at the Washington-based Palestine Centre about his new book, “Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope”.

The argument of his book, he said, is that “if you look at the way in which conflicts, political conflicts, have been resolved since World War II — in the Global South, or the Middle East, Asia, Africa — the side that wins is not the side that controls the battlefield”.

He added: “The side that wins commands the heights of morality and law. It’s a mysterious assertion and it contradicts what was true before 1945 where military power was the primary agency of history, but since 1945, the primary agents of history have been people, not military weaponry.

“And that’s an anti-realist lesson that neither Israel nor the United States have learned. It was the lesson that the US should have learned after the Vietnam war…. This template, I think, is a source of hope for the Palestinian struggle and people apply it only in situations of foreign domination or foreign intervention.”

All are now dependent on the promised hope.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.