Analysis: Building towards failure
Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are deemed illegal under international law
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Tuesday, 16, Mar 2010 06:02
The world's most difficult problem is only going to get more problematic.
By Matthew Champion.
A diplomatic row between Israel and the US is putting the world's other special relationship under its greatest strain since the Suez crisis.
The Middle East peace process has been officially stalled for 18 months, with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas already unilaterally extending his time in office by a year.
Last week US vice president Joe Biden suffered the ignominy of standing side-by-side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu praising the two country's relationship towards restoring direct talks while the Jewish state's interior ministry announced the construction of 1,600 new settlers homes in the Ramat Shlomo neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.
The interior minister Eli Yishai apologised to Biden but the damage of the clearly intended snub was done.
Since then the Palestinians and the Israelis have moved further apart, with Abbas pulling out of 'proximity talks'; Arab League shorthand for indirect negotiations.
The inflammatory Israeli actions have also fired Hamas, which has de facto control of the Gaza Strip, to call for a "day of rage" in the West Bank.
Today hundreds of Palestinian youths took to the streets of East Jerusalem to protest at the reopening of a synagogue that has been closed for more than 60 years. Rocks were hurled at Israeli security forces who returned fire with rubber bullets and smoke grenades amid false rumours right-wing Israeli groups were planning to ascend the Temple Mount, where the third holiest site in Islam - the al-Aqsa mosque - is located.
The Hurva synagogue, which is being reopened, is just 700m from al-Aqsa. Both are in East Jerusalem, which Israeli took control of along with the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day war.
The renovations that led to the reopening of Hurva had been planned for months and its organisers are victim to very unfortunate timing, but the clashes are indicative of a situation that is worsening daily.
Israeli president Shimon Peres, whose job is unofficially to keep Israel's political factions together, mourned the most obvious effect of the week's events as Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell delayed a scheduled visit to the region. Put simply, Mr Mitchell has suspended his visit to avoid another diplomatic row.
"We cannot afford to unravel the delicate fabric of friendship with the United States," President Peres said on Tuesday.
"Today, we are also at a decisive moment and we must decide without the determination of external parties. That is, decide that even in a time of threats we will not give up on peace. The heritage of our leaders guides us and our children as such."
Peres is president of a government led by Netanyahu, whose years in opposition after a first spell as prime minister in the 1990s have seen his hawkish leanings come to the fore.
His changed mood was reflected by Israeli voters, who punished the economic and militaristic failings of the moderate government led by Ehud Olmert at the polls to allow Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party to become the dominant force in parliament.
But the fractious nature of Israeli party politics means that Netanyahu, whose own foreign minister lives in an illegal settlement, presides over a coalition government, parts of which often do not toe the dominant party line.
The interior ministry which announced the Ramat Shlomo construction plans is under the control of the ultra-orthodox Shas, which scorns the internationally-accepted view that the construction of new settlements, and the existence of many others, is illegal under international law.
That is certainly the view of the Obama administration, whose demands for a settlement freeze are being ignored.
This, when added to Netanyahu's refusal to explicitly back the creation of a future Palestinian state and the seemingly intractable divisions between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank put the prospect of an independent Palestine further and further away.
Nicholas Kristof, the double Pulitzer-prize winning CNN journalist, claimed on Tuesday that the scale of the dispute was redefining the concept of a pro-Israeli American; writing that in the context of recent events it now referred to a viewpoint "pushing to end self-destructive Israeli policies".
This definition suits the Obama administration, which must now decide on how to react to Israeli's actions. As with Iran and Afghanistan, President Obama began tackling the Israeli-Palestinian issue with the best of intentions but the worst of partners.
Obama would not have hoped to have secured peace in the Middle East during one or two terms in office, but now even the prospect of talks about talks about peace seem a distant prospect.