EDITOR: The Show deteriorates into soap Act 3 Scene 3
You have to cry, really, when reading this text, one of many, about the moving love story gone so wrong… Is there nothing that can be done, to bring back those two lovies together? To read the reports, you would think they are bound for the divorce court, to say the least. Please do not get unduly worried – it is all part of the play.
In a week or two, who would even remember this buildup of consternation between such loving partners. It is just part of the great scheme of things. And the love will be ever greater, as the elections in November get nearer. So, good people, do relax, there is a happy end coming up.
Ties between Israel and US ‘worst in 35 years’: BBC
Ambassador Michael Oren reportedly made the remark to Israeli diplomats
Israel’s ambassador to the US has said that relations between the two countries are at their lowest point for 35 years, Israeli media have reported.
Last week Israeli officials announced the building of 1,600 new homes in occupied East Jerusalem while US Vice-President Joe Biden was visiting.
The move was seen as an insult to the US. Palestinian leaders say indirect talks with Israel are now “doubtful”.
But Israel’s PM said Jewish settlements did “not hurt” Arabs in East Jerusalem.
Addressing Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, Benjamin Netanyahu said he wanted peace negotiations, and hoped the Palestinians would not present “new preconditions” for talks.
Israel and US: A bruised friendship
“No government in the past 40 years has limited construction in neighbourhoods of Jerusalem,” he said.
“Building these Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem does not hurt the Arabs of East Jerusalem or come at their expense.”
Meanwhile, EU foreign policy head Baroness Ashton, who is on a Middle East tour, said Israel’s decision had put the prospect of indirect talks with the Palestinians in jeopardy.
‘Difficult period’
Previously the Israeli government had played down the strain in relations with the US.
But Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told a conference call with Israeli consuls general in the US that “the crisis was very serious and we are facing a very difficult period in relations”, the Israeli media reported on Monday.
ANALYSIS
Paul Wood, BBC News, Jerusalem
Mr Netanyahu has been presented with a choice: a breach with right-wing members of his coalition – or with the Americans. With his speech to the Knesset, he seems to have chosen to put the needs of domestic politics first.
It seems the Americans are so angry because they believe that Mr Netanyahu went back on an understanding. This was, apparently, that Israel would not to push forward with any big new settlement building projects in East Jerusalem.
This was necessary if the Palestinians were to be persuaded to join the long-delayed negotiations so painstakingly put together by the US mediators. The decision to go ahead with new building has left the Americans affronted and Mr Netanyahu, while apologetic, is unbending.
The question is now what the US is prepared to do to rescue peace talks in which it has invested so much of its power and prestige.
On Friday, Mr Oren was summoned to the state department and was reprimanded about the affair, the Israeli Ynet News website reported.
Ynet quoted the ambassador as saying “Israel’s ties with the US are in the most serious crisis since 1975”.
In 1975, US-Israeli relations were strained by a demand from then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin partially withdraw its troops from the Sinai Peninsula, where they had been since the 1967 Six-Day War.
The Haaretz newspaper said the ambassador’s quote had been reported to it by four of the Israeli consuls general following the conference call on Saturday.
Mr Oren had appeared “tense and pessimistic”, the consuls general told the newspaper.
They were instructed to lobby members of congress and Jewish community leaders and tell them Israel had not intended to cause offence.
“These instructions come from the highest level in Jerusalem,” Haaretz quoted Mr Oren as saying.
The Israeli embassy in Washington has not yet commented publicly on the story.
The EU, as part of the Middle East Quartet, has already condemned Israel’s decision to build new homes in East Jerusalem.
Speaking to members of the Arab League in Cairo on Monday, Lady Ashton said the move had “endangered and undermined the tentative agreement to begin proximity talks”.
She added: “The EU position on settlements is clear. Settlements are illegal, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two state-solution impossible.”
‘Insult’
On Sunday, a top aide to US President Barack Obama said Israel’s announcement of plans to build 1,600 homes for Jews in East Jerusalem was “destructive” to peace efforts.
David Axelrod said the move, which overshadowed Mr Biden’s visit to Israel, was also an “insult” to the United States.
Just hours before the announcement Mr Biden had emphasised how close relations were, saying there was “no space” between Israel and the US.
Mr Netanyahu has tried to play down the unusually bitter diplomatic row between the two allies.
He said the announcement was a “bureaucratic mix-up” and that he “deeply regretted” its timing.
Under the Israeli plans, the new homes will be built in Ramat Shlomo in East Jerusalem.
The Palestinians are threatening to boycott newly agreed, indirect talks unless the Ramat Shlomo project is cancelled.
Close to 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
EDITOR: Bibi and Juliet, a Love Story
Well, how could anyone not love this man? He is tough, he is not afraid of anyone, he can even face little Palestinian boys – he is the Macho Man of the Orient, and the US and the EU are both wooing with gusto. Now he tells it like it is – “We will continue to build in Jerusalem, whatever you Lovey-doveys say, so there”. You can tell they will only love him more for it in the end…
Netanyahu: Israel will keep building in Jerusalem: Haaretz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said that Israel would continue to build in Jerusalem in the same way that it has over the last 42 years.
“The building in Jerusalem – and in all other places – will continue in the same way as has been customary over the last 42 years,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting.
Israel drew angry reactions from the U.S. and the Palestinians by announcing last week the construction of 1,600 new housing units in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo during a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden last week.
Netanyahu did not specifically address the diplomatic crisis with the U.S.over Israel’s announcement about the East Jerusalem construction.
However, when asked by MK Tzipi Hotovely what would happen in September, when the 10-month settlement freeze ends, Netanyahu responded that construction would continue unabated.
Under U.S. pressure, Netanyahu imposed a limited moratorium on new housing starts in West Bank settlements in November but excluded Jerusalem from the 10-month partial freeze.
Also on Monday, in a speech to the Knesset to welcome Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Netanyahu said the construction of homes for Israelis in the city’s eastern sector in no way hurts Palestinians.
In his speech, Netanyahu gave no indication he would cancel the project or limit construction in East Jerusalem.
“For the past 40 years, no Israeli government ever limited construction in the neighborhoods of Jerusalem,” he said in a speech to the Knesset, citing areas in the West Bank that Israel captured during the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed to the city.
Netanyahu called on the Palestinians, who have said they would not restart peace negotiations unless the project was scrapped, not to place new preconditions on the revival of the talks.
He added that there was nearly total consensus among Israeli political parties that what he called Jewish neighborhoods in and around Jerusalem would remain “part of the state of Israel” in any future peace agreement.
Palestinians say Israeli settlement in the West Bank will deny them a viable state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They claim East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future state.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Ehud Barak earlier on Monday urged the government to work toward defusing the diplomatic crisis over Israeli construction in East Jerusalem and getting peace talks with the Palestinians back on track.
The government must make an effort in order “for this crisis to be forgotten and for the proximity talks, and later direct talks, to return to the right path,” said Barak at a Labor party meeting.
Barak said he met with American officials about the necessary steps to move forward.
“Peace talks are a first priority for Israel and for the entire region,” said Barak. “The political process is in the interest of the state and it is a subject in which the Labor party believes. It is one of the things that anchors us in the government and drives us to work within it.”
Leading article: Israel’s high-risk strategy: The Independent Editorial
Monday, 15 March 2010
Israel’s Prime Minister has often tried, and succeeded, in having it both ways on the question of a peace deal – talking to the US, in vague but emollient tones, about a two-state solution while palming off his right-wing allies with pledges of more Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
The escalating row between Benjamin Netanyahu and the US suggests this strategy is now starting to unravel. Hillary Clinton’s heated discussions with Mr Netanyahu at the weekend showed that the Obama administration feels that Israel has crossed a red line by announcing plans to build thousands more Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, and by releasing that inflammatory information when the US Vice-President, Joe Biden, was in town to restart stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Mr Netanyahu’s latest contribution, a suggestion that everyone should “calm down”, has not helped matters, by sounding patronising. There is no disputing the virtue of calmness, but the real obstacle to fresh talks between Israelis and Palestinians is not excess emotion; it is the Israeli’s leader’s reluctance to alienate his right-wing coalition allies by spelling out exactly what he is prepared to pay for peace.
Like many in Israel, and on the political right in the US, Mr Netanyahu may be banking on Mr Obama turning out to be a one-term president; a leader to be endured until a more ardently pro-Israeli Republican takes back the White House. That offers one explanation for Israel’s almost deliberate-looking humiliation of the President. But if this is the strategy – to appeal over Mr Obama’s head to a right-wing audience in America – it is fraught with risk.
The strength of Israel’s alliance with the US has depended on its bipartisan character, which meant Israel not taking sides between Democrats and Republicans. The danger of Mr Netanyahu’s approach is that Democrats may start to see Israel not as the great friend of America but as the great friend of the Republicans, which will change the entire dynamics of the alliance. It may be that in a few years’ time the US will have another Republican president, in which case Israel can presumably restart settlement activity without any apology. But it should not bank on such an outcome at this stage.
Savage sentences on Muslim demonstrators will be counterproductive: Letters to the Guardian
The savage “exemplary” sentences handed out to young Muslims (Sent to jail for throwing a single bottle, 13 March) need to be viewed in the broader context of the “war on terror”, which itself has turned out to be a euphemism for a more shadowy war on Islam. While the government’s huge assault on our basic civil liberties has affected a wide range of citizens (prayers for the fallen at the Cenotaph, calling out “rubbish” at a party conference, silent prayer in Trafalgar Square), it has impacted mainly on the Muslim community.
The absurdly high-profile assaults on Muslim households are designed to send a clear message to a vulnerable group. They should be seen within the context of the illegal attack on Iraq, the government’s acquiescence in the incarceration of over a million Gazans, and the calamitous neglect of Afghanistan post-2002. The attitudes inherent in all these actions seem designed to create a climate of contempt that can only oil the wheels of extremism, defeating the very object the government proclaims – at the expense of the daily loss of young lives and the huge waste of economic resources.
Future historians may well trace the dramatic decline of this country in economic, political, social and democratic terms to this disastrous failure to relate these repressive attitudes to the ongoing creation of a negative climate that can only be self-destructive.
Roger Iredale
Yeovil, Somerset
• On reading the report on the arrest and conviction of many young Muslims over the January 2009 demonstrations against the massacre in Gaza, a number of uncanny similarities strike one with the situation in Palestine. The first is the reported police brutality in response to low-level violence, where the Israeli security forces use similar methods.
The second parallel is the behaviour of the legal systems. Israel’s overlooks the war crimes in Gaza reported by Judge Goldstone, but is keen on arresting and holding without charge boys of 10, and treating boys of 12 who throw stones as terrorists. Meanwhile, the London courts seem as keen to throw young Muslims in jail, as Gordon Brown is prepared to bend the legal system after the election so as to not inconvenience those responsible for ordering and managing the massacres in Gaza. Certainly, if Britain set out to create Muslim radicalism, it could do no better.
Professor Haim Bresheeth
University of East London
• After acknowledging Mosab al-Ani’s excellent character, Judge John Denniss is quoted as saying: “I’m going to give you this [prison] sentence to deter other people.”. I thought fair sentencing was supposed to work on the “punishment fits the crime” principle. If so, Judge Denniss badly needs reminding of this, or better, early retirement. I was at the demo and that bottle never got near the Israeli embassy.
Judith Kazantzis
Lewes, East Sussex