“Mr. President, will you take a call from Prime Minister Netanyahu in five minutes? He says it’s urgent, very urgent.”
“Rahm, I can tell from the tone of your voice that you’re not asking me a question. You’re giving me an order.”
Rahm Emanuel smiled.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu described his offer to temporarily restrict construction of all-new Jewish settlements on the West Bank excluding Arab East Jerusalem as a “far-reaching and painful step”, which was part of a policy he hoped would give a new impetus to peace talks.
Netanyahu is not stupid. He knows that some of us know he is not remotely interested in peace on terms the Palestinians could accept. So what then is his real game plan of the moment? Simple. He is seeking to make peace with the Obama administration. And its response suggests that with the help of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress he’s got that matter firmly under control.
It’s not often that stories about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict make me laugh but one by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, did. Because he is the corporation’s correspondent supporters of Israel right or wrong most love to hate – from time to time they pressure the BBC to fire him – I imagine he enjoyed writing it.
I’m quite strongly inclined to the view that the answer is “No”, but the question is still worth asking. It was triggered in my mind by a phrase in the introduction to the lead story of the BBC’s World Service (Radio) news bulletins late on 17 November and early the following morning. The story was the Obama’s administration’s “dismay” at Israel’s decision to approve 900 new homes in occupied Arab East Jerusalem “in defiance of world opinion“. The words emphasized were those of a BBC scriptwriter, not a spokesman for the Obama administration.
There is a case for saying that those leaders of the discredited PNA (Palestine National Authority) who are proposing to unilaterally declare an independent state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and seek to get UN Security Council backing for it are being clever.
What they would be doing in effect is asking the Security Council not only to re-affirm its commitment to Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967 but, far more important, to confront that resolution’s fatal flaw on the matter of land for peace.
