By Michael Young

March 25, 2010

The Daily Star

Some will argue that the United Kingdom’s expulsion this week of an Israeli diplomat, by most accounts a Mossad agent, was a transitory spat between allies, following Israel’s use of forged British passports in the recent assassination of a Hamas operative in Dubai. After all, they might add, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did something similar in 1988, without lingering consequences. Yet things seem rather different this time.

Israeli officials should take note that the narrative of their conflict with the Palestinians is changing fundamentally outside Israel. The specifics aside, in the larger picture more countries than ever before see Israel as the problem, and we’re not talking here about the popular antipathy the country seems to often provoke in Asia and Latin America. Even in friendlier climes such as the United States and Europe, the hardening perception is that Israel’s irresponsible settlement expansion plan is destroying all prospects for a mutually satisfactory accord with the Palestinians, and that the ensuing instability will harm everyone.

In the uproar that followed US Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel two weeks ago, relatively little attention was paid to his important speech at Tel Aviv University, where one sentence accurately summarized Israel’s dilemma. “It’s no secret the demographic realities make it increasingly difficult for Israel to remain both a Jewish homeland and a democratic country in the absence of the Palestinian state,” Biden warned his hosts.

In this, the vice president only echoed a theme that Israeli officials themselves have long acknowledged. All things staying equal, Israel will continue to control a growing Palestinian population whose rights, by necessity given the imperatives of security, it will abuse even more extensively than it is doing today. Nor would this resolve anything, because demographics would march on, until two peoples are fighting over one piece of land – or trying to conclude an impossible peace.

The only alternative for Israel is the full-scale expulsion of Palestinians, which would thoroughly discredit Israel in the eyes of the world. In a way the Israelis are paying for that choice before it has ever been made. Nor will it be. Israel simply has no expulsion option. It can reduce the Arab population in Jerusalem, perhaps; it can momentarily seal off Palestinians in enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza; but without a political solution, those are merely odious stopgap measures costing the Israelis ever more valuable political capital to sustain.

That’s why the narrative has shifted, and it’s why Israel today is facing, for the first time, criticism from allies on moral grounds. A state that sustained itself for decades as a moral creation, a refuge for the world’s suffering Jews, is essentially ensuring that the only long-term outlook for Israelis and Palestinians is violence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declared backing for a two-state solution notwithstanding, Israel has no endgame other than the perpetuation of ruinous stalemate. And because it holds the land, the burden is on Israel to define that endgame.

Israel’s ability to draw the negotiating process out indefinitely has been greatly facilitated by Palestinian incompetence. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is struggling to regain the initiative among Palestinians, while Hamas, despite optimistic suggestions to the contrary, has no interest in entering peace talks with Israel. Yet Hamas’ disastrous provocation of the Gaza war over a year ago has considerably undermined the movement’s military strategy, with Palestinians now more willing to go along with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building project in the West Bank, if it is allowed to eventually lead somewhere.

The Palestinian Authority has faced much criticism, especially by purported supporters of the Palestinian cause. But Fayyad’s approach is the only realistic project that Palestinians can pursue today – a project of internal consolidation. More important, as the world watches Abbas and Fayyad focusing on domestic reform, they also see Israel in a different light. The Palestinians, for once, have managed to transform interpretation of their relationship with Israel to their own advantage.

That’s why continuing skepticism over the extent of the dispute between Israel and the United States, or Israel and the United Kingdom, is irrelevant. Neither the Americans nor the British will soon, or ever, break with Israel. But neither, too, is disposed any more to acquiesce in Israel’s contention that its policies in the West Bank are justified by the absence of a resolute Palestinian partner. As Biden affirmed in his Tel Aviv speech, “Genuine steps toward a two-state solution are also required to empower those [willing] to live in peace and security with Israel and to undercut their rivals who will never accept that future.”

Ultimately, Israeli leaders will insist they have no obligations but to their own people. They will disregard intensifying frustration with their actions because Israel’s security is an Israeli matter. But how true is that? If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Israeli security will be more closely tied in with that of the United States. Any American regional nuclear umbrella will also cover Israel, regardless of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. As for the Palestinians, their problem has never been more internationalized – its repercussions felt in countless foreign capitals. Palestinian statehood may be debated at the United Nations in the not too distant future. Israel’s latitude to pursue containable unilateral steps is diminishing because the Middle East’s dynamics now have an impact in so many countries.

A more disturbing thought is that any solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is long gone, making this entire discussion pointless. In that reading, the Palestinians have time in their favor, as they will form a numerical majority over the Jews before long. Therefore, all we can really look forward to is open-ended armed hostility, again lasting generations. That may be too bleak an evaluation. Then again it may not be.

By Avi Issacharoff

March 25, 2010

Haaretz

Throughout the latest crisis between Israel and the United States, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that no previous Israeli government has frozen construction in East Jerusalem has been repeatedly mentioned. Netanyahu and his associates claim that the Obama administration has been pressuring Israel over East Jerusalem building, unlike previous American administrations.

Netanyahu is right. There was never any real pressure – but the American demand in principle to cease construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is long-standing. In fact, all American governments have made the same demand of all Israeli governments, apart from on one occasion: The letter of understanding penned by former U.S. president George W. Bush that recognizes the principle of settlement blocs.

Now, the U.S. is finally putting this demand into effect. Moreover, Netanyahu must also recognize the changing reality on the Palestinian side. Until 2004, the Palestinian Authority was led by Yasser Arafat, who was perceived by the Americans and Europeans as a terrorist. Now, the Palestinian leaders are viewed in Washington and within the EU as true partners in the peace process and in the effort to create a Palestinian state. It is Israel’s leaders – specifically Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Likud Minister Benny Begin and Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon – who are far from being perceived in that way. In the past, the U.S. saw settlement construction as a “stick” used to deter Palestinian terror, but today it is viewed as an obstacle.

How could Netanyahu have safeguarded the construction in East Jerusalem? By offering something in return. Past Israeli governments have indicated their intent to build in Jerusalem beyond the Green Line, but they simultaneously gave the U.S. a political strategy to present to the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s government is backtracking on all fronts and offering nothing to the Americans or the Palestinians.

There was something extremely pretentious about Netanyahu’s speech at the AIPAC policy conference in Washington. He descended upon the American capital and, on the eve of his meeting with the U.S. president, emerged with a display of power (and an impressive one at that) in declaring that Jerusalem is not a settlement. As expected, his speech was met with a harsh but proportionate response from Obama. To add to his transgressions, Netanyahu insisted on meeting Obama without any real preparation for such high-level talks.

Obama’s reaction is not a result of his victory in passing health care reform. The American president doesn’t needto be strong to offend an Israeli prime minister over a matter such as settlements. And despite the hopes of some in Israel, it doesn’t appear that the U.S. Jewish community will go out of its way to defend Israel on the settlement issue either.

“Netanyahu should have taken into account the change within the American Jewish community,” Dov Weisglass, a senior adviser to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told the MESS Report. “Their support for Israel is decreasing and they will defend Israel in the face of the administration only on matters where there is a real threat to Israel. I have serious doubt that U.S. Jews see the Netanyahu government’s territorial aspirations in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and the Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem as an existential matter.”

The Sharon government and the Americans had worked a clear political outline, by which the territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians would be resolved according to the current demographic reality. In other words, Jewish population centers including Ma’ale Adumim and others surrounding Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Jewish neighborhoods over the Green Line, the Etzion settlement bloc and the Ariel settlement would be remain part of Israel – and what is outside of those blocs would be under Palestinian control.

The current Israeli government, which was founded on different guiding political principles and does not recognize the Road Map, essentially abandoned the doctrine outlined in Bush’s letter. Israel brought the subject of settlement construction back to square one – and the Americans obliged them by returning to their default stance that Israel cease building beyond the Green Line.

By Robert Wright

March 23, 2010

New York Times (Online)

Are you anti-Israel? If you fear that, deep down, you might be, I have important news. The recent tension between Israel and the United States led various commentators to identify hallmarks of anti-Israelism, and these may be of diagnostic value.

As you’ll see, my own view is that they aren’t of much value, but I’ll leave it for you to judge.

Symptom no. 1: Believing that Israel shouldn’t build more settlements in East Jerusalem. President Obama holds this belief, and that seems to be the reason that Gary Bauer, who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, deems Obama’s administration “the most anti-Israel administration in U.S. history.” Bauer notes that the East Jerusalem settlements are “entirely within the city of Jerusalem” and that Jerusalem is “the capital of Israel.”

That’s artful wording, but it doesn’t change the fact that EastJerusalem, far from being part of “the capital of Israel,” isn’t even part of Israel. East Jerusalem lies beyond Israel’s internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders. And the common assertion that Israel “annexed” East Jerusalem has roughly the same legal significance as my announcing that I’ve annexed my neighbor’s backyard. In 1980 the United Nations explicitly rejected Israel’s claim to possess East Jerusalem. And the United States, which normally vetoes U.N. resolutions that Israel finds threatening, chose not to do so in this case.

In short, accepting Gary Bauer’s idea of what it means to be anti-Israel seems to involve being anti-truth. So I don’t accept it. (And if you’re tempted to accept the common claim that Israel is building only in “traditionally Jewish” parts of East Jerusalem, a good antidote is this piece by Lara Friedman and Daniel Seidemann, published on Foreign Policy Magazine’s excellent new Middle East Channel.)

Symptom no. 2: Thinking that some of Israel’s policies, and America’s perceived support of them, might endanger American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (by, for example, giving Jihadist recruiters rhetorical ammunition). This concern was reportedly expressed last week by Vice President Joe Biden to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. And General David Petraeus is said to worry about the threat posed to American troops — and to America’s whole strategic situation — by the perception of American favoritism toward Israel.

Identifying threats to American troops is part of a general’s job, and it seems to me Petraeus could honestly conclude — without help from dark “anti-Israel” impulses — that some of those threats are heightened by the Israel-Palestine conflict and America’s relationship to it. But Max Boot, writing on Commentary’s Web site, seems to disagree; if Petraeus indeed holds such opinions, that’s a sign of “anti-Israel sentiment,” in Boot’s view.

Now, for a lionized American general to even hint that America’s stance toward Israel might threaten American troops is a serious public relations problem for Boot’s ideology. That, presumably, is why Boot tries to show that this “anti-Israel” view, though attributedto Petraeus, is not in fact Petraeus’s view. Specifically, Boot aims to discredit journalists who attributed this quotation to Petraeus: “The [Israel-Palestine] conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel … . Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”

Boot assures us that this passage, far from being a good guide to Petraeus’s thinking, was just “pulled from the 56-page Central Command ‘Posture Statement’ filed by his staff with the Senate Armed Services Committee.” Well, I don’t know who did the filing, but the document itself is titled “Statement of General David H. Petraeus … Before the Senate Armed Services Committee.” So I’m guessing it’s a fair guide to his views — in which case, by Boot’s lights, Petraeus is anti-Israel, right? And in which case I’ll reject Boot’s criterion for anti-Israelism.

Boot has an ally in Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Foxman said the perspective attributed to Biden and Petraeus “smacks of blaming Jews for everything.”

Foxman’s claim may seem hyperbolic, but look at it this way: If he can convince us that blaming any Israeli policy for anything is akin to blaming Jews in general for everything, then anyone who criticizes an Israeli policy will be deemed anti-Semitic — and fear of that label will keep everyone from criticizing Israel. And by virtue of never criticizing Israel, we’ll all be “pro-Israel.” And that’s a good thing, right?

Actually, it seems to me that if we were all “pro-Israel” in this sense, that would be bad for Israel.

If Israel’s increasingly powerful right wing has its way, without constraint from American criticism and pressure, then Israel will keep building settlements. And the more settlements get built —especially in East Jerusalem — the harder it will be to find a two-state deal that leaves Palestinians with much of their dignity intact. And the less dignity intact, the less stable any two-state deal will be.

As more and more people are realizing, the only long-run alternatives to a two-state solution are: a) a one-state solution in which an Arab majority spells the end of Israel’s Jewish identity; b) Israel’s remaining a Jewish state by denying the vote to Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, a condition that would be increasingly reminiscent of apartheid; c) the apocalypse. Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference on Monday: “A two-state solution is the only viable path for Israel to remain both a democracy and a Jewish state.”

So, by my lights, being “pro-Israel” in the sense embraced by Bauer, Boot and Foxman — backing Israel’s current policies, including its settlement policies — is actually anti-Israel. It’s also anti-America (in the sense of ‘bad for American security’), because Biden and Petraeus are right: America’s perceived support of — or at least acquiescence in — Israel’s more inflammatory policies endangers American troops abroad. In the long run, it will also endanger American civilians at home, funneling more terrorism in their direction.

The flip side of this coin is that policies that would be truly good for Israel (e.g., no more settlements) would be good for America. In that sense, there’s good news for Bauer and Boot and Foxman: one of their common refrains — that Israel’s and America’s interests are essentially aligned — is true, if for reasons they don’t appreciate.

Sadly, the Bauer-Boot-Foxman definition of “pro-Israel” — supporting Israel’s increasingly hard-line and self-destructive policies — is the official definition. All major American newspapers, so far as I can see, use the term this way. AIPAC is described as “pro-Israel,” but the left-of-AIPAC J Street isn’t, even though its members, like AIPAC’s, favor policies they consider good for Israel.

No doubt this twisted use of “pro-Israel,” and the implied definition of “anti-Israel,” keeps many critics of Israeli policies from speaking out — Jewish critics for fear of seeming disloyal, and non-Jewish critics for fear of seeming anti-Semitic.

So, if I’m right, and more speaking out — more criticism of Israel’s current policies — would actually be good for Israel, then the newspapers and other media outlets that sustain the prevailing usage of “pro-Israel” are, in fact, anti-Israel. I won’t mention any names.

Postscript: It has been reported that, notwithstanding accounts in Israel’s media, Biden did not, in fact, complain to Netanyahu in private about the threat of Israel’s policies to American troops. Perhaps predictably, the journalist who first reported this is the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been described by one New York Times columnist as Netanyahu’s “faithful stenographer.” I don’t doubt that Goldberg found an administration source who downplayed Biden’s remarks to Netanyahu; obviously, once tensions started to subside, and the goal of both America and Israel was to smooth relations, it wasn’t going to be hard to find an administration official who would do that, regardless of the truth about what Biden said. So I attach little significance to the administration’s revisionist account of what transpired between Biden and Netanyahu — especially given the heat the administration no doubt took over the original account of what transpired.

By Lara Friedman and Daniel Seidemann

March 19, 2010

Foreign Policy (Online)

Throughout the past week the world has heard Israeli government officials and their allies in the US –particularly among the pro-settler crowd — defending construction in East Jerusalem settlements on the grounds that “everybody knows” these areas will always be part of Israel.

The “everybody knows” argument is familiar. Those in the peace camp often say that everybody knows what an Israeli-Palestinian permanent status agreement looks like. Their point being: all that is needed is the political will of courageous leaders to work out the final, hardest details and sign the treaty.

But today the “everybody knows” meme has been cynically appropriated by Netanyahu and his supporters. “Everybody knows these areas in East Jerusalem will always be Israel,” they say, “so when the Palestinians (and the Americans) make a fuss about new construction plans, it is just for political purposes, not because there is any real issue.”

Those peddling this rubbish are guilty of transparent manipulation. Those buying it are guilty of having short memories and an excess of credulity.

In 1993, when the peace process was taking off, the settlement of Ramat Shlomo — which last week caused such a headache for Vice President Biden — didn’t exist. The site was an empty hill in East Jerusalem (not “no man’s land,” as some have asserted), home only to dirt, trees and grazing goats.  It was empty because Israel expropriated the land in 1973 from the Palestinian village of Shuafat and made it off-limits to development. Only later, with the onset of the peace process era, was the land zoned for construction and a brand-new settlement called Rehkes Shuafat (later renamed Ramat Shlomo) built.

If in 1993 you had asked what areas “everybody knows” would stay part of Israel under any future agreement, the area that is today Ramat Shlomo — territorially distinct from any other settlement and contiguous with the Palestinian neighborhood of Shuafat — would not have been mentioned.

The same can be said for the massive settlement of Har Homa, for which Israel issued new tenders in the past few days (sometime after the Ramat Shlomo-Biden fiasco). Here, again, the argument is that “everybody knows” this area will forever be part of Israel. But here again, we are talking about an area that at the outset of the peace process was empty land — devoid of Israelis, belonging mainly to Palestinians, and contiguous entirely with Palestinian areas — that anybody drawing a logical border would have placed on the Palestinian side.

American pundits and members of Congress may be unfamiliar with or may have forgotten these inconvenient facts, but the Palestinians — who have watched Israel eat away at East Jerusalem at an increasing pace — have not.

Some will argue that these are the facts on the ground today, and the fact is that Israel will never part with the big East Jerusalem settlements. So regardless of sins of the past, why make a fuss about new construction in them?

The answer lies in a closer look at what Netanyahu means when he talks about what “everybody knows.”

Because if he meant that everybody understands what will be Israeli and what will be Palestinian in Jerusalem, this would potentially be great news: it could mean an agreement is possible, at least on Jerusalem, tomorrow. And if that were what he meant, then just as he suggests that Israel can build without restrictions in the areas that “everybody knows” will stay Israeli, he would have no problem with Palestinians building without restrictions in the areas that everyone knows will be Palestinian.

But there’s the catch: for Netanyahu, there is no place in Jerusalem that “everybody knows” will be Palestinian.

What Netanyahu really means is that East Jerusalem land falls into two categories: areas that “everybody knows” Israel will keep and where it can therefore act with impunity, and areas that Israel hopes it can keep, by dint of changing so many facts on the ground before a peace agreement is reached that they move into the first category.

It is an approach that can be summed up as: “what’s mine is mine, and what you think is yours will hopefully be mine, too.” It discloses with stark clarity the underlying principle of Netanyahu’s Jerusalem policies: the status of Jerusalem and its borders will be determined by Israeli deeds rather than by negotiations. More bluntly, who needs agreement with Palestinians or recognition of the international community when “everybody knows”?

And it is an approach that we see today on the ground, where Israel is doing its best — through construction, demolitions, changes in the public domain — to transform areas of East Jerusalem that have always been overwhelmingly Palestinian into areas that everybody will soon recognize as Israeli, now and forever. This is happening in the area surrounding the Old City, in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods like Ras al Amud and Jebel Mukabber, and it is now starting to target areas like Shuafat and Beit Hanina.

The notion that a peace process can survive such an Israeli approach in Jerusalem is not rational.  The notion that Israel can be taken seriously as a peace partner while acting this way is farcical.  And the notion that the United States can be a credible steward of peace efforts while tolerating such behavior is laughable.

Lara Friedman is director of policy and government relations for Americans for Peace Now.  Daniel Seidemann is the founder of the Israeli NGO Terrestrial Jerusalem.

By Roger Cohen

March 15, 2010

International Herald Tribune

I’m tempted to see Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel as a parable: Nice guy wanders into mess and truth is revealed.

We’ve had, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clarifying the fact that, “Israel and the U.S. have mutual interests, but we will act according to the vital interests of the state of Israel.”

Of course, the United States, too, has “vital interests.” They include reaching a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine for which the physical space erodes daily as Israeli settlements in the West Bank expand.

Peace is a vital American interest for many reasons, including its inalienable commitment to Israel’s long-term security, but the most pressing is that the conflict is a jihadist recruitment tool that feeds the wars in which young Americans die.

This is not rocket science. Yet over the past decade the United States has been facilitating the costly settlements enterprise by pouring $28.9 billion into Israel. America’s strategic goal of Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side in security has been undermined by its own blank-check diplomacy.

Well, goodbye to all that — maybe. Something shifted when Biden (“You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist”) was thanked for his unstinting support of Israel with a snub: The announcement that another 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in east Jerusalem, a pure provocation when restarting peace talks is the core U.S. aim.

President Barack Obama was furious. In a top-down administration like this one, you don’t get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lambasting Netanyahu for 43 minutes and David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, speaking of “an affront” and “an insult” and a “very, very destructive” step if America’s measured leader is not immeasurably incensed. That truth is also worth knowing.

Obama has reason to be angry.

Netanyahu, betraying the growing Israeli taste for the status quo, torn between rightist instincts and coalition partners on the one hand and his ego’s sensitivity to the peacemaker’s halo and history books on the other, has been toying with Obama.

A year ago, in March 2009, I wrote that, “Obama’s new policies of Middle Eastern diplomacy and engagement” would involve “a probable cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations.” I believed that Israel had misread or underestimated a core strategic shift of the Obama presidency: away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.

Well, here’s the cooling. You can’t have rapprochement with Muslims while condoning the steady Israeli appropriation of the physical space for Palestine. You can’t have that rapprochement if U.S. policy is susceptible to the whims of Shas, the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party in Netanyahu’s coalition that runs the Interior Ministry and announced the Biden-baiting measure.

The Israeli right, whether religious or secular, has no interest in a two-state peace. I had lunch the other day with Ron Nachman, the mayor of Ariel, one of the largest West Bank settlements. He told me breezily that there “can be no Palestinian state,” and that “Israel and Jordan should divide the land.” I liked his frankness. It clarifies things.

It’s time for equal frankness from Netanyahu. Do “the vital interests of the state of Israel” include continued building in East Jerusalem and the steady takeover of the West Bank, or does his embrace of the airy phrase, “two states for two peoples,” have more than camouflage meaning?

Netanyahu’s apology is not enough. The United States is asking for “specific actions.” I’d say at a minimum that would include the annulment of the 1,600-apartments plan. Israel, always ready to mock Palestinian disarray, might also ensure that its leader knows what members of his own government are doing.

This is a watershed moment. Palestinian violence, Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement and jihadist infiltration of the Palestinian national movement all undermine peace efforts. They are unacceptable; Biden was right to “ironclad” the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. But it’s past time that Palestinian failings cease to serve as an excuse for Israel’s remorseless, cynical scattering of the Palestinian people into enclaves that make a farce of statehood. That is “an affront” to America.

In this sense, Biden’s foray has been salutary. It brought U.S. “vital interests” to the surface. It challenged Israel’s ostrich-like burrowing into polices that, over time, will make one divided, undemocratic state more likely than “two states for two peoples.” It asked again the question posed recently by David Shulman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Are Israelis, cocooned, still able “to see, to imagine, and to acknowledge the suffering of other human beings, including those aspects of their suffering for which we are directly responsible?”

The mass-market daily Maariv had a front-page post-Biden cartoon of Obama cooking Netanyahu in a pot. It was supposed to illustrate a relationship “in flames.” But the image — a black man cooking a white man over an open fire — also said something about the way Israel views its critics.

Israel is wrong to mock its constructive critics. They alone can usher the country from the one-state dead end — a vital Israeli interest.

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/18/telling_israel_difficult_truths_by_henry_siegman

By Henry Siegman

March 18, 2010

Foreign Policy, Middle East Channel

For all the anger and indignation of the White House and Department of State over the humiliation of Vice President Joseph Biden by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government during Biden’s visit to Israel, it is difficult to deny that we virtually invited that treatment.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Netanyahu it was the substance, not only the timing, of the announcement of new Israeli construction in East Jerusalem that the U.S. found so objectionable. Presidential advisor David Axelrod added that it was Netanyahu’s attempt to deceive us about the purpose of this construction that is particularly offensive. For the massive Jewish incursion into Arab East Jerusalem is a deliberate effort to prevent a peace agreement and a two-state solution. No Palestinian leader can sign a peace accord that denies a Palestinian state its capital in Arab East Jerusalem.

But the Obama administration knew what Netanyahu was up to well before Biden’s visit. Israel’s media reported that shortly after Netanyahu alleged his conversion from life-long bitter opposition to a Palestinian state to supporter of a two-state solution, he assured the settler leadership behind closed doors (evidently not all that closed) that the conditions he is attaching to his acceptance of a Palestinian state, including that state’s exclusion from Jerusalem, would be impossible for even the most moderate Palestinian leader to accept.

What is more, Netanyahu had reason to believe that we knew this. Why else would Washington have proposed Terms of Reference (TOR) for the “proximity talks” that accorded the same standing to Netanyahu’s refusal to start the negotiations at the pre-1967 border as the Palestinian demand that they do?  Secretary Clinton knew that the Palestinian position was in accord with the Roadmap. Last August, and more recently as well, she declared that unilateral actions – presumably of the kind Israel is taking in East Jerusalem – “will not be recognized as changing the status quo.”  By providing that these two conflicting positions must be “reconciled,” the TOR compromised the Palestinian position even before the talks begin.  It also encouraged Netanyahu’s belief that, with the support of the Israel lobby, he can get away with anything.

But nothing has been as damaging in encouraging Israeli disregard for its obligations under existing agreements and international law than the administration’s bizarre notion that halting Israel’s continuing theft of Palestinian territory beyond the Green Line is an Israeli “concession” that deserves to be rewarded by Palestinians and Arab countries with real concessions; indeed, that Arab “gestures” are necessary to justify U.S. demands that this thievery end. It is this perverse characterization of Israel’s obligation to cease its illegal confiscations of Palestinian territory as a concession that is responsible for the behavior that finally has outraged Washington.

The Obama administration must stand by its repeated commitments to do what it takes to guarantee Israel’s security, no matter how serious our differences, and no one should doubt that it will – as will succeeding administrations. But the over-the-top message Biden delivered to Israel that no “daylight” separates Israel and the U.S. when it comes to security is another example of dangerously misleading signals we  send to Netanyahu’s right-wing,  hard-line government.

Israeli governments, and most especially this one, have a long history of abusing the security argument to justify confiscations of Palestinian lands and unilateral border changes. Israeli security vulnerabilities are real enough, even if too often self-inflicted. But they are only increased, not diminished, by the sweeping and unconditional assurances that Biden offered in Israel.  What he should have told Netanyahu is that there would indeed be considerable “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel if illegal measures are taken by Israel under the false guise of “security.”

The seriousness of Secretary Clinton’s demand – that Netanyahu remove not with words but “with specific actions” the obstacles his government has placed before America’s peace initiatives and the Israel-U.S. relationship – will be put to the test at AIPAC’s upcoming annual meeting in Washington D.C., to which senior administration officials and virtually every U.S. senator and congressional representative regularly come to pay obeisance. The lobby believes that when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, it owns both houses of Congress; House and Senate members have too rarely given AIPAC reason to doubt it.

The Obama administration has now told Netanyahu that not only Palestinian but Israel’s non-compliance with previous agreements, and its obstructions of U.S. efforts to end the occupation and achieve a peace accord that establishes a viable Palestinian state, will no longer be cost free. And they have promised Israel to continue to act as its true friend by telling it difficult truths. The message that Clinton and other senior administration officials will deliver at the AIPAC meeting will tell Israelis and Palestinians – and the rest of the world – what the half-life of this most welcome new American resolve is likely to be.

Unfortunately, initial signs are hardly promising.  President Obama told Bret Baier of Fox News that his disagreement with Netanyahu and his government is “over how we can move this peace process forward.” If that is what President Obama really believes, or worse yet, if he does not believe it but thought it is politically necessary to pretend that he does,  it is difficult to understand what in the world last week’s flap over construction in East Jerusalem was all about.

Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.  He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress.