Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington last week was greeted in the world press with articles predicting the line of negotiation and the expected results. Some newspapers, such as the British Independent, urged US President Barack Obama to take a tough stand with the Israeli official, so as to end Israeli brutality against the Palestinians and freedom activists, who intended to break the inhuman siege of Gaza. In its editorial published on July 7, The Independent urged Obama to take action to convince Netanyahu to adopt a historic reconciliation in the Middle East “where the continuing statelessness of the Palestinians, and the West's apparent tolerance of this situation, has become a poisonous symbol of injustice”. The newspaper also wrote that it is already very late to push for a two-state solution. “The ethnic dividing line between Jews and Arabs is blurring, with Jewish settlers now controlling 45 per cent of West Bank land, according to a new report from the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, while Israel's policy of demolishing Arab homes and building Jewish ones in East Jerusalem is fast bringing about a Jewish majority in that part of the city, too.” The Independent added: “The US President has, until now, been preoccupied by domestic concerns, starting with the battle over health insurance and then the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. Now is the moment to grapple with a foreign policy conundrum that his predecessor woefully neglected, but which only an American president can move forward.” In the same newspaper however, Patrick Cockburn doubted the ability of Obama and other American politicians to talk firmly with Israel. “It may be in the interests of the US to restrain Israel, but this is almost certainly not going to happen. It is possible that President Obama privately took a tough line with Netanyahu, but he is unlikely to take effective measures to pressure Israel for fear of increasing expected Democratic Party losses in the mid-term elections.” Unfortunately, his prediction proved true as the US President showed full agreement in his friendly meeting with the Israeli official. In addition to the prolonged handshake the two leaders made for the cameras, Obama assumed the Israeli stance, when he said that he hoped for direct Middle East peace talks to start before the end of September. Previously, Netanyahu had warned of the resumption of building Jewish settlements on the West Bank in September, if the Palestinians did not speed up in accepting the launch of unconditional direct talks with Israel without a specific time schedule to reach a peace deal. The two officials knew well that the Palestinians insist on the necessity of making progress in indirect negotiations on core issues (borders, security, etc) before going into direct negotiations. So, once again, the US administration, whether Democrat or Republican, takes sides with the Israelis against the legal rights and interests of the Palestinians and Arabs. It is hard to imagine that the US President has had to drop all the hot files that Israel has created in the region since he took office. If Obama ignored Netanyahu's previous humiliating announcement of creating some 1,600 settlements in the West Bank on the eve of US Vice-President Joe Biden's visit, how could he neglect Netanyahu's recent warning to resume building settlements if the Palestinian Authority did not kow-tow to Israeli pressure? If Obama closed his eye to the Israeli practices against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, how could he disregard the world's criticism of Israel's brutality against the flotilla bearing humanitarian aid that tried to break the illegal siege of Gaza? Another important challenge facing Israel, which cannot be overlooked by its ally, is the present tension created between Tel Aviv and Ankara in the aftermath of Israel's violent killing of nine Turkish peace activists on a Turkish boat in the aid flotilla. To overcome such a deep rift in Israeli-Turkish relations, the US might well make a move before Turkey's expected leadership of the Security Council from September, when the Goldstone report over Israel's war on Gaza will be re-debated. Ironically, while Netanyahu was attempting to convince Obama of focusing on Iran's threat in the region and adopting his vision of the way to reach peace with the Palestinians, his far-rightist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was cooking up a diabolical plot. Its intention is to achieve his announced policy of clearing Israel of its non-Jewish citizens. According to an article recently written by Jonathan Cook and reprinted in the Canadian Islamic Congress magazine, Lieberman set a “blueprint for a resolution to the conflict” with the Palestinians, demanding most of Israel's large ethnic Palestinian minority be stripped of their citizenship and relocated outside Israel's future borders. Cook, a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, also wrote that Lieberman had spoken repeatedly in the past about drawing the borders in such a way as to forcibly exchange Palestinian communities in Israel for Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Apparently, this is a new Israeli trick to evade signing the two-state deal since Lieberman, as well as all other Israeli officials, are quite sure that this blueprint for population exchanges could not be implemented. However, Lieberman is promoting it chiefly to further harm Israel's Palestinian citizens and advance his own political ambitions of having Israel as a purely Jewish state. He is also sure that Israel will not and cannot evacuate all Jewish settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territory settlements, which enjoy special power and privilege within different Israeli governments and the army itself. In return it is hard to convince the Arab Israelis, those Palestinians who were forced in 1948 to take Israeli nationality in order to be allowed to continue living in their towns and cities that became part of the state of Israel, to leave their homeland for which they sacrificed their Palestinian identity some 62 years ago.
