That George Mitchell has not been hesitant in articulating the US desire to see a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict lends to speculation that the new Israeli government and the new Obama administration may find themselves on a collision course.

Stark differences between US and Israeli policy toward peace talks with the Palestinians are beginning to emerge. While Mitchell, the US Middle East envoy, insists the US will not settle for anything less than the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the highest of Israeli officials are avoiding any mention of Palestinian statehood.

For good reason, the US is nervous about Israeli intentions. The coalition Benjamin Netanyahu cobbled together ended up with a government bringing together the right and ultra right, and as such, is a government that cannot possibly seek political settlement. In Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman he has a man who quit the Olmert government when it decided to attend regional US-sponsored talks in Annapolis, and did not disappoint his supporters when upon his first day in office in the present government declared Annapolis dead and buried.

It cannot at all be said of US-Israeli ties as weakening, but that could happen, as was the situation during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. The following remarks could have been made by any Palestinian on the street: “Now is the time to lay aside once and for all the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel... Forswear annexation; stop settlement activity; allow schools to reopen; reach out to the Palestinian as neighbors who deserve political rights.” But speaking was the US secretary of state at the time James Baker at an AIPAC conference. Then there was Baker’s famous rebuke in Congress in 1990: “When the Israelis are serious about peace, they should call the White House.” The telephone number, he said, “is 1-202-456-1414.”

Shared US-Israeli values and strategic interests are not rock-solid. Both America and Israel have new leaders who do not appear to see eye to eye on future moves concerning the Palestinians. And that could shake the alliance and its history.

The US has been an incredible friend to Israel. Israel is a major power with a First World GDP, overwhelming military superiority over any combination of Arab armies and a regional monopoly on weapons of mass destruction. It owes much of this to US policy in the region. Meanwhile, today, the US is economically weaker, militarily exhausted and diplomatically diminished. It needs Israel to pursue sensible policy decisions. Will Israel prove its friendship to the US or will its current stand undermine this long-standing alliance?

Obama has not yet spelled out his Mideast policy in detail but what has always been accepted by the US as well as by Israel has been direct negotiations. Washington genuinely seems taken aback at such a sudden and public repudiation of one of the main planks of its Middle East policy. This could make it at the very least awkward for the US to continue with its current policy of unlimited and uncritical support of Israel.

Torture: Holding the US to account

The Guardian yesterday commented on torture, saying in part:

To read the four newly released Bush-era memos on America’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” for terror suspects is to enter a very dark moral world indeed. It is the Orwellian world of the concealed global detention network set up by the CIA on President Bush’s authority after 9/11 in which suspected terrorists — many of whom may have had a lot of blood on their hands — were secretly held in US bases from Afghanistan to Romania and systematically tortured. A world in which Britain is implicated too, do not forget.

The memos do not admit torture, of course. The United States, Bush famously claimed in 2006, “does not torture”. The memos embody a cynical bureaucratic attempt to align what went on in the secret prisons with that claim. Yet no one who reads their argument that the threat of imminent drowning caused by waterboarding does not reach the level of “prolonged mental harm” which the Bush lawyers argue is necessary to constitute torture, can doubt that torture is precisely what the CIA had been permitted and encouraged to carry out. The truth, as the new US Attorney General Eric Holder has said, is clear: “Waterboarding is torture.”

Jaw-dropping though they are, the memos are not the only evidence of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture. The “procedures” discussed in the memos — grasping, slapping, holding, banging against walls, confinement in boxes (sometimes with insects), sleep deprivation, prolonged confinement in “stress positions” and waterboarding — were additional to these. The ICRC heard accounts of most of them from the detainees. These accounts are far more graphic (and even credible) than the cold lawyerish prose of the memos. The ICRC conclusion was emphatic: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture.”