Following his talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Washington on Thursday, US President Barack Obama says that he is hopeful that the present stalemate between the Palestinians and Israelis will be broken and that Israel will accept a two-state solution. Arabs are hopeful too. We have been hoping for a just solution for the past 61 years. If hope were all it took to make peace a reality, it would have happened long ago.

Yet for once, there is real reason to believe that progress can occur.

The much-reported suggestion that Obama’s attitude to Israel is fundamentally different to that of previous US presidents took on flesh and muscle on Wednesday when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared in ringing terms that all settlement expansion must stop, including existing settlements. The comment, a response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s defiant approval of existing settlement expansion on his return home from Washington where Obama had told him expansion must stop, is the toughest language any US administration has used toward Israel probably since the 1956 war.

No one should image that Clinton’s words herald a splitting of the ways, but here is proof of a paradigm shift in the three-corned relationship between Americans, Palestinians and Israelis. For the first time, we see the Americans and the Palestinians singing from the same song sheet, not the Americans and the Israelis. Isolated, Netanyahu sings a song of defiance to himself and the circle of refuseniks around him.

In rejecting the US demand for an end to settlement construction, the Israeli government becomes the proverbial ostrich with its head firmly in the sand. That is clear from comments by Mark Regev, the Israeli government spokesman. Asked about the Clinton statement, he said that settlement expansion is not and never has been a key issue. He could not be more wrong. Settlements are fundamental to progress on peace. Mahmoud Abbas said he would not return to talks unless expansion were frozen. Netanyahu’s defiance sets the Israelis on collision course with the Americans. Hillary Clinton has made it quite clear that Washington has every intention of forcing the issue, although how is unclear. Given the tough words, there is no way that either she or Obama can back down on this. Nor do they need to; they have American public opinion behind them.

Obama’s and Clinton’s stand are a victory for President Abbas. Washington has supported him; it has not supported Netanyahu. If that support then translates into action and expansion ends, as Clinton suggests it will, Abbas may well see his support among Palestinians rise.

Even so, there is one fundamental point that Washington needs to understand. It is not an end to expansion that has to happen, it is an end to the settlements themselves. They have to go.

They exist to spearhead Israeli colonization. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem there are some 470,000 Israeli colonists living on stolen Palestinian land. It has been suggested by the PLA that settlers could stay on as dual nationals, with both Palestinian and Israeli citizenship (in itself, a remarkable piece of creative thinking). What cannot happen is that the settlements remain as Israel outposts. On that there can be no compromise.

Rain forests and the planet

New York Times yesterday commented on climate change, saying in part:

A major shortcoming of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change was its failure to address the huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions caused by the destruction of the world’s rain forests. A proposal that rich nations be allowed to offset some of their emissions by paying poorer counties to leave their rain forests intact was shot down after European environmental groups objected. They argued that it would allow rich countries to buy their way out of their own obligations. The planet has been paying for that colossal blunder ever since.

Deforestation accounts for one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — about the same as China’s emissions, more than the emissions generated by all of the world’s cars and trucks. And the world is doing far too little to stop it. An estimated 30 million acres of rain forest disappear every year, destroying biodiversity and pouring billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The global warming bill now working its way through the House seeks to change this destructive dynamic in two ways. It sets up a carbon trading system that is expected to raise upward of $60 billion annually through the sale of pollution allowances. Five percent of that would be set aside to help prevent deforestation, either through a special international fund or as bilateral grants to poor countries. In addition, the bill would allow for the kinds of offsets proposed and rejected in Kyoto, Japan. For example, a power company having trouble meeting its emissions limits could satisfy some of its obligations by paying to reduce deforestation elsewhere in the world.

The economics make sense. It is a relatively inexpensive way for industrialized nations to get credit for reducing global emissions.