Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reckless behavior exceeded a new limit in his authorization of an extra 900 houses in the Gilo neighborhood of East Jerusalem. There is more to this than just another big settlement growth on Palestinian land. It is a rude finger pointed in Obama's face. The Israeli government has decided that it will not only defy the president of the United States but insult him.

The White House spokesman said the administration was "dismayed," and the State Department chose the same word to describe its reaction. The president, speaking to his big-league haters on Fox television from Beijing, said this new building spurt will not make Israel safer but will make any prospects of peace more difficult. When George Mitchell said much the same to an Israeli apparatchik in London, he was given another dose of contemptuous insult. Journalist Akiva Eldar, writing in Haaretz, wondered whether Netanyahu's behavior would at last push Obama into the arms of Mahmoud Abbas.

That last suggestion, if it were to mean a turning away from American commitment to the safety of Israel, will not happen. But Obama made clear, in his statement to Fox, how well he knows that this sort of rampage will never provide Israel with security but will only drive its thus far helpless victims to greater rage. In the face of relentless Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank, the reality is dawning rapidly that the two-state solution is in danger of becoming no more than a slogan that has no chance of being implemented or altering the reality of a de facto binational state in Palestine/Israel.

Many times over President Obama has told us of his realization that Palestinians are in fact victims of grave injustice. Will his instinct for protecting Israel from harm this time lead him merely to talk about it but do nothing?

The near total collapse of the Obama administration's peace efforts, and the fact that the continued intransigence of the Israeli government on the settlement issue and foot-dragging on the peace talks has the potential of provoking a larger war in the area and escalation of global terrorism must be on the president's mind. It's fine and dandy to talk of peace but it means nothing if you don't demand law enforcement at the national level. If you have no plan to make peace, you make war inevitable; the US administration ought to know this by now.

The hurdles he would have to overcome to do more than talk look formidable. The powerful traditional lobbying groups, however false their claim to represent the real opinion of the American Jewish community, are instruments not of Israel's interests but of Likud politics. The Congress of the United States could well be described as their wholly owned subsidiary, with the pressures of the religious right added to those of AIPAC and its accomplices. Obama, with other fish to fry in the Congress, from health care to climate change to the introduction of some sanity into the American financial system, knows the vengefulness of the legislators, the whole Republican Party an unbroken phalanx seeking to bring down his presidency in a Waterloo and his own Democratic Party members so wrapped up in their self-interested subservience to their funders that reliance can never be placed on them. Dare he provoke them?

The president, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and his emissary Mitchell have tried evasive tactics, begging PA President Abbas to pretend nothing is wrong and sit down further with the land-devouring Netanyahu, but Abbas has shown he will not play that game.

These columns, and many other voices, have long argued that Obama, with all his genuine commitment to Israel and its safety, should make international law the measure of what he expects of Israel, in fact of what he would see as contributing to Israel's real good. If indeed he has had any inclination to take up that challenge, it would be difficult to see just what would make a suitable handle to initiate such an insistence on the law. His general plea for a freeze on settlements proved too broad and abstract to give him leverage on this matter. But here, in this decision to build 900 more houses in one of the most sensitive areas of encroachment on Jerusalem itself, he has a concrete and specific instance of the gross violation of a particular item of international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention's prohibition of the colonization of occupied territory by an occupying power.

Obama has spoken often, most recently when he addressed the opening session of the General Assembly, of his intention to use the United Nations as a resource and treat it with due respect. Such respect has not been forthcoming from the United States for a long time, especially over the years since 1980. The United States refused, for many years, to pay its dues to the UN organization, tried to bully its members into making the UN an instrument of its own policies and used its veto power in the Security Council to stymie anything unwelcome to Israel's far right. In more recent years, the US has declared the United Nations one of the Quartet powers, even while making sure that it had no influence in this or other regions.

Obama could now use the UN as the instrument for peace that it was designed to be. He could give his approval to a resolution of the Security Council defining this enlargement of the settlement footprint in occupied East Jerusalem as a specific violation of law and demanding that Israel desist. The United States need not initiate such a resolution itself. Approval of it would a powerful action in itself, and it might best be proposed by one of America's European allies.

What would this accomplish? It would put Israel on notice that the international community spoke with one voice in its disapproval of its confiscatory policy of settlement on land belonging to another. Aggressive actions of this sort by Israel could not happen without the support, or at least tolerance, of the American superpower.

Yes, without the US there would be no Israel today. And who among us thinks Israel isn't the dog wagging the US tail? The fact is that all governments in Israel have expanded the settlements, indicating their contempt for the Palestinians and their desire to dominate the entire region. Regardless of the party in power in Tel-Aviv - whether a right wing or a left-wing party - US official policy is still to support Israel's actions.

Billions in annual US military support and US diplomatic support for Israeli policies toward the Palestinians is perceived by the international community as a major cause of Palestinian deprivation and suffering, and in fact, it is doubted whether Israel could continue the occupation in the long term without these.

Israel's own citizens by great majority are themselves quite strongly conscious of what a burden the settlements are to their society and its safety. That the United States spoke with all the rest of the world, which would readily agree, would require Israel to look to its own genuine interests, which can only be for peace with its neighbors, with the Palestinians and all the nations of this region in which it has been planted. Israel would be the gainer, as would all its Palestinian and other neighbors.

For the United States, breaking out of its dominative relation to all the world's nations, including those most anxious to be its allies, by aligning itself with their belief in justice, alive even in the most difficult of its partners in the United Nations, would make it possible to build cooperative consensus among them, a relation that would rescue the United States itself from its stance as a new kind of empire, which all the world must strive to overcome. The decision to call its own ally, Israel, for its own good, to recognition of international law would do precisely these things for the United States. The Likud aggressors and the settler movement, with their allies within the Washington Beltway, would howl, but briefly. Like the British government which was so infuriated when President Clinton made his first moves on Northern Ireland, the howlers would soon come to realize that he had done them the service they needed more than anything else.

Is the Arab world ready to respond to such an action generously, with generosity to an Israel that stepped away from its ruinous policies? That readiness has already been manifest ever since the Arab nations made their massive peace proposal of 2002.

And what of Hamas? Its leaders clearly know that Palestinians cannot succeed in achieving a life for themselves unless they reconcile with Fatah and work together with them for the good of their people. They have suspected Abbas, Fayyad and all their colleagues of being collaborators in their own destruction, but Abbas is determinedly showing now that he is nothing of the sort. That he finds himself so helpless in the face of the Israeli juggernaut is, to an enormous extent, due to the schism itself between his party and Hamas. Both sides in this quarrel recognize this and desire to heal the breach. What holds them apart are technicalities, which can be resolved if they are not fed by suspicions.

This column has insisted for some time that the massive wounds of the Middle East can be healed, that the persons involved can actually be the ones to bring about a resolution of the problems that beset them, that there are reservoirs of good will in the populations that are opposed to one another, and that these can be tapped if they turn toward one another with recognition and respect. President Obama, if he overcomes the fears that have to have hold of him, can be the essential catalyst that sets such a development in motion, for the good of Israelis, Palestinians, all their neighbors and in fact all the rest of the world. Inshallah, and on that we can rely.

- Fr. Raymond G. Helmick, S.J. is instructor in conflict resolution, Department of Theology, Boston College and author of Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp David Failed (London, Pluto Press 2004). Dr. Nazir Khaja is chairman of Islamic Information Service, Los Angeles.