The request by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the US to allow Israel to complete building thousands of units in Jewish settlements in the West Bank before halting construction there, as well as to allow the government to construct public buildings and continue construction in East Jerusalem — a territory Palestinians hope will be their future capital — is unprecedented in the annuls of the conflict. The establishment and expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories has no legal validity as registered by UN Security Council resolutions. Israel’s settlement policy is illegal, discriminatory and a violation of Palestinian human rights.
As jolting as Netanyahu’s suggestion was the reply by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who qualified Israel’s settlement policy as putting “significant limits on settlement activity.” What a huge U-turn for the US that not long ago had demanded Israel halt all settlement building. However, the US reaction is not so surprising when put in context. When Netanyahu took office seven months ago, the Obama administration called on Israel to halt all settlement building before negotiations could resume. Netanyahu did not oblige, forcing Washington to call for the next best thing: To get the negotiations going again.
By refraining from exercising any level of pressure on Tel Aviv to halt settlements, Washington has in effect approved this policy, leaving Palestinian negotiators with nothing to discuss in any future peace talks. This is bound to create another wave of tension amongst Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.
And if Clinton also agreed with a statement by Netanyahu that Palestinians had never demanded a settlement freeze in the past as a condition for sitting down with Israel, that would be because there have never been so many Israeli settlements. Israel is preparing to issue tenders for 500 housing units in East Jerusalem and refuses to halt construction of 5,970 settlements in the West Bank. Now Netanyahu wants to finish building 3,000 units in the West Bank. By contrast, since 1967, not a single Palestinian home has gained permission to be built in West Jerusalem. Moreover, while Israel built more than 50,000 settler units for Jews in and around East Jerusalem, not a single apartment was built by the Israeli state for the town’s Palestinian inhabitants.
This is an illegitimate land grab, the size of which transgresses anything seen in the past.
Visits by the Middle East special envoy George Mitchell have so far failed to produce any tangible action. US President Barack Obama personally tried to jump-start talks in September by bringing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Netanyahu together with Obama but that high-profile sit-down produced no breakthroughs.
It is Clinton’s turn these days. With regard to Israeli settlements, her expressed goal is to “narrow the gap to a sufficient degree” so both sides can agree to resume negotiations. If she cannot fair any better than Obama and Mitchell, then at least she should try to make sure things don’t slide backward. But her unabashed alliance with Netanyahu over the settlements widens the gap further and creates a slide more precipitous.
A long way to go
EXCERPTS from an editorial in The Christian Science Monitor on Thursday:
The American economy flipped from recession to recovery over the summer, a bit of sunshine news just before the weekend that ends daylight saving time. But even President Barack Obama, who claims his stimulus spending has created or saved 650,000 jobs so far, isn’t celebrating quite yet.
The news of a 3.5 percent rise in economic growth was met with plenty of “Is this a trick or a treat?” comments by market watchers. And Obama himself warned that the US economy has “a long way to go” to being fully restored. Indeed, coming back from the longest economic contraction since World War II will require a careful assessment of what has worked so far to avoid making policy mistakes. Economists are still debating what ended the Great Depression, which was triggered 80 years ago this month by the 1929 stock market crash.
With midterm elections for Congress a year away, politicians will be focused on job creation.
More than 4 million jobs have been lost so far this year, a source of great suffering for many Americans. And the unemployment rate, now double what it was two years ago and at a 26-year high, could rise above 10 percent soon and stay high a while even as the economy itself recovers.
The job losses would have been higher if not for the $787 billion stimulus plan, the government’s “cash for clunkers” boost in new-car sales, and the $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers. But such spending, which largely takes money out of the economy to spend it elsewhere, is temporary.
Real job creation comes from the more fundamental levers of government, such as actions by the Federal Reserve and US Treasury to stabilize banks and Wall Street and to keep interest rates low. Fresh capital invested in innovative, globally competitive enterprises is what really creates the best high-paying, long-lasting jobs.
A nice uptick in the economy over the summer is welcome news. Now let’s make sure that it lasts by putting more capital to work in order to get Americans back to work.
