Between the Lines: American Needs to Be an Honest Broker

Unmentioned in the articles about the Obama administration's pressure on Israel to strangle development of Jewish communities in the disputed territories - while simultaneously allowing unfettered growth of Arab settlements - is the damage it does to America's credibility.

Those who (wrongly) believe American pressure on Israel is vital to the prospects for peace ought to be very concerned.

For those people, Israel can afford to make one-sided concessions because it can trust the United States. Yet here is another example showing American commitments to Israel are ephemeral.

Israel accepted the so-called road map largely because, despite its one-sidedness, it was performance based. This essentially meant, for the first time, supposedly Israel wouldn't be forced to make even more concessions before the Palestinian Arabs upheld their end of the current step.

Israel also included some reasonable reservations in its acceptance
and those reservations were understood and, according to the article in the Washington Post, excerpted below, agreed to by the United States.

Those understandings were also implicit in President Bush's letter to Ariel Sharon recognizing the major Israeli communities in the disputed territories would obviously be incorporated into Israel proper under any conceivable agreement.

The Bush Administration itself undermined the "road map" with the Annapolis meeting, which completely violated the principles of the road map.

The Palestinian Arabs have actually gone backwards in terms of their complying with their only important commitment in the first stage, eliminating their terror infrastructure.

Yet the Obama administration is not only ignoring the fact that the Palestinian Arabs are going backwards, but violating our own commitments to Israel.

The upside is that ultimately it will be up to the Arabs, including the Palestinian Arabs, to recognize it is in their own interests to live in peace with Israel; while America can - although it generally has not - play a helpful role, its role has never and likely never will be critical in promoting peace between the Arabs and Israel.

However, those who believe otherwise ought to be very concerned and should be strongly lobbying the Obama administration to stop undermining the credibility of the United States of America.

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U.S. Urges Israel to End Expansion

Excerpted from The Washington Post. The full article may be read at <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/23/AR2009052301536.html>.

Settlement Issue Is Complicated by Bush Agreement

By Glenn Kessler and Howard Schneider

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, May 24, 2009

The Obama administration is pressing the Israeli government to halt the expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas, U.S. and Israeli officials said, seeking a visible symbol of progress on peace that might inspire Arab states to consider normalizing relations with Jerusalem. The administration's effort is being accompanied by greater willingness by U.S. lawmakers to complain publicly about settlements, but it has been complicated by an unwritten agreement on the issue between Israel and the United States reached during the Bush administration.

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"Natural growth" refers to population expansion as a result of births, adoptions and the like -- a position successive Israeli governments have rejected, though it is an Israeli obligation in the 2003 peace plan known as the "road map." The Bush administration accommodated Israeli concerns with a secret understanding that allowed for growth in settlements that Israel hopes to keep in any peace deal with the Palestinians.

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Regev said the Israeli government is relying on "understandings" between former president George W. Bush and former prime minister Ariel Sharon that some of the larger settlements in the occupied West Bank would ultimately become part of Israel, codified in a letter that Bush gave to Sharon in 2004. In an interview with The Washington Post last year, Sharon aide Dov Weissglas said that in 2005, when Sharon was poised to remove settlers from Gaza, the Bush administration arrived at a secret agreement -- not disclosed to the Palestinians -- that Israel could add homes in settlements it expected to keep, as long as the construction was dictated by market demand, not subsidies.

Elliott Abrams, a former deputy national security adviser who negotiated the arrangement with Weissglas, confirmed the deal in an interview last week. "At the time of the Gaza withdrawal, there were lengthy discussions about how settlement activity might be constrained, and in fact it was constrained in the later part of the Sharon years and the Olmert years in accordance with the ideas that were discussed," he said. "There was something of an understanding realized on these questions, but it was never a written agreement."

Regev said Israeli and U.S. negotiators are discussing the degree to which the terms of the 2004 letter will apply under the new administration, but U.S. officials indicated that Obama wants to move beyond the 2004 letter and hold Israel to its commitments under the road map. "The bottom line is we expect all the parties in the region to honor their commitments, and for the Israelis, that means a stop to settlements, as the president said," a senior administration official said.

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Ignoring the morality of attempting the strangulation of Jewish communities in the disputed territories while promoting the growth of Arab settlements in those territories and the fact that Israel did not agree to a total construction freeze, where is the pressure on the Palestinian Arabs to adhere to their commitment to dismantle their terror infrastructure, not to mention ending incitement, including teaching hatred of Jews in their school systems?