What is happening in Israel? Highway underpasses are lined with posters screaming about the "Jew-hater Obama", with pictures of the American president wearing the Palestinian kaffiyeh.
The office of National Union Member of Parliament Michael Ben Ari has a poster hanging on the wall that depicts Barack Obama under the headline "Agent of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation]." Hundreds of copies of this poster are planned for distribution across the country.
Just as the Americans were gently urging moderate Arab states to fully accept a normalised relationship with Israel and make confidence-building gestures, Israeli agents carrying forged European passports infiltrated Dubai and assassinated a prominent Hamas figure — infuriating the Palestinians, the Arab states and the European Union, and lending credibility to critics who say Israel is the real rogue state in the region.
On a visit to Israel sponsored by the American Jewish lobby group J Street, which claims to be pro-Israel and pro-peace, a group of American congressmen were humiliatingly given the cold shoulder by the Israeli foreign ministry, which refused to meet with them. Their crime: they support the peace process, which Israel officially accepts and which it claims to be anxious to promote.
Add to this the on-going campaign in Israel against Israeli human-rights organisations that dared to provide documentation and field research findings that were used by the UN-mandated Goldstone Commission to support its finding that the Israeli military committed war crimes in Gaza last year. These Israeli human-rights organisations are branded as traitors, who work for the enemy.
All these and other mind-boggling behaviour — the continued dispossession of the Palestinians, the expulsion of Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem, and the inhumanity of the Gaza siege — paint a picture of a country treating the world community and the norms of international law with contempt, engaging in gangster-like assassinations, and belligerently inviting conflict as it systematically undermines any prospects for peace.
The Quartet — made up of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN — which officially sponsors the peace process, condemned the latest Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from occupied Jerusalem and the announcement of new colony construction, and warned that unilateral action cannot prejudge the outcome of peace negotiations.
Further adding to Israel's isolation, the European Parliament adopted a resolution urging its 27 member states to monitor the Israeli and Palestinian investigations into the Goldstone Report's finding that war crimes were committed during the Gaza war last year.
And it was within this tense environment that the Joe Biden incident erupted. The US vice president — a long-time staunch supporter of Israel — went to Israel to advance the Palestinian-Israeli proximity talks, only to be publicly humiliated by the Israeli Ministry of Interior's announcement that the construction of 1,600 new homes for Jews in occupied East Jerusalem had been approved — in total contempt of the Obama administration's demand that all colony construction be halted.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CNN television: "The announcement of the [colonies] on the very day that the vice-president was there was insulting."
Clinton spoke with Netanyahu on the phone and told him the announcement "had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and that the Israeli government needed to demonstrate not just through words but through specific actions that they are committed to the peace process."
Hard to believe
Netanyahu responded by claiming that Israel had already demonstrated its commitment to peace. Reasonable people will find this claim hard to believe. But we are not dealing with reasonable people.
Blinded by their unconditional devotion to Israel, right or wrong, some of Israel's friends in the United States — believing that they are defending Israel — fall into the same trap of hallucinatory irrationality. The president of the Anti-Defamation League — a prominent member of the Israel lobby — criticised American condemnation of the Israeli colony decision in occupied East Jerusalem as an overreaction to "a policy difference" between friends. Another ‘friend' of Israel wrote in a recent issue of Commentary arguing that Israel's standing in the international community had plummeted to an unprecedented low because it had done so much for peace.
Israel's real friends, especially the US, should be concerned. One such friend in the US recently compared Israeli behaviour to that of a drunken driver and urged Washington to show tough love and stop Israel from endangering itself.
It is hard to understand why Netanyahu is not able to see the damage he is inflicting not only on the prospects for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, but also on his own country — setting it on a course of perpetual conflict with the Palestinians, with its neighbours, and with itself.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak had the courage to confront that reality. "The simple truth is, if there is one state including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, it will have to be either bi-national or undemocratic," he recently said at a conference near Tel Aviv. "If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
Adel Safty is distinguished professor adjunct at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration in Russia. His new book, Might Over Right, is endorsed by Noam Chomsky.
