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The Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is making concerted efforts to avoid a looming crisis with the Obama administration over the issue of Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank.
United States President Barack Obama is demanding that Israel freeze all settlement expansion projects in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in order to enable the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
However, Netanyahu has so far been defying American demands, resorting to diversionary tactics and vague statements about accepting a Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
On Monday, 6 July, the Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who is effectively acting as an extraordinary foreign minister in lieu of the widely- despised Avigdor Lieberman, met once again in London for 90 minutes with US Peace Envoy George Mitchell.
Barak was trying to sell the Obama administration its usual bill of goods, offering to dismantle "illegal outposts" in return for obtaining an American consent for allowing construction of settlement buildings in "legal outposts".
The two had met earlier in New York and held "intensive discussions" on the settlement expansion issue. Barak described the meeting as "positive and constructive", saying that "there was no crisis in relations between the US and Israel."
However, subsequent reports indicated that the New York meeting was a failure as Mitchell refused to accept salesman Barak's used-cars which would allow Israel to continue building thousands of settler units under the rubric of "natural growth".
A few weeks ago, a Western diplomat confronted Israeli officials on the "illegal settlements", asking them why Israel, an ostensibly democratic state where the rule of law is upheld, allowed illegal outposts to be established in the first place. The officials evaded the question, arguing that the issue was "more complicated than it seems".
According to the Israeli media, Barak has been trying to impress Mitchell with an offer to dismantle 26 outposts, three of which have already been dismantled. The Americans, however, have a list of at least 100 outposts they insist Israel must dismantle. The bulk of these outposts were established after the end of the "Oslo era", especially since 2000, and are built mostly on private Palestinian land seized at gunpoint by settlers, often in coordination with the Israeli occupation army.
In 2005 and 2008 Israel made commitments to dismantle the very same outposts, but to no avail. This probably explains why Barak gave Mitchell no timetable for removing the posts, a sign that Israel doesn't really intend to carry out this old commitment, which is part of the American-backed roadmap.
Some Israeli commentators have labelled Israeli efforts to cajole the US to accept a "compromise" on settlement expansion "playing on borrowed time". Writing in Haaretz this week, Akiva Eldar said that Israel should realise that the US considers all Jewish settlement activities illegal, even in East Jerusalem. "There is no magical formula by which Israel can convince the Obama administration to accept the settlement expansion."
If the sought "compromise" with the US fails to materialise, it is widely expected that Israel will declare its "willingness" to freeze settlement construction in return for far-reaching concessions from the Arab camp: first, a recognition by the Palestinians of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state in which non-Jews have to accept racial inferiority or leave, and, second, a deep multi-faceted normalisation between Israel and the entire Arab world.
Israel, of course, realises that the Palestinians and other Arabs would never accept such humiliating preconditions which amount to a kind of capitulation to Israeli intransigence. Hence, such a declaration would be a continuation of the policy of posturing, which represents the modus operandi of the Netanyahu government discourse.
It is also an indication that Israel is not really interested in reaching an honest and dignified peace with the Palestinians but is only trying to throw the proverbial ball into the Arab or at least the American court.
Netanyahu has actually been bragging about succeeding in creating "a national consensus" on the restrictions and proscriptions that would make his "acceptance" of Palestinian statehood null and void.
In his speech at Bar Ilan University last month, Netanyahu, who barely uttered the word "Palestinian state" once, said Israel would have to tightly control of the borders, border crossings, air space, water resources, and foreign relations of such a state which he said had to be completely demilitarised.
Netanyahu also said the Palestinians would have to give up the right of return for millions of refugees uprooted from their homes when Israel was created in Palestine in 1948. He also said occupied East Jerusalem would remain part of Israel in the context of any peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Preferring to appease and please his extreme right-wing coalition partners rather than to deal honestly with growing international demands for ending the 42-year-old Nazi-like occupation, Netanyahu is increasingly betting on Barak, who is mendaciously marketed by the Israeli hasbra machine as "leftist" and Israeli President Shimon Peres, the presumed "dove of peace".
Last week, Peres, who participated in an interfaith conference in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, called on Saudi King Abdullah "to meet me in Jerusalem, or Riyadh or any other place to make the promise of peace come true."
Viewed widely as a master of hypocrisy and moral duplicity, Peres utterly ignored the fact that the dream of peace has been virtually killed by the inexorable Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and also by consistent Israeli rejection of all Arab peace offers, including Saudi Arabia's own Arab peace initiative.
Nonetheless, it is increasingly clear that neither Netanyahu's prevarication, nor Barak's salesman tactics, and not even Peres's public relations magic are making many people give Israel the benefit of the doubt.
On Monday, 6 July, former Israeli foreign minister and opposition leader Tzipi Livni accused Netanyahu of being dishonest and disingenuous about his declared commitment to the two-state solution.
"He doesn't know that this is the right path for Israel, but he understands this is the right thing to say. The world is demanding it, so he says 'I have to say it,' this is how he explained his speech to his faction members," Livni was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, the expansion of settlements goes on unabated as if there is no crisis over the matter. The Jerusalem Post on 6 July reported that the government was providing financial inducements to encourage settlers to buy homes in the West Bank.
The heavy subsidies, said Peace Now, which monitors Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank, would help potential settlers move to the settlements. "In this way, the government proves its rejection of the two-state solution."
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