It turns out that at least when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration is this: team Bush had better choreography.
The Guardian now reports:
The US vice-president, Joe Biden, today attempted to salvage the Middle East peace talks after the Palestinians announced they were pulling out of a new round of indirect negotiations before they had begun.
The Palestinian move was in protest against Israel’s decision to build hundreds of new homes in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem.
The withdrawal from negotiations, announced in Cairo by Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, represents a major setback to months of diplomacy by the US administration prior to Biden’s visit to the region.
The US vice-president said an agreement would be “profoundly” in Israel’s interests and appealed to the Israeli government to make a serious attempt to reach peace with the Palestinians
Even so, Biden went on to say that in Israel the US has “no better friend”.
Does the vice president, does this administration, have no dignity?
Is it so craven that in the moment of its humiliation it feels driven to ingratiate itself even further?
What Goliaths are these that never fail in turning America’s leaders into gibbering fools?
Gideon Levy offers credit where credit is due:
Here’s someone new to blame for everything: Eli Yishai. After all, Benjamin Netanyahu wanted it so much, Ehud Barak pressed so hard, Shimon Peres wielded so much influence – and along came the interior minister and ruined everything.
There we were, on the brink of another historic upheaval (almost). Proximity talks with the Palestinians were in the air, peace was knocking on the door, the occupation was nearing its end – and then a Shas rogue, who knows nothing about timing and diplomacy, came and shuffled all the proximity and peace cards.
The scoundrel appeared in the midst of the smile- and hug-fest with the vice president of the United States and disrupted the celebration. Joe Biden’s white-toothed smiles froze abruptly, the great friendship was about to disintegrate, and even the dinner with the prime minister and his wife was almost canceled, along with the entire “peace process.” And all because of Yishai.
Well, the interior minister does deserve our modest thanks. The move was perfect. The timing, which everyone is complaining about, was brilliant. It was exactly the time to call a spade a spade. As always, we need Yishai (and occasionally Avigdor Lieberman) to expose our true face, without the mask and lies, and play the enfant terrible who shouts that the emperor has no clothes.
For the emperor indeed has no clothes. Thank you, Yishai, for exposing it. Thank you for ripping the disguise off the revelers in the great ongoing peace-process masquerade in which nobody means anything or believes in anything.
I have believed that the “emperor had no clothes” since about 2000. Others have believed, or outwardly professed to believe (rather a different thing), that there was a real peace process (that is, something was happening which had some chance of reaching a peace treaty in a reasonably short time). But the incessant growth of the settlements and the concomitant proof that the US was “wrapped around Israel’s finger” (a puppet in a world where the US has so many puppet regimes of its own!) must at least have made people wonder.
If there is, indeed, someone “in the game” who believed as recently as 2000 that there was a “peace process” rather than a sham, will he please identify himself and explain why he so believed?
And, now, maybe it is in fact a forward motion, people are beginning to say that there is no future in peace negotiations as presently structured. Why now? What happened? The US has been in Iraq and Afghanistan for quite some time now, and if our troops were threatened, we’d know it by now. Biden is fooling. Fine! But why now? And why cannot the US stand on its hind legs and say to its own people (and especially to AIPAC, etc.) that it is time to stop putting up with insults from Israel, and time to stop looking the other way while Israel commits war-crimes and violates the laws of belligerent occupation?
There stood VP Biden with the spit running down his nose from Yishai’s figurative spitting in his face as he declared: “PROGRESS CAN ONLY BEGIN WHEN PEOPLE REALIZE THAT THERE’S NO SPACE BETWEEN THE US AND ISRAEL.” Thuuuu! You, Mr. Biden may be a cheap politician used to getting spit on as just the cost of $ political support, but right now you are *OUR* VP so it is *OUR NATION* THAT GOT SPIT ON, not just you. Note that there are no instant-AIPAC polls showing whether most US Jews support this recent insult to THEIR country by that fetus of a state which keeps screaming for another bottle or it will start another battle. This is why so many Jews wish they could grow back their foreskins; they never thought the day would come when their loyalty to their homeland—USA– would be challenged by a bunch of shysters who want someone else’s something for nothing. Netanyahu, clean the trash out of your Cabinet or Diaspora Jews, just like us “dumb goyim,” will consider you and Obama as puppets of these gan