DIGGING THE HOLE DEEPER

from the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 - The Bush administration, moving to lend political support to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at a time of political turmoil, has modified its policy and signaled approval of growth in at least some Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, American and Israeli officials say.

In the latest modification of American policy, the administration now supports construction of new apartments in areas already built up in some settlements, as long as the expansion does not extend outward to undeveloped parts of the West Bank, according to the officials.

Let me put this diplomatically: U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine is fucked. It is immoral, irrational, and inconsistent with U.S. security. It refuses to recognize Israel's settlements for what they clearly are, for what the rest of the world recognizes them as: illegal instruments of expropriation, expansion, and control. They have nothing to do with Israel's security, as previously claimed, and have everything to do with taking control of the region's scarce water resources and arable land, and indulging the irredentist fantasies of religious fanatics.

Like the majority of this president's initiatives, the "roadmap" amounted to a photo-op, a signature, and little else. And as anemic a plan as the roadmap surely was, the president himself then bled it dry when he endorsed Sharon's Gaza pullout plan, which any fool could have predicted was and is merely a song and dance meant to distract from Sharon's larger goal of consolidating and increasing Israeli control over large portions of the occupied West Bank, a goal which has now apparently received the approval of the United States, in contravention of both international law and decades of U.S. policy.

It's impossible to square Bush's claims about changing America's image in the Middle East with his support for continued Israeli expropriation and expansion. Regardless of what hardline Israel supporters in the U.S. would have you believe, the question of Palestine is, in fact, the single most salient issue in the Arab world vis a vis the United States.

Here's a choice quote from Lieut. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, the Israeli army chief of staff:

The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.

My own observations during my visit to Palestine confirm Ya'alon's statement of Israel's intent. Palestinians, of course, understand this all too well, as they live with its effects everyday; the wider Arab world understands it, as Arab news media run stories, almost nonstop, detailing the daily brutalities and humiliations of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. And then they see the United States aiding and abetting that brutality.

I want to believe that President Bush sincerely wants to move toward a negotiated peace between Israel and Palestine, but everything that he does suggests that he's more interested in appeasing his fundamentalist Christian-Zionist base. This new policy shift makes a bad problem worse.