I am pleasantly surprised that the Obama administration isn't just letting this slide. Maybe Israel doesn't have limitless credit at our casino after all. If they keep sabotaging the peace process by provoking the Palestinians and making us look like illegitimate peace brokers, it will only hurt them in the end. They are acting like spoiled brats, and treated Biden (the #2 guy of the world's lone superpower) like a chump when he was supposed to be a guest of the state. It's tragic how all of Obama's hard work and overtures to the Muslim World were mostly erased by his Afghanistan escalation and a few new apartments in Jerusalem.
The settlement BS is undermining Mahmoud Abbas' credibility, who is supposedly Israel's preferred negotiations partner instead of Hamas. He only has the trust of 1/3-1/2 of Palestinians as it is, but if he doesn't deliver solid progress, they will kick him in favor of a more radical voice. So all of Israel's games and nonsense are actually increasing the likelihood of a new Intifada, when instead they could actually seize this moment of relative calm to work out something lasting with the PA. But that tells me that Likud are not concerned with peace. They just want to keep the Palestinians divided, poor, and suppressed, the US government spinning its wheels, and the American public cynical and apathetic about peace prospects. Actually they're probably hoping for Ahmadinejad to run his mouth again or some sort of other Iranian provocation, in order to augment support for tougher sanctions and shift the spotlight from the Two-State Solution. Israel is fixated on defeating their more formidable Iranian foe; the Palestinians are but a mere nuisance.
I expect this from Bibi and the Zionist hard-asses, but I think it's kind of sad that some polls show that many Israelis don't care about peace with the Palestinians anymore. They "won" already, so why the need to make concessions for peace? They built their Berlin Wall so terrorism is near zero, the Gazans are poor and powerless, America is compliant, and their economy is flourishing. Israelis and foreign tourists are going to the beach resorts again. Why mess all that up with peace talks?
Like after the Hamas hit job in Dubai, all but the most dovish Israelis praised it with much national pride (like it was an Olympic gold or something). The target, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was a Hamas operative working to obtain arms from Iran (allegedly). Apart from that indirect threat, he hasn't lifted a finger against Israel in decades, and in fact was held and released by Israeli authorities multiple times. Why let him go if he was such a bad guy? He supposedly orchestrated the kidnapping and killing of 2 Israeli soldiers in 1989. So Israel went though all that effort and nearly got caught in a major diplomatic row just for 20-year-old revenge. And they have the nerve to call Hamas the extremists? Well it takes one to know one. I don't think we can downplay how serious this could have been for Israel if things went worse, like at Watergate. The US took a lot of heat and Americans were generally outraged when we learned about Extraordinary Rendition, faulty Iraq WMD evidence, and the outing of Valerie Plame by Bush's people. But in Israel, a similar scandal was celebrated as a great victory.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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