US President Barack Obama's Middle East peace initiative has run aground at the start line. Addressing the world's Muslims in Cairo last June, he had said the US does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. Noting that "the construction violates previous agreements, and undermines efforts to achieve peace", he had averred, "it is time for these settlements to stop."
Yet it did not take long for his administration to beat a retreat in the face of Israeli intransigence. Israel refused to stop building 3000 new homes in the occupied West Bank, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who had earlier said that all construction, including outposts as well as 'natural growth' settlements, must come to a halt, reversed stance to praise the Jewish state for saying it would 'restrain' the activity.
Israel has now announced a new plan to build 900 housing units in East Jerusalem's Gilo district. Obama has, once again, expressed his disapproval of the activity, saying additional settlement building would make it harder for Israelis to make peace with their neighbours, and that it could embitter the Palestinians in way that could end up being very dangerous.
Obama's sincerity in resolving the situation may be genuine, but the dark reality is that he is powerless before the extraordinary clout the Jewish lobby wields in the American politics. He can invite a serious trouble to his presidency if he insists on pressuring Israel to do the right thing. Palestinians have done all they were asked to do under the US old Road Map.
Palestinian Authority President Mehmoud Abbas has been earnestly trying to fulfil the requirements that the US and Israel demanded of him to pave the way for a viable Palestinian state. Five years on, he has nothing to show his people by way of progress.
A few days ago, he announced his decision not to stand for a second term in the presidential election due in January. Meanwhile, emboldened by Washington's impotence before the Jewish lobby's influence, Israel is laying, with renewed emphasis, a claim to all of East Jerusalem, the designated capital of a future Palestinian state, which is part of the territories Israel occupied during the 1967 war.
It is no accident that all the occupied territories where settlements have kept expanding happen to contain 80 percent of the Palestinian water resource. Israel is working systematically to grab the best lands out of the 22 percent of what remains of historic Palestine with the Palestinians. Soon they would be left with ghettoised and fragmented remains of their homeland, if they do not act soon enough to take an alternative course.
It, indeed, is a decisive moment for them. The two options they are now talking about are to declare an independent state within the 1967 borders or to go for a one-state solution, living side by side with Jews. They cannot expect the US to broker a just peace, and hence must decide sooner rather than later on either of the two options presently under discussion.
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