maandag 22 maart 2010

Witte Huis wil 'regime change' in Israel

 
Het streven van de regering Obama zou zijn om de overwegend rechtse coalitie in Israel uiteen te drijven middels het afdwingen van een bouwstop in Oost-Jeruzalem. Likoed en de Arbeidspartij zouden dan een nieuwe coalitie moeten vormen met Kadima, die anders dan de huidige het vredesproces weer op gang zou kunnen brengen, en wellicht eindelijk ook zou kunnen voltooien. Los van de problemen aan Palestijnse kant, zou deze aanpak echter niet gaan werken, zoals Ratna op IMO uitlegt met behulp van Ami Isseroff's inzichten: Conflict met Amerika over bouwen Jeruzalem verenigt Israel
Zoals wel vaker immers pakt een volk zich juist samen als er een dreiging of druk van buitenaf op wordt uitgeoefend, en Jeruzalem zou niet alleen voor rechts Israel 'heilig' zijn, maar voor de overgrote meerderheid een 'consensus issue'. Zoiets als hier het homohuwelijk, om maar weer een willekeurige ongepaste vergelijking te maken. Zouden wij toegeven aan buitenlandse druk om dat weer af te schaffen?
 
Wouter
 
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Angry White House seeks to 'modify' Israeli regime
President Barack Obama's team hope to push Right-wing premier Benjamin Netanyahu into a coalition which will put peace talks on track.
 
By Adrian Blomfield in Ramat Shlomo and Alex Spillius in Washington
Published: 5:30PM GMT 20 Mar 2010
 
 
It is an hour or two before the Sabbath, and customers spill out of Gershon Hickmann's small grocery shop in Ramat Shlomo dressed in the sober costume of Hasidic Jewry and clutching bags crammed with loaves of challah bread for their Friday evening meals.
 
Despite the utilitarianism of the East Jerusalem suburb's homes, there is a sense of timelessness, born of the settlement's religious devotion and semi-rural setting.
 
Yet across the valley, black smoke rises from burning barricades beyond the Palestinian refugee camp of Shuafat. No one affects to notice the fumes, nor the distant popping of tear gas canisters and stun grenades, a reminder of the almost daily clashes that have erupted between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces ever since Ramat Shlomo found itself at the centre of unwanted international attention.
 
For Jewish settler families, there is nothing controversial about the plans to erect 1,600 new homes. But for Washington they represent an insult that has reduced relations between the United States and Israel to their lowest ebb in a generation. The friendship that has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy for 40 years and sustained a small democracy in a perilously hostile neighbourhood has moved on to novel, shaky ground.
 
Rather than peace process, the new buzz phrase in Washington is "regime modification", as the Obama administration examines how it can force a rupture in the ruling right-wing coalition and put talks between the Israelis and Palestinians back on a real meaningful track.
 
Israel chose to announce the expansion of Ramat Shlomo as Joe Biden, the US vice president, was in the Holy Land to clinch an agreement to relaunch indirect negotiations which were regarded as the first albeit limited sign of progress of the Obama era.
 
Initially Mr Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, shook hands and made up. But inside the White House there is no appetite for reconciliation. Under the direction of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, was ordered to give Mr Netanyahu a telephonic dressing down in which she demanded the homes plan be rescinded.
 
Mr Obama has invested his prestige heavily in securing a peace deal in the Middle East that has eluded his predecessors – saying it would happen two years from taking office – and this was the latest but greatest rebuke Mr Netanyahu had delivered.
 
"Behind his cool detached demeanour, there is a part of Obama that is easily frustrated, almost arrogant. I am sure he has reached boiling point," said Aaron David Miller, a senior Middle East negotiator in the Clinton administration.
 
A frostiness bordering on animosity has been evident since the two leaders first met last May and Mr Obama demanded a freeze on new settlements and placed the greater burden of compromise on the Israelis than the Palestinians.
 
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general to Washington, characterised the relationship between the White House and the prime minister's office as "almost unprecedentedly non-existent".
 
Hostilities ran both ways. Mr Netanyahu last year reportedly said that David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the two most senior Obama aides, were "self-hating Jews".
 
Axelrod has an Obama campaign poster in Hebrew on his office wall. Emanuel is taking his son to Israel soon for his bar mitzvah; he volunteered for the Israeli Defence Force in the 1991 Gulf War. "These are not the actions of self-hating Jews," said a source close to the White House.
 
This week, Mr Netanyahu's brother-in-law called Mr Obama an "anti-semite". The in-house magazine of Shas, a Right-wing party in the Netanyahu coalition led by interior minister Eli Yishai – the man blamed for the Ramat Shlomo decision – described the US president as "a Muslim and an amateur".
 
Mr Netanyahu has never been popular in Washington. When he was first prime minister in the 1990s, a state department official under Bill Clinton was asked how the United States viewed Mr Netanyahu. "We hate him," came the reply.
 
Mr Clinton was able to elbow the Israeli out of office by appealing over his head to the Israeli public. The key question now for the Obama administration is how hard to push – not to remove Mr Netanyahu altogether – but to form a new coalition with Tzipi Livni and her centrist Kadima party.
 
"There is potential to use this crisis and say we have to move forward," said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank. "The coalition is fragile and Netanyahu is not that popular, while Livni is trying to position herself as a potential coalition partner. This is at least a chance to finally and fully dictate American expectations. There are people in the White House who get this."
 
The weekend brought a fresh round of diplomacy and violence.
 
Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, arrived in the West Bank on Saturday to meet Palestinian leaders and press for a resumption of talks.
 
He said the world had condemned Israel's expansion plans in East Jerusalem.
 
"Let us be clear: all settlement activity is illegal anywhere in occupied territory, and this must stop," he added.
 
His visit began hours after at least 11 people were injured in Israeli air strikes which targeted Gaza's disused international airport in the second night of raids since a Palestinian rocket killed an Israeli farm worker on Thursday.
 
All eyes and ears will be on Hillary Clinton tomorrow [Mon] when she delivers a speech at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful lobby group that critics say has kept Washington policy too close to Netanyahu's centre-right Likud party over the years.
 
In the past few days Washington has softened its rhetoric, abandoning unprecedentedly strong diplomatic language such as "condemn". Mr Obama said the disagreement was not a "crisis" and tried to portray it as a healthy dispute between friends.
 
Mr Netanyahu, after a gap of six days, finally returned Mrs Clinton's call and pledged his commitment to the so-called "proximity talks" with the Palestinians and suggested "mutual confidence-building measures" by Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. He and Mrs Clinton will take advantage of his visit to Aipac to hold a meeting, the choreography of which will be carefully watched.
 
But whatever is now being said in public, the Israeli prime minister knows that much more will be expected of him, and that his earlier offer to stop settlement-building in the occupied West Bank (as opposed to East Jerusalem) will not appease a US president grown highly impatient.
 
The slight against Mr Biden is not even at the crux of the dispute. Nor is it Jewish construction in East Jerusalem, as sensitive an issue as it is for Palestinians who believe there is a plot to make Arabs a minority in the capital they yearn.
 
For a fundamental rift has opened up between the two allies. Mr Netanyahu's commitment to a genuine deal with the Palestinians is regarded with suspicion in Washington, Mr Obama does not regard Jewish settlements as an issue central to Israel's existence, as right-wingers do. Rather it emphasises that a speedy resumption of talks is as essential to its own interests.
 
"If Biden hadn't come and talks had started, I have no doubt that after one, two, three meetings it would have ended in crisis as the US would have realise that what they want to hear and what Netanyahu is prepared to say is very different," said a former senior official in the Israeli government.
 
It emerged that earlier this month Gen David Petraeus, currently America's most influential commander, warned that the impasse in the peace talks was endangering American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan by wrecking US credibility with Arab states and inflaming anti-Americanism. It was strong stuff.
 
"Petraeus slapped Israel in the face, not on the wrist," said Mr Pinkas. "He was basically saying to Israel that you are a liability rather than the asset you think you are."
 
Previous Israeli prime ministers have managed to alleviate international pressure, either by conducting genuine peace talks or by going through the motions of negotiations. But since he assumed office a year ago, Mr Netanyahu has contrived to do neither. He has however managed to annoy his country's greatest benefactor.
 
 

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