Juan Cole

Likud is hoping that somehow along the way the indigenous population will gradually be convinced to leave for Egypt or Jordan, as the Israelis move in. (Some hard nudging is not ruled out by some elements of the party.) In the meantime, in the words of Likud leader Netanyahu, the Palestinians might have self-rule, but would not be allowed to have self-government.

In reality, it is the Palestinians, with their high population growth rates, who have the demographic advantage. Israel’s ability to retain new immigrants fell during the second intifada or Palestinian uprising. As the Russian economy benefits from high petroleum prices, further major immigration by Jews from that country seems unlikely. Indeed, some of the 1 million Russians in Israel, many of them not actually Jewish, may start returning to the old country. By 2020, most projections predict that Jews will be a minority in the area comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Even among Israeli citizens, Israeli government demographers predict that by 2030 the population could be a third Arab.

Sharon, unlike the Likud, understood the threat these demographic trends posed to Israel, and so saw the future as one in which Israel stopped expanding in some directions, instead accepting a fixed territory. It would become a huge gated community, surrounded by seven or eight small enclaves. Each enclave might remain a bad neighborhood, but gates, punitive raids and assassinations would keep the ghetto dwellers from storming the citadel. The “gates” include checkpoints, highways and a wall that would have made the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi — who built his own Great Wall — proud. It would break up the Palestinian regions into isolated cantons and guarantee that they could never mobilize politically and would remain de facto stateless. It would also preserve the Jewish polity by keeping the Palestinians in their current limbo, prevented from claiming Israeli citizenship even as they are denied a viable state of their own.

That the scheme probably creates a permanent state of low-intensity warfare between the Israelis and Palestinians is a price Sharon was willing to pay for the permanent territorial gains and diplomatic superiority it guaranteed Israel. Indeed, this condition of staccato conflict between the wealthy Israelis behind their various gates and the dispossessed Palestinians outside is what Sharon seems to have thought of as “security” for Israel.

Both the Likud and Sharon were dedicated to forestalling the emergence of even a weak Palestinian state, of a sort implied by the Oslo peace process accepted by the late Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. Although they said they feared that such a state would pose a military threat to Israel, that seems rather unlikely. It is more probable that they feared that it would gain diplomatic and political legitimacy in the world, gaining a voice among nations that the Palestinians currently lack. Likud and Sharon roared that Rabin had made an error of biblical proportions in agreeing to such a state. Elements of the Israeli far right agreed, and one Yigal Amir took matters into his own hands, assassinating Rabin in 1995.

Amir’s bullets ended the Oslo process and sounded the death knell for a genuine Palestinian state. Even in the 1990s, the number of Israeli colonists in the West Bank had doubled, which enraged Palestinians took as a sign of bad faith, and which ultimately led to the outbreak of the second Intifada. Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in the Muslim world, was merely the spark that ignited the uprising. During his three years as prime minister, 1996-99, Rabin’s successor and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly derailed what was left of the Oslo process, which had called for a phased Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and movement toward a Palestinian government.

Despite the myth that at Camp David in summer 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat 98 percent of what he was demanding, in fact the Israelis were not nearly so forthcoming. Barak declined to meet with Arafat privately (so that it was the Palestinians who had difficulty finding an Israeli interlocutor). And Barak insisted on keeping 10 percent of Palestinian land, rather as though the British had offered to end the Revolutionary War in 1780 if only George Washington would agree to cede Maine to them. Clayton Swisher, in his fine study “The Truth About Camp David,” shows that the Israelis bear significant blame for the breakdown of the negotiations.

The conflict between Sharon and his own Likud Party over his withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 reflected the two differing visions of the Israeli right. For Sharon, Gaza itself could be configured as an enormous slum. The withdrawal of the Israeli colonists from Gaza was simply a way of moving them into the gated community, so as to keep them safe more cheaply than military patrols and reprisals could hope to. (Gaza had not been notably rundown in the 1940s, but the rise of Israel and the isolation of the Strip from its natural markets, especially after 1967, gradually turned it into a huge penitentiary.)

Moreover, the Gaza maneuver took pressure off Israel to move in a deliberate way toward withdrawal from the West Bank. Sharon’s advisor Dov Weisglass notoriously explained the Gaza withdrawal to Haaretz in October 2004:

“I found a device, in cooperation with the management of the world, to ensure that there will be no stopwatch here. That there will be no timetable to implement the settlers’ nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?”

Weisglass, who later repudiated his interview, actually called the Gaza withdrawal a sort of “formaldehyde” for the negotiations into which Israel had been pressured by the United States and the European Union, for all the world as though he were a diplomatic kidnapper. The unilateral Gaza withdrawal would involve no negotiations with the Palestinians, since Sharon had decided that there was no one to talk to. This allegation, of there being no Palestinian interlocutors, is an updated version of the old (monstrous) Zionist myth, most famously articulated by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinians at all.

Supporters of the Likud demonstrated in the tens of thousands against the Gaza withdrawal in summer of 2005. They did not accept Sharon’s theory of enclaves and a fixed gated community. They saw Israel as an ever-expanding, territorially dynamic political reality. Sharon could see that an expanding Israel might well eventually be saddled with new Palestinian citizens of Israel, since the world community would not forever accept their demotion to statelessness even in their own homes. Spinning off the enclaves, and building an apartheid wall, would forestall this scenario.

The fiction that the Palestinians would ultimately get their state could be maintained to the sour Europeans and naive Americans until the point at which it was obvious it would never happen, a decade or more hence (“until the Palestinians become Finns”). The Palestinian Authority, or whatever entity survived, could then claim authority over the congeries of Palestinian ghettos, and could call them a state if it liked, but it would never actually have the sort of territory or authority or sovereignty associated with states. Observers have long drawn a parallel between Sharon’s policy of ghettoizing the Palestinians, and the way the South African whites spun off small Bantustans to relieve themselves of unwanted potential black citizens.

The Israeli prime minister appears to have believed that he could destroy the militant fundamentalist movement Hamas, which launched large numbers of deadly terrorist operations against Israel, by murdering enough of its leaders. (I use the word “murder” to describe extra-judicial killings. That the victims were leaders of a terrorist movement was something for which they could have been arrested and convicted instead, and is irrelevant to whether they were murdered.) Israeli security officials adopted a political science theory that you can cause an organization to collapse if you neutralize even a fourth of its leadership.

Sharon’s systematic execution of the civilian Hamas leadership even extended to firing a rocket at a nearly blind old man in a wheelchair, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who could surely have been arrested if Israeli authorities had evidence he had committed a crime. Yassin, ironically, had after years of militancy begun urging a “hundred years truce” with the Israelis, and his voice may have restrained some impatient Palestinian youth activists. That voice went silent as Yassin was wheeled out of a mosque on March 22, 2004. Six others were killed by the rocket, and a dozen wounded. Soon thereafter militants in Fallujah, Iraq, killed four Western security agents, claiming to have done so in the memory of Yassin, setting the stage for the destabilization of western Iraq.

Far from wiping out Hamas, Sharon watered its saplings with the blood of martyrs. It has done unprecedentedly well in recent Palestinian elections, even on the West Bank, where it had earlier been weak. The moderate, secular president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was reported in the Jordanian press on Monday to be privately considering resigning if Hamas wins the forthcoming legislative elections.

Sharon’s formaldehyde was powerful, and it did indeed put the world to sleep on the pressing issue of continued Israeli dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians. Still, he dealt a permanent, if partial, setback to the expansionist and aggressive Likud Party. It is hard to imagine that even if it returned to power, the party could realistically hope to put colonists back into Gaza. Instead, the Hamas Party, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, will almost certainly rule the strip.

The old general with so much blood on his hands was given the equivalent of formaldehyde by his physicians over the weekend, to induce a coma. Induced sleep is never more than a stopgap measure, however, since the patient must eventually awake to face the real world. The dark vision of Ariel Sharon, of Israel as walled fortress, with hordes of leaderless, hopeless, violent Palestinian plebeians trapped in serial enclaves outside the marble walls, virtually guarantees a Hundred Years War in the Mideast. It enrages the Arab and Muslim world and is a leading cause of its hatred of Israel’s patron, America. It hardly creates a situation that would attract Jewish immigration, or help retain Jews already in Israel. It erases the Palestinians as persons, reducing them only to the occasional violence in which some of them engage. Sharon himself never understood, and now perhaps never will understand, that only war can be waged unilaterally. Peace requires negotiations and partners.

The episode underlines the ways in which their forced statelessness leaves Palestinians (almost uniquely among major world nationalities) completely vulnerable to loss of the most basic human rights. That he was forcibly moved to Gaza by the Israelis suggests that many of those singled out for potential deportation from the West Bank may be moved to the small slum along the Mediterranean, which the Israelis have cut off from its traditional markets and which they keep under a blockade of the civilian population (a war crime). The Israeli establishment has decided not to try to colonize Gaza, and its isolation and hopelessness make it an attractive place for them to begin exiling West Bank residents, thus making more room for Israeli colonists.

The new policy, which is illegal six ways to Sunday in international law, is the brainchild of the government of far right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, an Israeli hawk and expansionist, slapped President Barack Obama in the face again Thursday when he confirmed that he refused to halt construction of new homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is militarily occupied by Israel.

Netanyahu’s announcement is probably the nail in the coffin of any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (in which the Israelis have thrown most Palestinians now living beyond the Green Line off their land and deprived them of citizenship in a state and all the rights that go with such citizenship). Palestinians are so despairing that only 57 percent even believe in having an independent Palestinian state any more. The rest are resigned to becoming Israelis in the distant future, when demographic realities and perhaps world-wide boycotts of Israel for its apartheid-style policies toward the occupied Palestinian will force Israel to accept them.

At the same time, Netanyahu tried to throw sand in peoples’ eyes by talking about recognizing an ‘interim’ Palestinian state with “temporary” borders.

Palestinian leaders reject this formulation, which is intended to allow the Israelis to continue aggressively to colonize Palestinian territory while pretending that they are engaged in a “peace process.” The Palestine Authority, established in the 1990s, was already a sort of interim state then, and Palestine’s borders were then “temporary.” So temporary that Israel has made deep inroads into them through massive colonies and building a wall on the Palestinian side of the border, cutting residents off from their own farms and sequestering entire towns and cities.

Netanyahu’s various moves this week, from illegally expelling a Palestinian from the West Bank to Gaza — to blowing off the president of the United States and hitching his wagon to massive increased colonization of Palestinian land — all of these steps are guaranteed to mire Israel in violent disputes for years and perhaps decades. And the U.S., which has already suffered tremendously in Iraq and elsewhere from its knee-jerk support of illegal and inhumane Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, will suffer further.

Meanwhile, in the wake of a vicious attack on Barack Obama by New York Senator Chuck Schumer, Steve Clemons of the Washington Note frankly wonders whether Schumer understands he is in the U.S. Senate or whether he is under the impression he is serving in the Israeli Knesset.

“Yunus Muhammad” says in the interview that the Quran instructs Muslims to “terrorize the disbelievers.” It does no such thing. The Quran instructs Muslims to live at peace with non-Muslims who are at peace with them.

The verse to which this individual referred was in the chapter of the Spoils (al-Anfal), 8:60:

Wa a`iddu lahum ma istata`tum min quwwatin wamin ribati ‘lkhayli turhibuna bihi `aduwwa Allahi wa`aduwwakum

Which means, “Prepare against them all the power, and all the war horses that you can, whereby to strike fear into the enemies of God and your enemies.”

The context of this verse is the Battle of Badr on March 17, 624 of the Common Era. In the 610s, the pagan Meccans had persecuted the new religion of Islam and ultimately chased Muhammad and the Muslims out of Mecca for preaching the one God. They took refuge in the nearby city of Yathrib, which became known as Medina (i.e., the City [of the Prophet]). The wealthy Meccan polytheists hoped to wipe Islam and the Muslims out, and fought skirmishes with them. The early Muslims riposted by raiding Meccan trading caravans, in hopes of weakening their foe economically. That March in 624, the Meccans sent out their best fighters to protect a caravan. A Muslim force more or less stumbled onto this expedition. Badr, named after a well south of Medina, was the first major battle between the two sides, and the Muslims won it, thus saving themselves from genocide.

So what the Quran is saying in 8:60 is that the Muslims should keep a stable of fighting steeds at the ready and let the Meccans know about it, to strike fear into the hearts of an enemy trying to wipe out them and their religion.

The verse does not command any act of “terrorism.” It commands that Muslims attempt to forestall irrational violence against a Muslim state through deterrence. It is defensive in intent.

The verse does not say anything about mere ‘disbelievers’ or non-Muslims. It is warning of the designs of “enemies of God,” i.e., militant and violent anti-Muslims. Moreover, there is no implication that Muslims should act as individuals or vigilantes. Medina was a city-state that the Prophet Muhammad ruled, and he gave the orders. Muslims could not just run off and attack whomever they pleased whenever they pleased. A duly constituted Muslim state was in charge of defense of the community.

So unless Yunus Muhammad can find a group of armed individuals who aim at violently attacking Muslims en masse and trying to wipe out them and their religion, he should stuff a sock in it and go home.

In fact, trying to import terrorism into the Quran is an infinitely greater blasphemy than that of any Western cartoonist, and one would hope Muslim groups would get more upset about Yunus Muhammad and “Revolution Muslim” than about an irreverent American TV program.

Unfortunately, along with people with genuinely hurt feelings, there will be some cynical political forces that manipulate Muslim fundamentalists and will try to advance their agendas by taking advantage of this “South Park” controversy. (The show depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit to avoid showing him — which is about as close as “South Park” gets to deference to religious feelings.)

The Obama administration is now moving to tighten economic sanctions on Iran, as an alternative to a more direct approach. These measures include pressuring countries and firms not to buy Iranian petroleum and gas; pressuring them not to sell gasoline to Iran; and attempting to make it difficult for Iranian banks to interface with the world economic system.

While these measures could impose costs on Iran, these costs can easily be borne by the country, and more especially by the regime.

Moreover, it is unclear that President Obama can even swing further sanctions on Iranian petroleum and gas. Such harsh measures are opposed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC bloc of nations that are emerging diplomatic and economic players outside the U.S.-dominated G-7 nations. At the BRIC summit in Brazil last week, a consensus emerged against strong new sanctions on Iran. Brazil is on the U.N. Security Council at the moment, and in May Lebanon will assume the rotating chairmanship of that body. Given that Turkey also currently has a seat and is strongly opposed to new Iran sanctions, it may be difficult for Obama to get a significant new resolution.

Financial sanctions are not all that they are cracked up to be. Iran Oil & Gas reports that from March ’09 to March ’10, Iran swapped 450,000 tons of petroleum products. Some 90 percent of the swaps were with nations of the former Soviet Union (CIS), and 10 percent were with Iraq. Likely we are talking about Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This item is an example of how Iran can import refined gasoline (it has a temporary shortage of refineries) without needing to go through the international banking system. Even if some sort of official ban on trading with Iran could be arranged by the U.S. with these CIS countries and Iraq, private traders and corrupt government officials would simply step into the resulting black market and make a pile. Smuggling oil products out of Iraq on trucks was a specialty of Jordan and Turkey in the 1990s, and that sort of black market would operate quite efficiently were Iran to be put under the sort of sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein.

Few commodities are more easily transported and more fungible (easily exchanged for other goods or for cash) than gasoline, and the plan for a gasoline embargo on Iran (popular in Congress) is a pipe dream.

But we are hardly in a stage of black marketeering. Rather, direct deals are being done by major players, despite the withdrawal of some players, such as Lukoil, from exporting gasoline to Iran. Chinaoil just directly sold Iran 600,000 barrels of gasoline, and Sinopec, another Chinese oil giant, is preparing to resume direct gasoline sales to Iran. Soft gasoline demand in Asia because of the global economic downturn has left petroleum companies with high inventories that they are eager to offload anywhere they can, and Iran as a destination suits them fine.

Reuters reports, “As long as there is money to be made, and economic benefits to be taken advantage off, Iran will always find ready sellers of gasoline from the international market,” a trader said. “The politicians don’t understand markets … sanctions are cosmetic.”

And if direct sales became difficult, indirect ones would be substituted. And if that became difficult, smugglers would step in. A lot of Iraqis would get rich. And while paying extra to smuggle things in would hurt ordinary Iranians, the regime would use its oil profits to cushion the elites and keep them happy. (That cushioning is why very severe sanctions on Iraq never had a chance of shaking the Baathist regime.)

The man said it all: “Sanctions” are purely cosmetic, designed to make it look as though U.S. politicians had taken some dramatic and effective step. It is odd that the politicians in Washington, who are always loudly proclaiming their belief in the market, think its iron laws can be suspended by a simple vote on their parts.

And another development taken as a bellwether of increasingly effective sanctions turns out to have been a mirage. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak clarified remarks he made last Thursday about creeping sanctions on Iran. He was misunderstood to have said that Petronas, the Malaysian petroleum company, had suspended gasoline sales to Iran, but he never said any such thing and it never happened. He referred to a canceled third-party spot oil deal that collapsed for purely economic reasons.

Moreover, Iran’s need to import gasoline is probably temporary. It has the wherewithal to build new refineries, and is doing so. Germany’s ABB Lummus has a a $512 million deal with the National Iranian Oil Co. and a consortium in Iran to raise gasoline production at the Bandar Abbas refinery to about 3.5 million gallons a day from the present 1.3 million gallons.

In fact, there are 10 such projects to expand existing refineries, which could allow Iran to nearly double its production of gasoline by 2012. In addition, Iran is investing nearly $40 billion in building seven new refineries. So even a successful squeeze on Iran’s gasoline imports, if it could be implemented right away, would only have much effect for two years. But such a squeeze is unlikely to be successfully implemented in the first place.

Nor is Iran lacking for customers. A Swiss company just signed a deal worth $13 billion to import Iranian natural gas over the next 25 years. As for financial sanctions, so far Iran is evading them through banking partners in the United Arab Emirates, and Iran and Venezuela have two joint banks. These measures provide Iran with a back door, allowing it to mitigate the effects of financial sanctions.

Very few sanctions have actually produced regime change or altered regime behavior. The U.S. could not even accomplish this goal with regard to a small island 90 miles off its shores, Cuba. That an oil giant halfway around the world with a population of 70 million that is as big as Spain, France and Germany can be effectively bludgeoned with sanctions is not very likely.

The U.S. needs to engage in comprehensive security talks with Iran, in hopes of striking a grand bargain. Because as Adm. Mullen rightly says, there are no good military options here.

As for the first question Wright raises, of the legal implications of assassinations, such as the one President Obama authorized for American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, they are horrible. Having CIA officers operate the drones makes the attacks a covert operation, which cannot be spoken about publicly by U.S. government officials, and which cannot be investigated by ordinary Americans worried about the direction of their government. The drone assassinations are lawless, and they have killed large numbers of innocent civilians, as Wright notes. For Obama to take out a contract on al-Awlaki diminishes us as a nation. If al-Awlaki is guilty of a crime, he should be brought to justice if possible, and tried, even in absentia. Yemeni authorities should arrest him and extradite him on that basis. For the U.S. to allow 300 al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula guys to draw it into unethical actions and perhaps even into an unwinnable war in Yemen, would be foolish.

Jordan’s study seems to me generally sound, and one can think of lots of supporting evidence. It seems to me that it would be useful to further amplify a distinction that Jordan makes, between highly organized and more inchoate religious organizations, with the latter being more common.

1. I would argue that social movements (as opposed to organizations) are particularly difficult to decapitate. Organizations are characterized by a high degree of integration and are tight systems. Movements are more informally arranged than are organizations, and their flexibility and vagueness can help them withstand attacks on leaders. Charles Tilly defined movements with reference to to campaigns, claim-making repertoires or performances, and the demonstration of qualities such as unity, commitment and numbers.

The Greens in Iran since last summer have been a movement, and it seems obvious that Mir Hosain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as leaders are not all that central to it. The Sadrists in Iraq are a movement, and after a campaign of arrests and assassinations waged against them by the U.S. and British militaries and then the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki over years, they continue to survive and reemerged to take some 12 percent of seats in the Iraqi parliament on March 7.

What is often missed about Hamas is that it, too, is a movement. They have gotten up big demonstrations, and waged campaigns, including political campaigns. They aren’t just a terrorist group, and they depend on kinship links and informal networks, not a corporate-style leadership flow chart.

Movements that are embedded (as most are) in a particular population can draw on enormous resources.

Ariel Sharon was convinced by some game theorist who knew nothing about Palestinian Arab society that if he could kill off one-quarter of the Hamas leadership, he could cause the organization to collapse. What I heard was that the original basis for this thesis was risk studies of corporations like IBM, where the models had shown that in case of a catastrophe that took out a quarter of the management, the organization would implode.

So Sharon’s government assiduously assassinated suspected Hamas leaders, killing the spiritual leader of the movement, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin, in his wheelchair as he came out of a mosque, along with 17 others, including juveniles. Then titular leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was assassinated. And so on and so forth. But Hamas did not collapse. It won the 2006 Palestine Authority elections, and even when the resulting government was overthrown by the PLO in the West Bank — with U.S. and Israeli help — it proved powerful in Gaza. The Gaza war was another Israeli attempt to destroy Hamas, which failed miserably. Israeli military leaders professed themselves astonished at how little resistance to the invasion Hamas put up, showing that they don’t understand movements. Movements can afford to lie low during attacks, because they have the resources and support to reemerge once the heat is off.

Assassinating movement leaders, as opposed to organization leaders, is usually worse than useless, especially if the movement has a strong social base in a compact population.

On the other hand organizations such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping (al-Gama’a al-Islamiya) in Egypt were effectively defeated by the Egyptian security forces. They arrested some 30,000 militants in the 1990s, and they engaged in running street battles with armed members. Since 1997, these groups have been defeated in the Nile Valley and seldom can pull off even a small attack. The Egyptian government caught a break, because the radicals’ 1997 attack on Western tourists at Luxor produced profound revulsion toward them among almost all Egyptians. The leadership of the Islamic Grouping (whose blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, is in an American penitentiary for involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing) has even renounced violence and now sees the Koran as forbidding terrorism. This leadership had not been systematically killed, however. It was incarcerated in Tura prison.

In this regard, U.S. drone attacks on al-Qaida figures in Pakistan must be contrasted to assassinations of Taliban leaders. Al-Qaida is more like an organization, and its leaders seldom have a lot of local support (the Arabs in the northwest of Pakistan are not embedded in a local population that adulates them, but rather live among Pashtuns who have a variety of views of Arab expatriates). There has never been a big al-Qaida demonstration (I mean by al-Qaida Osama Bin Laden’s organization, and don’t consider the Islamic State of Iraq to be actually al-Qaida), because they don’t have the numbers to pull it off.

In contrast, just killing Pashtun insurgent leaders, whether in Pakistan or in Afghanistan, is unlikely to destroy the Taliban, because they are a movement embedded in an often supportive population.

The two sides “may say to themselves, ‘We are not prepared to resolve these issues no matter how much pressure the United States brings to bear,’” Obama said.

Obama reiterated that peace is a vital goal, but one that may be beyond reach “even if we are applying all of our political capital.”

Obama may be right. But note the implications of no progress between Israel and the Palestinians on political settlement of their dispute:

1. Iran – the primary rejectionist state in the region, will grow in power and popularity in the Middle East
2. Anger in the Arab world toward Israel and the US will grow in intensity
3. Israeli policy toward East Jerusalem could itself be the cause for a war. Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims and Christians as well as to Jews
4. Israel’s status as a de facto Apartheid state will be made permanent and the boycott movement will grow, ultimately affecting the Israeli economy
5. If the two-state solution is dead as a doornail Israel will either have to give the Palestinians citizenship or face a long and bitter struggle to make their own state in the teeth of Israeli opposition

Obama’s team tried to get Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to restart negotiations last year, but the long-suffering Abbas insisted first on a freeze of creeping Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank. That is, he insisted that Israel not be actively annexing the very territory at issue while the talks proceeded. It would sort of be like negotiating to buy a mansion from a seller who was dismantling wings of it, carting them off to his new residence, while he kept jacking up the asking price on his increasingly diminished domicile.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally agreed to an eight-month settlement freeze on the West Bank. But the offer was insincere. Building within existing settlements would continue; they would just get denser. And the parts of the West Bank Israel had illegally and unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem would continue to be settled.

The first, flawed offer by Netanyahu was enough to bring Abbas to indirect negotiations. But then the implementation of the second bit of insincerity scotched any movement toward peace talks as the Palestinians decided that they had to retain a modicum of self-respect. The building of 1,600 new homes on Palestinian land near Jerusalem was announced just as Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel to kick off the proximity talks made it look as though Israel is not only a fickle and unreliable diplomatic partner. Beyond that, it looked as if its government was intent on kicking Biden in the teeth and humiliating Washington.

One problem Obama faces is that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a coordinating body for the Israel lobbies, has successfully mobilized congress against him with regard to putting further pressure on far right-wing Netanyahu to stop building settlements. Congress decides on how much money to give Israel annually, and how many weapons to sell it. Obama cannot effectively threaten Netanyahu with a reduction in the billions of dollars a year in aid, trade privileges, loan guarantees, and military equipment sent to Israel by the U.S. Those goods are giftds from Congress, and Congress typically yields to AIPAC and its colleagues.

As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have demonstrated in The Israel Lobby, these lobbies cultivate congressmen and senators from the beginning of their careers. The Christian Zionists, who form a significant movement within U.S. evangelicalism, probably number some 10 million, and it is not hard to get them to write their senator on behalf of Israeli expansionism. Pro-Israel organizations and individuals are disproportionately politically active and likely to give to political campaigns.

A recent Israeli government decree that could lead to the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank has stirred extreme anxiety in the region.

Aljazeera English has video on the new rules:

According to the London pan-Arab daily, al-Quds al-Arabi, the Jordanian government fears that Netanyahu and his even more right wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, will engineer clashes between Israeli colonists on the West Bank and the Palestinian villagers on whom they are encroaching, as a pretext for pushing tens of thousands of Palestinians into Jordan.

Certainly, Israeli-Jordanian relations are at their lowest point since the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries — a treaty that King Abdullah II says he is beginning to regret. He worries that Jerusalem is a keg of dynamite, that Gaza and Lebanon could explode into hot war at any time, and even that Israel and Iran may go to war against one another.

Yep, that’s what  you worry about if you know the region well.