In observing Israeli leaders and their much-touted peace overtures over the years, it has always been wise to hew to the maxim: “Watch what they do, not what they say.”
The reason, of course, is that Israeli officials are marvellously adept at telling outsiders keen on a just and fair settlement with the Palestinians exactly what they want to hear – even as they condone and carry out measures that undermine such a settlement.
Thus, even as these officials utter into the ears of credulous listeners what the historian Avi Shlaim, in his 2001 book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, calls the most odious and deceptive Israeli bromide of all – “we always have our hand extended in peace” – they are overseeing the expansion of West Bank settlements and injecting the Israeli military into every dimension of Palestinian life.
Pardon us then, for being unmoved, even a tad cynical, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to President Barack Obama during their meeting in the White House earlier this week that his government was prepared to take “concrete steps” to bring about direct Middle East peace talks and then pointedly failed to specify exactly what those steps would be.
Perhaps we would not be quite so sceptical were Israel’s game-playing not so transparent. In the run-up to this week’s long scheduled meeting between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Obama, Israel took token steps to burnish its peace-loving credentials, dilute criticism and most importantly of all, change the subject.
With the kind of clockwork predictability we have become all-too-familiar with from previous Israel-US summitry, Israel lifted restrictions on many goods previously barred from transfer into the Gaza Strip (although the illegal blockade remains).
Moreover, the Israeli military announced on Tuesday it had charged a soldier with manslaughter for the deaths of civilians killed during its invasion of Gaza in late 2008 – an announcement whose timing, an Israeli spokesman in Washington said in Washington, was only coincidental.
So the unwary listener is led to believe that justice is being done, although Israel has for months waged a diplomatic war to demonise any independent inquiry into human rights atrocities committed by both sides during the Gaza invasion as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.
Perhaps we could draw some hope from this otherwise predictable affair had Mr Obama demonstrated that Israel’s penchant for words over action was not becoming his own. The requirements of diplomacy and hospitality call for ritual affirmations of long-standing ties and friendship, to be sure.
Yet to hear the US president on Tuesday adopt virtually wholesale a threadbare Israeli canard and caution Palestinians not to “look for excuses for incitement” and not to “embarrass Israel” went far beyond what the occasion – and Israel’s perfidy in the past year – called for. The result, sadly, is that Palestinians feel more alone today.
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