Israelis are doing precisely that — expanding their illegal settlements on the West Bank and expropriating even more land on the fringes of the Wall that replicates the doomed apartheid experiment in South Africa. All that the energetic US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice can do in response is to murmur her displeasure in an undertone.
Palestinians themselves are hopelessly divided between the Fatah and Hamas factions, the latter controlling a Gaza Strip converted by Israel into a vast open-air prison. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ rationale for continuing his make-believe talks with Mr Olmert on an illusory peace process is that the alternative would be war. Arab efforts at reconciling the two Palestinian factions have yielded little but recrimination.
The truth is that with Americans perennially handicapped by the clout of the American-Jewish lobby and the love of the Christian evangelical Right for Israel, no US administration can do much to resolve the problem. Mr Barack Obama, who flaunts his liberal credentials, was the first to pay homage to the Israeli lobby, promoting the dubious Israeli claim to an undivided Jerusalem as its capital.
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11:22 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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