The Enlightened Despot

This, if the unnamed sources know what they’re talking about, is very bad news:

Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu has struck a secret deal with Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman for highly contentious construction on West Bank land known as E1, Army Radio reported Wednesday.

A source close to the negotiations between the pair told Army Radio that the plan had been agreed upon even though it did not appear in the official document detailing the coalition deal between Yisrael Beiteinu and Netanyahu’s Likud.

The plan is for the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim to build 3000 new housing units on the territory, which stretches between it and Jerusalem, the source was quoted as saying.

Construction in the area is particularly sensitive because it would create contiguity between the settlement and the capital, which in turn would prevent Palestinian construction between East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

This immediately brought to mind a very foolish thing that Obama said in his press conference about the Arab-Israeli conflict: “the status quo is unsustainable.” I realize there is a trend towards using the word ’sustainble’ to mean ‘good’ in a fairly vague way, especially when the environment is involved. In this sense, the situation in the Middle-East is certainly completely unsustainable. But if by ’sustainable’ you mean ’something which can be sustained’ then this situation has been the most sustainable conflict of my lifetime, and it got going well before I was born, and I see no reason to think it’s on its last legs now. A much more honest comment on the situation was printed in the Onion during - if memory serves - the al-Aqsa Intifada: “Maybe we should stop thinking of this as the Middle-East crisis and start thinking of it as Middle-East culture.”

It’s a good joke, and a fair point, but, of course, it’s not good advice - we should certainly be doing everything we can to resolve this. But here’s a nasty thought: at any point in time, the odds are against a lasting peace being established within the next few years, but right now, with the recent fighting in Gaza, a prime minister who is opposed to the formation of a Palestinian state, and a foreign minister who just flat out hates Arabs and doesn’t care who knows it, it is just about inconceivable that any agreement will be reached in the near future. So perhaps it’s time to admit that. Not that we should say so out loud, of course, but I do think our policy for the region should be geared towards improving our position as a negotiator with the next Israeli government, rather than putting our all into improving the situation while this one is still in power. I don’t pretend to know all that that would entail, but, for a start, we don’t have to worry about staying on Bibi’s good side to assure our place at the negotiating table if we admit that nothing will get done at that table until he leaves it.

This sentence from the Haaretz article quoted above sticks out:

For this reason, the United States has strongly opposed this sort of Israeli construction for more than a decade.

I imagine a copy editor lost his job over this one, because no one would intentionally refer to our opposition to settlements over the past few decades as ’strong’. But there’s no time like the present.