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IT WAS a wretched beginning to what had been hailed as the hopeful resumption of peace talks, albeit indirect ones, between the Israelis and Palestinians under the aegis of an American mediator. Barely had America’s vice-president, Joe Biden, begun a visit to Israel to herald a new era of compromise and goodwill than it was announced, as if deliberately to poison the mood, that 1,600 new houses would be built for Jewish settlers in a big Jewish suburb in the Israeli-annexed eastern part of Jerusalem that Palestinians see as their fledgling state’s future capital. Palestinian politicians were united in fury. Arabs and other peacemaking outsiders viewed the action as the illest of omens. Mr Biden sharply “condemned” the action as “precisely the kind of step...