Palestinians the Cause of U.S.-Israeli Rift

“Last June at Bar-Ilan University, Prime Minister Netanyahu put his country on the path to peace,” Hillary Clinton declared at AIPAC’s annual policy conference on Monday. “President Abbas has put the Palestinians on that path as well.”

For all its honey coating, the secretary of state’s speech was replete with advice and demands that rang awkwardly, and worse, in the Israeli prime minister’s circle. She lectured on the untenability of the status quo, as though this was news to Israel. She urged Israelis, like their ancestors leaving Egypt, to take risks and seek new avenues to peace, as though Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert had not sought compromise and been rebuffed. She disingenuously misidentified Hamas, rather than Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, as the prime force behind the honoring of the perpetrator of the Coastal Road massacre with a square in al-Bireh.

But it was the two sentences on those ostensibly shared Netanyahu and Abbas “paths” that fell flattest of all.

If only, was the bitter response to the top American diplomat’s assertion that Abbas had placed the Palestinians firmly on that peaceful route. In Binyamin Netanyahu’s view, underlined by his public comments during this fraught visit to the US, the Palestinians haven’t shown the slightest readiness to progress.