People with Two Car Garages

Case One: You’ve got nothing to lose. You honestly believe that a generation ago, the country that rules the land you live on took your family’s property and deeply oppresses you. You are unemployed or underemployed and surviving on the edge. You are seething with anger. Case Two: You have a good job, own a house with a two car garage and actually have two cars, and are planning a vacation next year to Italy. Case Three: You live in a land surrounded by hostile and well-armed neighbors, folks who have attempted to invade you and have no real issues with lobbing missiles and rockets into your neighborhood, maybe even wiping your entire country off the face of the earth. You’ve got a pocket of impoverished residents in land you have annexed that want to break free and have their own country, and those hostile neighbors use this annexation as the best justification for driving you into the sea.

Case One and Case Three pretty much define the current status of Palestinians and their Israeli overlords. Case Two – a possible Palestine of the future – is probably the only hope for a solution that: (i) takes the motivation out of Palestinians (at least on the West Bank where Hamas does not rule) to attack Israel, provoking a response that could easily lead to the loss of the two-car-garage house, and (ii) serves as an example to the rest of the Middle East that working with Israel and the West is ultimately in the region’s self-interest. It’s not enough that Palestine becomes a separate nation-state; with anger and poverty, it is still too easy to blame Israel and continue launching murderous strikes –rockets, military attacks, suicide bombs, etc. – against that Jewish country. A separate Palestine also needs massive investment in infrastructure, healthcare, education and jobs. From an economic perspective, that “massive investment” by Israel, wealthy Arab sovereign states and the West (particularly the United States) is a vastly less expensive path than funding a huge military capacity and constantly fighting regional wars that seem unwinnable and never-ending.

And with increasing threats from hostile neighbors generating nuclear strike capabilities, Israel has a pretty good reason to find a safer path that does not rely on “never again” defiance and a litany of provocation that might seem politically expedient in the short term, but which may ultimately result in the death of huge segment of the population. After all, one nuclear bomb can pretty much eviscerate a tiny country where cities and towns are so close together.

Which brings me to the current conundrum that faces the Obama administration: on the one hand, a strong, pro-Israel lobby – supporting one of America’s most reliable allies – pretty much backs Israeli policies regardless of the consequences. They see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party’s hard line conservative stance against the Palestinians as appropriate, even if the peace process suffers almost irreparable harm. On the other hand, there is pressure on the United States – if it is too defuse a hostile region that seems hell-bent on destroying us along with Israel – to adopt a more even-handed tone; this position is also seen by many even in Israel as the best path to reduce the day-to-day dangers of living in an Israel surrounded by angry neighbors.

Vice President Joe Biden, Jr. arrived in Israel on March 9^th to express the Obama administration’s support for the continued and unbending commitment to the security of Israel. Unfortunately for Mr. Biden (not to mention profoundly embarrassing), the Israeli government just announced plans to construct an additional 1,600 housing units for Jewish residents in one of the most provocative areas of the West Bank – occupied by Palestinians – East Jerusalem. To make matters worse, this “out-of-left” field announcement picked a site that wasn’t on anyone’s radar. The timing of the release, which seemed to be intentional, placed the Vice President in an exceptionally awkward position, particularly since he was scheduled to meet with Palestinian leaders the next day. Biden promptly denounced these plans to build another Israeli settlement on the West Bank, noting that the move was “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”

The New York Times (March 10^th) expressed that the decision by Israel’s Interior Ministry may have caught even the conservative Prime Minister off-guard: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was clearly embarrassed at the move by his interior minister, Eli Yishai, leader of the right-wing Shas Party, who has made Jewish settlement in Ea st Jerusalem one of his central causes… A statement issued in the name of the Interior Ministry but distributed by the prime minister’s office said that the housing plan was three years in the making and that its announcement was procedural and unrelated to Mr. Biden’s visit. It added that Mr. Netanyahu had just been informed of it himself.” Expressing his “displeasure” to Yishai, Netanyahu has apparently instructed his government officials to avoid disruptive and ill-timed announcements such as the above settlement expansion notice.

Palestinian reactions were supportive of Biden’s response but expressive of dismay at the seeming attempt to derail an already fragile peace process that seemed only to sputter through a process of perpetual “one step forward, two steps back” delays and frustrations: “Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian government, called the new housing announcement ‘a dangerous decision that will torpedo the negotiations and sentence the American efforts to complete failure.’… Mr. Abu Rudeineh added that ‘it is now clear that the Israeli government is not interested in negotiating, nor is it interested in peace.’” Quoted in the NY Times. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also indicated that unless the announced 1,600 new East Jerusalem construction plans were withdrawn, Palestine would not participate in the in the indirect peace talks with Israel that have been carefully orchestrated, largely through the efforts of U.S. special envoy, George Mitchell.

The peace process is tortuous. The problem of Gaza – a Hamas stronghold on the Egyptian side of Israel – is much more complex than the solutions that scream for implementation on the West Bank. But without giving Palestinians genuine hope for the future, the lives of so many Israelis appear to be needlessly placed in continuing jeopardy. It’s time to stop the madness and build a solid platform for regional peace.

I’m Peter Dekom, and angry people with nothing to lose are the most dangerous folks on earth.