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The Cairo Speech Was a Lie
Of course the headline is not news to anyone who has been watching, but here is additional proof.
The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.
Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo – June 4, 2009
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[France] MFA Middle East Director (Assistant Secretary-equivalent) Patrice Paoli informed POL Minister Counselor June 18 that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told French officials in Paris June 15 that the Israelis have a "secret accord" with the USG to continue the "natural growth" of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
US Embassy France Cable: "FRANCE MID-EAST DIRECTOR ON PEACE PROCESS" – June 22, 2009
About the only time Obama doesn’t lie is when he talks about his unwavering support for Usrael. For evidence that such a secret USG-IL agreement concerning a natural growth of illegal settlements exists, I don’t need to look any further than the deal offered by Obama to Netanyahu when the last moratorium ran out:
[…] To save face – and postpone failure – Obama has reportedly promised Israel broad security and diplomatic guarantees. All he has asked for in return is the mere extension of the settlement moratorium of 60 days – enough to push his party through the November elections.
According to an article by David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the leaked letter from Obama to Netanyahu positions US foreign policy as a hostage to Israeli diktats, whereby the US makes no such future requests of settlement freeze, guarantees a US veto of any UN Security Council Resolution related to the peace talks for a year, agrees to increase pressure on Iran as per Israeli demands, and so on. Among the many disturbing pledges made by the Obama administration, one seems particularly generous. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the US will “‘accept the legitimacy’ of Israel’s security needs as defined by the Netanyahu government, referring apparently to the Israeli leader’s demand for a long-term Israeli military presence in the eastern West Bank, along the border with Jordan”.
For Obama to lease his country’s political influence to a foreign state for cheap political gain is bad enough. To achieve personal and party political goals at the expense of the national interest of the country is equally disturbing. But to promise a lasting military presence of an occupying power in another people’s land for a mere 60-day settlement freeze is completely unethical and illogical. Furthermore, it violates international law. This letter will someday be analyzed in the same category as the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when a Jewish Homeland was promised by Britain to a group of European Zionists in historic Palestine – even when neither group had ownership rights or any political mandate. […]
Israel’s policy of building settlements in illegally occupied territories is a corner stone of zionist strategy, and from what I’ve seen has had US support since day one. Never has there been a serious attempt by the US to put an end to Israeli expansion, and Obama insisting Israel stops its illegal expansion was as empty a gesture as Abbas and his team of advisers are mere extras in this play called “peace negotiations”.
We know Israel is getting all of this from the US for simply agreeing to a two-month freeze. The question that must be raised what Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians are getting in return? Nothing absolutely nothing, other than having the honor and privilege of meeting face to face with Bibi Netanyahu.
Mahmoud Abbas is not getting one single security checkpoint removed, is not getting one single kidnapped and imprisoned Palestinian released and out of jail, is not getting any guarantees to get Israel to stop house demolition – even one single house – or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, not getting any guarantees that the Palestinians of Sheik Jarrah will not be evicted and exiled from their homes. […]
And so it comes as no surprise that things are developing just as Obama, Bibi and Dennis Ross had planned all along
[…] In the three months since Israel ended its settlement construction freeze in the West Bank, causing the Palestinians to withdraw from peace talks, a settlement-building boom has begun, especially in more remote communities that are least likely to be part of Israel after any two-state peace deal.
This means that if negotiations ever get back on track, there will be thousands more Israeli settlers who will have to relocate into Israel, posing new problems over how to accommodate them while creating a Palestinian state on the land where many of them are living now.
In addition to West Bank settlement-building, construction for predominantly Jewish housing in East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to make their future capital, has been rapidly growing after a break of half a year, with hundreds of units approved and thousands more planned.
On a tour of West Bank construction sites, Dror Etkes, an anti-settlement advocate who has spent nine years chronicling their growth, said he doubted whether there had been such a burst in settlement construction in at least a decade. […]
There is no better way than building settlements, creating facts on the ground, to remind Palestinians that time is not on their side.
Posted by: Juan Moment | Dec 23 2010 16:01 utc | 12
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