Let growth happen in settlements

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more "dictating" to other countries. We should "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth "start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating."

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone - Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: "a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions."

What's the issue? No "natural growth" means strangling thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Or if you have babies, no housing for them. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that.

Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements - and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself. That was envisioned in President Clinton's plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why turn towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. The entire "natural growth" issue is a concoction. It's farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren - when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel.

In his much-heralded "Muslim world" address in Cairo Thursday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people's "situation" is "intolerable." Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization. In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders built no schools, roads, courthouses, hospitals or institutions. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. Instead he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over "natural growth" may curry favor with the Muslim "street." But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

© 2009, The Washington Post Writers Group