Bradley Burston sagt es (in Haaretz), wie es ist:
In the case of Israel, the White House has stood often on the sidelines, politically neutralized, as the Jewish state undertook initiatives, in particular, settlement construction, which have proven painfully costly, morally dubious, and otherwise harmful – first of all, to Israel itself.
As the peace process unraveled in the late 1990s and then-prime minister Netanyahu burned through political capital in visits to Washington, senior Clinton administration Mideast official Aaron David Miller famously recalled that „all of us saw Bibi as a kind of speed bump that would have to be negotiated along the way until a new Israeli prime minister came along who was more serious about peace.“
In the case of the Palestine that has yet to arise, global donors who lavished hundreds of millions of dollars and euros in aid, failed to require that the funds be spent on the needs of the needy, and the phantasmagoria of corruption that ensued led directly to the rise of Hamas, the crippling of Fatah, and the collapse of the peace process.
As in the case with spoiled children, as Israel and the Palestinians received more and more attention, they focused more completely on themselves, cataloguing, memorizing, publicizing and, frequently, exaggerating, every real and imagined injury, dismissing and ignoring damage and injustice done to the other.
Like spoiled children, hardliners on each sides spin a narrative in which the other side „started it,“ and bears sole responsibility for the entirety of the fighting which no one seems capable of stopping. Like brats, they have no room for another narrative, for someone else‘ distress, to feel remorse or extend sincere apologies to address wrongs they themselves have committed.
Like spoiled children, they have been treated all too often with excesses of sympathy and compensatory, largely unappreciated gifts, rather than the respect and honesty that would better have served them.
Like spoiled children, the hardliners demand to be allowed to continue whatever destructive behavior they choose, for the sake of fairness.
This behavior, in turn, engenders revulsion on the part of the neighbors [Israeli or Palestinian] who thus become favorably disposed, or at least, complicit, when harsh punishments are heard being meted out in the neighboring household [air strikes, crippling aid embargos, rocket attacks].
The result, for Israel, has been an unaddressed clash with its own future, as the number of Arabs living in Israel and the West Bank continues to rise, and Gaza continues to seethe, with no solution remotely in sight.
The consequence, for Palestinians, has been the self-immolation of their movement for independent statehood, and, in blaming the occupation for all ills, an acquired, abject incapability to alter for the better a tragic present.
Small wonder, then, that this remains the most infuriating peace process in the world. For the present, you don’t have far to look to see why the Obama administration may, in the end, decide instead to devote its energies to more promising pursuits.
This may be the time to ask what, exactly, it is that Netanyahu has to lose by endorsing in broad strokes the two-state formula first conditionally endorsed by his Likud in 2003. On Monday, hours before the meeting, pollster Mina Zemach said that more than 50 percent of the Israeli public currently favors the two-state solution, and a total of 78 percent „would be willing to live with it“ in the context of a future peace.