Clinton and Netanyahu at joint press conference Photo: Avi Ohayon, GPO

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ostensibly contradictory statement during her recent Middle East visit — declaring in Israel that “There has never been a pre-condition [to freeze the expansion of Israeli colonies in occupied territories]. It’s always been an issue within the negotiations” while stating several days later during a visit to Morocco that there was no change in the American policy — is widely being spun as incompetence. In fact, there is no contradiction in what Clinton said: it is in fact American policy to condone, privately, unsubsidised (“natural”) growth in Israeli colonies (“settlements”), while publicly denying this policy. What Clinton did was to make public this increasingly widely known private policy. Why?

According to the Washington Post (23 May 2009, see earlier post) around 2004/2005, when Sharon was poised to remove “settlers” from Gaza, the neo-cons around Bush stopped Sharon and got Bush to give him a secret understanding — not disclosed to the Palestinians — that Israel could add “settlements” in areas it expected to occupy permanently, as long as the construction was dictated by market demand, not subsidies. This agreement, that some of the larger “settlements” in the occupied West Bank would ultimately become part of Israel — contrary to U.S. policy until then and to the Camp David and Oslo accords, was codified in a letter from former president George W. Bush to former prime minister Ariel Sharon.

The U.S. government has not resiled at least in public from this agreement; whether this has been done in private, orally or in writing, is not known, but is most unlikely. What Hillary Clinton did, in fact, is that she stated in public what the U.S. has assured Israel in private. Was this incompetence? Unlikely: Hillary Clinton is no Sarah Palin. It is much more likely that responding to the Israel lobby’s [see review of the latest book on the subject, whose wholesale import is banned in Europe] pressure on Obama this was a calculated “tilt” toward Israel. By making public America’s private assurances to Israel, effectively America has abandoned support for a Palestinian state, that was dangled by Bush, quite successfully, to weaken resistance by Muslim states to American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is how it is being seen around the world. According to the Indian Express, “Mr Obama … caved in after his own ratings in Israel had slumped, according to some Israeli polls, to as low as 4 per cent.” Gideon Livy, writing in Ha’aretz, concurs, and (in a triumph of hope over experience) recommends that “When Clinton returns to Washington, she should advocate a sharp policy change toward Israel… Washington needs to finally say no to Israel and the occupation. An unambiguous, presidential no.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves the White House after a meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington, Monday, Nov. 9, 2009. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) (Susan Walsh - AP)

Could this have happened in that most curious meeting between an Israeli prime minister and an American president that took place at the White House on 9 November 2009? According to most sources, Obama probably engaged in some hard talk with Netanyahu. Thus the Israeli Army Radio’s take was that Mr. Obama rapped Mr. Netanyahu on the knuckles for his predilection for making self-serving announcements after each meeting, of his victory over the Americans, to the press. This is also how the Jerusalem Post, on the authority of an unnamed U.S. diplomat, viewed the meeting.

The possibility, however, that what appeared as a procedural snub may in fact have concealed “far-reaching understandings” was raised by [former Sharon adviser] Dov Weisglass:

“Clearly, one of two things occurred during the meeting – a severe crisis and deadlock which the sides do not want to make worse by making it public, or far-reaching understandings that may lead to a domestic crisis in Israel, and therefore are not made public either,” [Dov Weisglass] said. “Time will tell which of the two scenarios actually transpired.”

Weisglass may be dissimulating in hinting at hard conditons on Israel (“that may lead to a domestic crisis in Israel”), but he does raise the possibility of “far-reaching understandings” having been reached at the meeting. For a variety of reasons — domestic (an isolated American president, under pressure from the Israel lobby, well entrenched in his administration, from the Republican party, the military-industrial-financial establishment, white supremacists, and other right wing groups) and international (the shifting of focus from Iraq to the “Af/Pak” theatre, privileging West Asia over the Arab Middle East, and military solutions over diplomatic ones, effectively abandoning U.S. support for a meaningful Palestinian state) — Mr. Obama may have capitulated to Israel.

We must remember that it was Dov Weisglass who, on behalf of Israel, negotiated the secret agreement on “settlements” with Elliott Abrams, the former U.S. deputy national security adviser; the agreement, formalised in Bush’s letter to Sharon, that Hillary Clinton is being accused of having revealed inadvertently on her recent trip to the Middle East.