Barak Bulldozes Chances For Israel-Palestine Peace

"The Bulldozer" was Ariel Sharon's nickname, but current Israeli Defense Minister and onetime Camp David peace processor Ehud Barak was the one who today gave the green light for the construction of hundreds of additional homes in West Bank settlements.  Building cheap housing for Russian immigrants would appear to outweigh building goodwill with Palestinians who own (or owned) the land where these fortress-settlements are sited.

Running roughshod over Palestinians and other Arabs was par for the course for Sharon, but you might expect more of Labour man Barak.  Then again, he is part of the most right-wing government in Israel's history.  But what of the impact on the negotiations (or talks about negotiations) brokered by US envoy George Mitchell?  It would appear that this is a rather provocative Israeli poke in the eye of the Obama Administration.  Will the President blink?

Chutzpah is a commodity in plentiful supply in the Netanyahu government, but yesterday's op-ed by Jimmy Carter in the Washington Post detailed an Israeli practice that has to take the world record for gall:

I visited a family who had lived for four generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors carried out the demolition order.

Demolishing your own house to avoid an Israeli bill for same?  That's like having to pay for your water from the very people who drain your wells - another Israeli-imposed practice.  Or how about paying for the "losses" of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, should it lose a court battle (highly unlikely) over confiscated Palestinian land, as lawyer Raja Shehadeh recounts in his award-winning book "Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape."

Those of us who live in countries where rule of law is generally applied to residents in a fair way, whatever the plaintiff's race or religion, will have difficulty even comprehending the daily lot of Palestinians in the West Bank, where confiscated Arab land may not be sub-leased to "non-Jews," as Shehadeh writes.

Shehadeh and other non-violent rights activists deserve our admiration and support.  Who among us would stand for years of niggling harassment over bypass roads (for Jews only), checkpoints (for Arabs only), and Separation Walls (which not only separate Jew from Arab, but also ensure that Palestinian farmers are cut off from their fields).

The poke in the eye, repeated enough, will result in self-defense mechanisms.  Have we not gotten beyond "an eye for an eye... ?"  How about "what goes around, comes around?"  Are a few hundred more houses really worth that much to Israel?