American condemnations, Israeli apologies and Palestinian disbelief quickly undermined what was supposed to be a relatively low-key effort to breathe some life into the near-dead peace process.
U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden's visit had barely begun before the Obama administration was repeatedly “condemning” his Israeli hosts – particularly harsh diplomatic language usually reserved for thuggish regimes in places such as Tehran and Pyongyang, not close friends and allies.
But an Israeli announcement of new settlements in East Jerusalem on Tuesday, the first day of Mr. Biden's visit, was a humiliating blow to the vice-president, who was clearly angered by the timing. East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel but is still regarded under international law as occupied territory.
“We had no intention, no desire, to offend or taunt an important man like the Vice-President during his visit,” explained Interior Minister Eli Yishai rather unconvincingly after his office torpedoed Mr. Biden's visit by announcing the building of 1,600 more settler homes.
But Mr. Yishai also didn't rescind the announcement; rather, he simply said it could have waited a week or two until Mr. Biden was gone.
More than irked, Mr. Biden kept Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting 90 minutes before showing up for dinner. The Prime Minister insisted he didn't even know the announcement was coming.
For all the brouhaha over whether the Israeli government deliberately drove another stake into the peace process or, as Mr. Yishai suggested, it was a bit of unfortunate timing, the vexed issue of deliberate Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories dates back decades and remains the one of the biggest stumbling blocks to peace.
The Obama administration – already awash in problems both domestic and foreign – has devoted little effort to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
President Barack Obama may have snagged the Nobel Peace Prize only weeks after moving into the White House, but there has been no gambit to stage high-level face-to-face talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Rather, sending Mr. Biden to see if he could get indirect talks under way – with U.S. diplomats shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian delegations sitting separately in different cities – was hardly designed to raise expectations.
Instead, Mr. Biden's efforts to woo Israel's right-wing government by directing tough talk at Tehran has dissolved into a mess.
In Israel, the latest settlement announcement is seen as a means by which the religious right-wing parties in Mr. Netanyahu's coalition can fire a warning shot at the Prime Minister, letting him know that there should never be any talks on sharing East Jerusalem, already annexed by Israel but still regarded under international law as occupied territory.
Bradley Burston, writing Wednesday in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, offered an illuminating sketch of the array of extreme Israeli political factions. “In their drive to expunge any trace of hitrapsut – grovelling to the colonial master – there are those among the ostensible super-patriots of the right who revel in shots across the bow of the American ship of state,” he wrote. “The farther right one goes in Israel, the more pronounced the sentiment. Avowedly pro-Kahane extremists, now strong enough to have placed their own representative in the Knesset, have gained shock cred by lining highway underpasses with posters of the ‘Jew-hater Obama' photoshopped into wearing a Palestinian kaffieh.”
So it's not surprising that the Interior Ministry was willing to upstage the Prime Minister. Ambushing visiting U.S. envoys with embarrassing announcements about settlements has a two-decade pedigree for Israelis, who did the same to George H.W. Bush's state secretary James Baker.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden's presence in place of the President – who didn't bother to visit Israel, yet visited both Cairo and Riyadh – was already seen by some Israelis as a snub.
“We see it as nothing short of an insult that President Obama himself is not coming,” said Danny Danon, Knesset deputy Speaker and a member of Mr. Netanyahu's party.
Fractious, blunt-speaking Israeli politics are commonplace and there may be no long-term damage.
Certainly in Washington, the political theatre of Mr. Biden's woes overseas seems mostly regarded as a welcome relief from the trench warfare over health-care reform.
The powerful Israeli lobby may be upset by Mr. Obama's lack of attention, but the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans reliably vote Democrat and almost certainly will continue to do so in this fall's mid-term elections.
As for Palestinians, whatever delight they had watching Israelis and their primary protector and best friend engaged in a mudslinging spat was tempered by the reality that nothing has changed in the essentials of American policy.
The Obama administration “is fully committed to the Palestinian people and to achieving a Palestinian state that is independent, viable, and contiguous,” he said after meeting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. But that was unchanged from the Bush policy, and there is nothing to suggest Mr. Obama is willing to get tough on Israel over its continued settlement expansion.
Nearly half a million Jewish “settlers” now live in 100 new towns and suburbs ringing Jerusalem, all on land seized by Israel in the 1967 war.
