Window on Israel: I am not anti-America, but...

Mahmoud Abbas has a new demand of the United States: to order the immediate removal of the security barrier being built between Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Israel. According to Abbas, the barrier is standing in the way of the peace process. On account of an end to the violence, he claims, it is unnecessary.
 
That is like a cancer patient telling his physician that he can stop chemotherapy because he is having a good day.
 
It is not possible at this time to predict whether Israel's security barrier will have a life that is shorter or longer than the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, or the various barriers that the United States is building between itself and Mexico.
 
It is one of the things that is working against Palestinian violence, and will remain for some time. I see a section being built about a mile from my balcony.
 
Abbas' latest call is one more indication that the Palestinian Authority is not a credible actor in international politics. It may be good enough to remove from Israel any responsibility for providing services to the Palestinians of the West Bank, and to be coddled by American contractors and Israel security personnel who help it against Palestinian ruffians and Hamas. But as a partner in negotiations? It does nothing but repeat the litanies heard since Arafat, without the give and take that is the essence of negotiation. Since it has been shut out of Gaza, it represents no more than one half of Palestine.
 
Only the deluded or the innocent can believe that gestures from Israel will get the peace process rolling.
 
Currently Americans and others say that Israel should stop settlement activity in the West Bank, including neighborhoods of Jerusalem. If they accept the demand of Abbas and include the dismantling of the security barrier as another precondition to negotiations, we surely will have arrived at Neverland.
 
Jewish friends accuse me of being anti-American.
 
A fair reading of what I write would place me within the range of Americans who criticize the American administration. No doubt my perspectives have been shaped by living outside the United States for half my life.
 
The last time I voted in an American election was 1972, for Richard Nixon. I would do it again, with all we have learned about him since then, if George McGovern was still his opponent.
 
Barack Obama strikes me as a McGovern of the 21st century. So was George W. Bush.
 
McGovern was a decent man who was naive about conditions that prevailed during the early 1970s.
 
Obama and Bush share a naive arrogance about their capacity to remake the region from the Middle East to Pakistan.
 
I still think of myself as an American as well as an Israeli, and insist on my rights as an occasional critic of both governments. For the United States, I hope that it does not kill more of its own troops or the locals before downsizing its aspirations. Obama may have done that for Iraq, but he has up-sized those for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
 
Israel will make some gestures in the American direction. Early signs are that it is more difficult to get building permits in areas deemed sensitive. Settler organizations are mounting their campaign, along with Netanyahu and other ministers, against the extremity of demands coming from Washington. Some American officials are saying that they may have gone too far in their demands of the Israelis, and should wait for something from the Palestinians. To me, that says that the surge in activity will peter out with a few more visits by George Mitchell or other underlings.