What’s real and what’s a smokescreen?

What do workers need to know about the disagreement between the U.S. and Israel?

Despite angry statements by U.S. officials and endless verbiage in the establishment media about what it all means, this disagreement is about a diplomatic embarrassment and is not substantial.

The U.S. is embarrassed because, on the same day that Vice President Joseph Biden arrived to show support for Israel, the Tel Aviv government announced it would build 1,600 more illegal housing units in East Jerusalem. Washington, which supports Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, had its mask of “honest broker” in Palestinian-Israeli talks ripped from its face and its complicity in the settlements revealed.

Washington has called in the spin doctors to try to put that shattered mask back together and give some credibility to its claim to be impartial as it arranges “proximity talks” to “get the peace process rolling” between the Netanyahu regime and the Palestinian Authority.

These “peace” talks have never been more than a diplomatic smokescreen for further U.S.-Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people. Ever-growing numbers in the West Bank and Gaza see the talks as against their interests.

How can you tell that the dispute is of no real substance?

If Washington were really angry at Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies, it could have opposed Israel’s worst aggression on Gaza in 14 months. On March 26, five tanks and two armored bulldozers rolled into Gaza, firing. And the U.S. could have called Tel Aviv to task for the recent killing of four Palestinian youths in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers.

Not a peep was heard from Washington over these murders of Palestinians. In fact, while Israel was killing Palestinians in Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called measures taken by the Israeli government to resolve the dispute between the two governments “useful and productive.”

U.S. supports Israeli settlements

The White House is calling on Israel to pull back on the settlement announced when Biden was there. However, it supports other settlements. A March 23 editorial by Stephen Maher on the Electronic Intifada website, entitled “The US-choreographed ‘outrage’ at Israel,” points out that in March “the State Department explicitly approved Israel’s construction of 112 new apartments in an illegal settlement outside Bethlehem.” And Israel continues to strip Palestinians in East Jerusalem of their residency rights at unprecedented rates.

Maher explains that only a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu restated his position that any “moratorium” on settlement building doesn’t apply to settlements built in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, Obama received Netanyahu in Washington.

If there is any doubt on how deep this disagreement between Washington and Tel Aviv goes, just follow the money. Washington has in no way threatened to reduce its steady stream of funds to Israel — more than $7 million a day.

Israel has been the Pentagon’s pit bull in the Middle East for more than 60 years. Tensions between the two are bound to arise from time to time, but overall strategic interests remain the same — to crush the Palestinian and other struggles and to secure the oil-rich area for Washington and Wall Street.

Palestinian cultural and religious sites attacked

Washington has nothing to say about Israeli attempts to take over Palestinian and Muslim cultural and religious sites, another form of annexation. These measures have especially angered the Palestinian people. Zionist attacks on religious sites in Jerusalem, and other Muslim religious sites in the West Bank, have been met with angry demonstrations.

Israel just announced it will enlarge the Jewish prayer plaza at a wall in the Old City, rejecting a Jerusalem court’s proposal to shelve the plan because it violates the 1967 “status quo” arrangement covering the Old City’s holy places. The site is an entrance to the mosque compound known as the Haram al-Sharif and is seen as an encroachment on it, an attempt to take it over. The compound contains the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock mosque, some of the most sacred mosques in Islam.

Netanyahu’s government has also declared that Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, deep in the West Bank, are “Jewish heritage sites.” Palestinians in Bethlehem responded to the announcement with a three-day general strike, shutting businesses, schools and universities.

The Tomb of Rachel, a shrine to the Biblical matriarch revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims and the site of a mosque, is already on the Israeli side of the apartheid wall, as Israel is poised to annex it.

This week also saw Palestinian protests in Hebron, near the al-Ibrahimi mosque, which Israel is now calling the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

The Israeli government has plans to destroy the Mamilla Cemetery, an important Palestinian and Muslim cultural site in Jerusalem. Ironically, this Muslim cultural site would be leveled to build a “Museum of Tolerance!” To sign a petition opposing this outrage, visit www.mamillacampaign.org.