“The US will not support the use of any additional land for settlements ... Further settlement activity only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs...

Ronal Reagan in 1982!

From the Globe & Mail/ here

".... “I want to make the American position well understood,” he said. “The purpose of this [initiative] is the peaceful and orderly transfer of authority from Israel to the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza.” ...Ronald Reagan, speaking on Sept. 1, 1982.

Efforts to instill a “new realism” in U.S. Middle East policy are not new, but they are bobbing up once again. When Mr. Obama declared last week at a press conference that resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict was a “vital national security interest of the United States,” he was signalling a shift in policy. That’s according to administration officials who conveniently underscored those few words for reporters. In short, the policy is this: With American lives on the line in Iraq and grave concerns about Iran’s nuclear agenda, the United States has national security interests in the Middle East that trump its support for Israel. The implication of the policy is formidable: Israel can be part of the problem or part of the solution.

This shift already had been articulated by General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command. In written testimony to the Senate’s armed services committee last month, the four-star general said the Arab-Israeli conflict makes it difficult “to advance our interests” in the Middle East.

“The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favouritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [area of responsibility] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world,” he wrote, adding that “the conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas.” And if that wasn’t clear enough, it was stated baldly this week by Martin Indyk, a two-time U.S. ambassador to Israel and a long-time friend to the Jewish state, who said the change “seems to have gone unnoticed in Jerusalem.”...

Mr. Obama didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to throw this bucket of cold water on Israel. It’s been a long time coming, since before the end of the Cold War.

Mr. Reagan, the first president to identify Israel as a strategic ally, began to sculpt this idea. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton chipped away at it too. It was Mr. Bush who launched the first Persian Gulf war against Iraq in 1991 and linked it to the Middle East peace conference in Madrid later the same year. Mr. Clinton, president during the Oslo peace process, went so far as to articulate parameters for the sides to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

More recently, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group of 2006 noted what it described as the linkage (Always linkage, Iraq, Iran, War on whatever... but never the 'right' of the Palestinians!) between making progress in an Arab-Israeli peace process and U.S. success in emerging from Iraq. (Leon Panetta, one of the members of that group, now is Mr. Obama’s CIA director.) Even during George W. Bush’s administration, viewed by Israelis as the most favourable ever, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice declared in Jerusalem three years ago that U.S. “strategic interests” were at stake in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is a change in U.S. policy, and it’s important in two ways: Although they may coincide, Israeli interests are not assumed be U.S. interests, and major tensions in the region often are linked.

So what comes now?.......

It’s not just Mr. Netanyahu’s administration that balks at making concessions asked of it by the United States. As Yossi Alpher, former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, points out, “The ruling coalition reflects a reshaping of Israeli society.” There are several trends responsible for that reshaping: the considerable growth of Israel’s ultra-religious community; the growth of the Israeli right and the connection between the two. There also is an increase in the number of those who enjoy comfort in a more affluent Israel and who are complacent about issues of war and peace. No longer are most Israelis fearful of attack from their immediate neighbours. The overwhelming assaults on Hezbollah and Hamas in 2006 and 2008-2009 added to people’s sense of security even as the operations fuelled an international campaign against Israel.

These are not trends that suggest any eagerness to make peace. Indeed the demographics are moving in the opposite direction.

In its annual report this week, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics said the country’s population had reached 7.5 million – fuelled largely by high birth rates as well as modest immigration (16,000), particularly among the religious and the right. The CBS also noted that about 10,000 people emigrated from Israel in the past year. There are no data on the motives for emigration, but you can bet that most of those who left were not religious, were not on the right and probably were not among the country’s comfortable and complacent. Even as those three groups grow in size, the country’s secular and left-wing sectors are shrinking...."