ISRAEL’S refusal to halt settlement activity has now assumed the shape of a brazen-faced defiance of President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy.

Since he moved into the White House, Mr Obama has repeatedly emphasised the need for a halt to the construction of new housing units for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank, including Arab Jerusalem. The American president emphasised this point during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and again in his historic broadcast to the Muslim world on June 4. However, Israel seems to have treated Mr Obama’s concerns with a degree of nonchalance that is stupefying.

On Wednesday, Mr Obama said in a TV interview in Beijing that the construction of new houses in occupied territory undermined his efforts and made it harder to achieve peace in the region. Similar protests have come from the European Union, which expressed its ‘dismay’ over Israeli policy. The Likud government not only ignored these protests, its tone seems to betray hubris. Justifying his government’s illegal action in building new houses in Jerusalem’s Gilo district, hard-line Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Gilo was ‘an integral part of Israel, an integral part of Jerusalem’.

Israel has no intention of withdrawing from the West Bank. That explains why all Israeli governments have sabotaged one peace formula after another and have continued settlement activity to ‘create facts’ and alter the West Bank’s Arab-Islamic character. Mr Obama’s assumption of power had aroused hopes of a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli peace process. But subsequent developments leave little room for optimism. In their last meeting at Abu Dhabi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told President Mahmoud Abbas to accept new housing projects. Earlier she had asked the Palestinian Authority not to take up the Goldstone report, which chastises Israel for crimes against humanity in Gaza earlier this year. Her remarks are a measure of the hold of the Jewish lobby on America’s domestic policy. America, she said, would abandon its mediatory efforts if the PA called for UN action on the Goldstone report. One can hardly hope for peace if Washington continues to kowtow to Israel.