Fantastic failure

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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the most spectacular statement earlier this week. After a meeting with Israel's right-wing premier, Binyamin Netanyahu, who defied and turned down the only demand the Obama administration has made of him (halting the construction and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territories), Clinton gleefully announced in a joint press conference Saturday that Israel had made "unprecedented concessions" by allegedly slowing down -- not stopping -- settlement expansion.

The Palestinians, she suggested quite boldly, should in return haste to the negotiation table without setting preconditions regarding a full settlement freeze.

Clinton's statements are a far cry from the promises and spirit US President Barack Obama expressed in his famous Cairo speech in June, when he vowed to "personally pursue" efforts to establish a two- state solution and demanded that Israel halt all settlement expansion as a precondition for meaningful peace talks.

There were preludes to this week's U-turn in the US administration's approach towards the peace process. Obama's much anticipated "vision" on the Arab-Israeli conflict, which was expected last month, never materialised. Five months after his Cairo speech the US president appears incapable of laying out a vision on how Washington would like to proceed with this stage of the 61-year-old conflict. His special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, has been roving the region for months without a hint of progress as Israel refuses with resilience to halt settlement expansion on the proposed future Palestinian state. His last visit to Cairo on 11 October was followed by statements made by Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmed Abul-Gheit saying there won't be a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks any time soon.

Now Clinton is telling us that Israeli settlements -- which were perceived by Obama as a glaring obstacle to peace talks only five months ago -- are not really an impediment and that the Palestinian Authority ought not to stake too much on this matter. The US secretary of state later attempted to refine her statements in response to criticism from official Arab quarters by saying that the US's position on Israeli settlements hasn't changed and that she should have "been clearer" in her choice of words while praising Israel's right-wing government in Tel Aviv and its race against time to construct and expand illegal West Bank settlements. Three days after Clinton's applause of the Netanyahu government, Israeli settlers evicted an Arab family from their home in East Jerusalem, as part of state efforts to judaise Jerusalem and expel its Arab population.

Yesterday, 4 November, marked a year since Obama was elected by the Democratic Party as its presidential candidate. Many here followed his campaign with zeal and genuine optimism, hoping that he would introduce change. A year later we are struggling to remind ourselves that this is a new US administration; that George W Bush is no longer president and that the Republicans are gone. We look across our northeast border and we only see the remnants of what was once Palestine as the Zionist project expands with America's blessings and recommendations that the Arabs accept it. Havoc is still the reality in occupied Iraq, and US soldiers are still chasing an enemy in Afghanistan, the graveyard of invaders.