Melanie's Queries

Melanie Phillips has some pointed questions for Vice President Joe Biden and his boss:

Israel is in the doghouse with America because it revealed during the visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden that it was building more houses for Israelis in east Jerusalem. According to Biden and outraged western received opinion, this ‘undermines peace efforts’.

Why? To be more precise, why does this initiative – or indeed any of the ‘settlements’ -- undermine peace efforts while the actual reason for the absence of peace, the fact that the Abbas administration has said it will never accept a Jewish state of Israel and refuses to renounce the Arab aim of ending Israel's existence, the sole reason for eight decades of aggression, terrorism and war in the Middle East, is not even mentioned?

Biden also said:

the Palestinians deserve a ‘viable’ independent state with contiguous territory

Why? What have they done to deserve it? In what other conflict in the history of the planet have people who have waged a war of annihilation for eight decades and continue to do so been considered to ‘deserve’ anything, let alone an ‘independent’ existence the sole purpose of which is a military beach-head to finish the job and which would slice its victim in half?

To put it another way, why does Joe Biden think that Israel ‘deserves’ to surrender?...

And why, once again, is a final solution being imposed by America upon democratic and beseiged Israel, while the administration of which Biden is such an ornament refuses to take any effective measures against the genocidal Iranian regime which is already responsible for countless American deaths and of which Israel is the present and potentially future victim, and which threatens the safety of the western world against which it has long declared war?...

I made some of the same points, more or less, and posed my own query in a letter I wrote to the Globe and Jazeera. It was in response to a front page article about how Israel's "humiliating" construction plans had likely torpedoed this latest round of hopeychangey "peace" chit-chat:

Let’s see: Hamas maintains its stranglehold over Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas has made it clear that any “peace” deal is but an interim step on the road to Israel’s eventual destruction. And over in Iran, the theocrats continue to enrich uranium that may well be used to create nuclear weapons, and no one is doing much of anything to stop them.

The “humiliation” of Israel’s announced construction plans notwithstanding, what, exactly, makes Joe Biden and his boss think that now is the perfect time to try to revive those stalled “peace” talks?