"The dispute has taken on rancorous partisan tones with over two dozen Democratic lawmakers vowing to boycott the speech. They charge that Netanyahu's goal is to undermine the president's diplomacy with Iran, and that Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited the Israeli leader to defy and humiliate the White House.
Yet all those objecting to the speech, whether in the United States, or Netanyahu's rivals at home where he faces an election next month, protest that their concern is to guarantee US-Israeli relations on whose strength the very future of Israel is said to hang.
But what all this sound and fury misses is that for the Palestinians there is no meaningful Obama-Netanyahu rift. Indeed US-Israeli relations have never been stronger, nor more damaging to the prospects for peace and justice and for the very survival of the Palestinian people.
Just look at the recent record. Last December, the Palestinian Authority put forward a tepid resolution in the UN Security Council that did little more than repeat long-standing US policy on the outlines of a two-state solution. Obama's UN ambassador Samantha Power marshaled all her resources to defeat it.
She claimed that the resolution was "deeply imbalanced" and took "no account of Israel's legitimate security concerns."
The next day, after disappointed Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas signed the treaty acceding to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Obama's State Department declared itself "deeply troubled," accusing Palestinians of an "escalatory step" that "badly damages the atmosphere with the very people with whom they ultimately need to make peace."
Power said the Palestinian move "really poses a profound threat to Israel."
These words are perverse. Israel's 51-day long attack on Gaza that left more than 2,200 people dead didn't "damage the atmosphere" as far as the Obama administration was concerned, but any Palestinian effort to use international bodies in pursuit of justice and accountability is tantamount to an act of war.
I challenge Ms. Power to go and repeat her words to any of the 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza still living in the damp and freezing rubble of their homes, to the surviving parents of more than 500 children killed in the Israeli attack, or to the thousands who will live with lifelong injuries."
Yet all those objecting to the speech, whether in the United States, or Netanyahu's rivals at home where he faces an election next month, protest that their concern is to guarantee US-Israeli relations on whose strength the very future of Israel is said to hang.
But what all this sound and fury misses is that for the Palestinians there is no meaningful Obama-Netanyahu rift. Indeed US-Israeli relations have never been stronger, nor more damaging to the prospects for peace and justice and for the very survival of the Palestinian people.
Just look at the recent record. Last December, the Palestinian Authority put forward a tepid resolution in the UN Security Council that did little more than repeat long-standing US policy on the outlines of a two-state solution. Obama's UN ambassador Samantha Power marshaled all her resources to defeat it.
She claimed that the resolution was "deeply imbalanced" and took "no account of Israel's legitimate security concerns."
The next day, after disappointed Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas signed the treaty acceding to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Obama's State Department declared itself "deeply troubled," accusing Palestinians of an "escalatory step" that "badly damages the atmosphere with the very people with whom they ultimately need to make peace."
Power said the Palestinian move "really poses a profound threat to Israel."
These words are perverse. Israel's 51-day long attack on Gaza that left more than 2,200 people dead didn't "damage the atmosphere" as far as the Obama administration was concerned, but any Palestinian effort to use international bodies in pursuit of justice and accountability is tantamount to an act of war.
I challenge Ms. Power to go and repeat her words to any of the 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza still living in the damp and freezing rubble of their homes, to the surviving parents of more than 500 children killed in the Israeli attack, or to the thousands who will live with lifelong injuries."
