The only good news from Israel is that President Obama, at least for the time being, has decided to not let Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu continue to push him around. During last week’s meeting in Washington Obama deliberately gave the Israeli premier a low key welcome —no big state dinner, no side-by-side photo ops.

Netanyahu earned this rebuke by insisting that Israel go ahead and build 1600 — which has been raised to 50,000 — new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem, a traditional Palestinian neighborhood which Palestinians had hoped — still hope — would serve as the capitol of their new state.

In a podium-thumping speech to AIPEC, the militantly conservative American Jewish lobby, Netanyahu repeated the claim that Jerusalem always has been and always will be Jewish turf and nothing less.

It wasn't so long ago that all three faiths — Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all of whom trace their origins to Abraham — saw Jerusalem as in some sense a home. I just finished reading two books about the Crusades in which over several hundred years Christians and Muslims slaughtered one another for the right to control the sacred city. Today, for several reasons, including pressure from the Jewish majority, the Christian presence in the Holy Land is a shrinking remnant, to about 2 percent. The West Bank Palestinians and Israeli Jews are separated by a wall; and the Palestinian West Bank, in violation of international law, is dotted with Jewish settlements linked by new highways where only Jewish vehicles may drive.

Just about every serious article I read about the Middle East and Israel in particular concludes that the huge irritating sore preventing peace in the region is Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank and its determination to keep building settlements on land to which they have no right.

Jewish fundamentalists claim the Old Testament God gave Abraham and his descendants all the land as far as the eye could see. But the claim is undermined by both archeology and secular history. Genesis and Exodus, are not history or legal documents, but religious myths. To use them in this way, as instruments of oppression, borders on sacrilege.

Meanwhile a few Muslim madmen corrupt the minds of their disciples; and, in violation of the Koran, stoke the frustrations of young Arabs who come forward as suicide bombers, with accounts of the American-backed Israeli abuse of its power. They will not forget the Gaza War in which 1400 Palestinians, of whom only 250 were combatants, were killed in only 22 days.

Netanyahu likes to present himself as defending Israel against its enemies, particularly Iran. But in effect he is primarily defending his own job. He is willing to compromise Israel's relationship with the United States, which over the years had fed Israel well over $3 billion a year, one-third of our entire foreign aid budget, when Israel is already one of the wealthiest countries in the world, rather than form a coalition with a more centrist party, Kadima. This new alliance would enable him to halt the East Jerusalem construction and dismantle unauthorized settlement outposts in the West Bank.

Now word has spread that the United States military, under General David Petraeus, have made the case that the Israeli-Palestinian failure to achieve peace, particularly because of America's complicity with Israeli refusal to stop building, is making America look weak in the Middle East. Furthermore, it weakens the moderate Arab regimes and strengthens Iran’s influence in the Arab world. As John Heilemann writes in New York magazine (March 29), Petraeus's presentation on Capitol Hill was both a blow to the Israel-is-always-right crowd, and a critique of Obama's so-far feeble efforts to get both sides to the bargaining table.

Finally, what's so terrible about Jews and Arabs sharing Jerusalem as the capitol of each one's state? There are Jewish scholars today who argue that they should be one secular state, not two separate entities divided by race and religion, where Jews and Arabs and whoever else wanted to join, no matter where they came from, would all live and work side by side. Seems like a radical idea, but it was tried a little over 200 years ago and seems to have worked pretty well here. If that's not possible for Israel, why call it a democracy?

raymndschroth@aol.com