My new article for the American Prospect, on the historical background to George Mitchell’s talks with Bibi Netanyahu, is now up:
In the summer of 1974, the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv received a cable from the State Department. The main office was concerned about press reports that Israel intended to expand settlements in the occupied territories. The cable complained of the “difficulties such publicity generates in U.S.-Arab relations.” The reports “were most unhelpful to Middle East peace efforts.” Foggy Bottom therefore wanted to know how Israel’s Labor government “might be induced to turn off public comments on expanding settlements.”
Two days later, Ambassador Kenneth Keating cabled back. He’d talked to Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, who said he was about to meet with the editors of the country’s newspapers. Allon promised to ask them to play down “sensitive issues” connected to the negotiations that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was conducting between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Allon kindly “volunteered to add settlement to his list” of subjects to hush up, Keating wrote. The secretary could rest easy.
What’s striking about those messages — preserved in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland — is that they say nothing about persuading Israel to stop building settlements. … Washington simply wanted to keep noise about them from sabotaging its peace efforts and its image in the Arab world. Never mind that West Bank settlement helped block an interim agreement between Israel and Jordan. The brief exchange of cables, surreal as it is, is just one example of a long tradition of half-hearted, half-attentive U.S. objections to Israeli settlement efforts — from the soft-spoken response to the first settlements in 1967, through George W. Bush’s 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon, accepting that “new realities on the ground” (read: major settlements) will prevent a return to the pre-1967 borders. …
Read the rest here, and return to South Jerusalem to comment