For within hours of Rice's departure from the region on her latest fruitless peace mission, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave the green light to the Jerusalem's municipal government to erect no less than 600 new apartments in Pisgat Zeev, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. This was followed by reports that Olmert had also pledged to construct 800 more housing units in the large West Bank Jewish settlement of Betar Illit.
To rub salt in the wound of Rice's humiliation, Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski expressed his confidence that Olmert would push ahead fast with the new plan.
That construction will more than double the 1,000 housing units in other settlements that Olmert has OK-ed since Annapolis, even though Rice's cherished "road map" for the peace process clearly states that there must be a total freeze on any such construction outside Israel's 1967 borders.
Not since Yitzhak Shamir defied U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, the current president's father, and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, more than 16 years ago has any Israeli leader openly defied or risked angering American leaders so much, and Shamir, whatever else, he was, was a strong and confident leader, the longest-serving Israeli prime minister since the state's founding father David Ben-Gurion. Olmert, by contrast, is so politically weak that he celebrates whenever his popularity ratings climb into double digits above 10 percent. If even he can humiliate Rice so brazenly when Israel remains so dependent on American support, without which it would be totally isolated, then anybody can.
Also, Shamir quickly paid the price for treating a powerful and successful president of the United States with such disdain. Bush defied all the massed power of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington to deny the Jewish state $10 billion in loan guarantees to settle immigrants from the collapsing Soviet Union. Bush 41's clearly expressed outrage undermined Shamir and played a significant role in his electoral defeat in 1992 -- the event that cleared the way for the 1993 Oslo agreement and the ensuing peace process. Today, however, Olmert appears confident that however much he humiliates Rice, her boss, Bush 43, will not follow his father's example and back up his secretary of state.
If Rice had any self-respect, she would fly back to Jerusalem within the week to tell Olmert in no uncertain terms what the price for defying a United States secretary of state in her drive to implement a high priority national diplomatic policy would be. Unfortunately, it seems a safe bet that she will simply suit back and passively accept this humiliation as she has so many others and simply continue to pay lip service to an Annapolis peace process that has become no more than a fiction in which only she still appears to believe.