Barack Obama has put usually pressure for an American president on Israel to stop all illegal settlement building on Palestinian. This has created a public rift for the first time in years between the two nations.

Settlements are illegal under international law and even Israeli military lawyers decreed that settlements are illegal when the government first started to allow construction after the 1967 war.

Today, half a million Israelis - 10% of the Jewish population - live in illegal settlements.

In the past, U.S. administration would utter words about stopping settlements but then never follow with pressure. Israelis took this as a green light and continued with construction. Obama has broken that tide by ruling out any new construction even for the Israeli euphemism of “natural growth”.

Israelis have been visibly frustrated that Obama would have the temerity to demand Israel follow international law. And now the Jewish state has decided to give Obama the finger:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has authorized the building of 300 new homes in the West Bank, defying U.S. calls for a halt to settlement growth.

Activists for Bimkom association, which works for justice and human rights in planning and knows a thing or two about the situation in the territories, have discovered that Barak recently authorized the Civil Administration to submit a plan for the construction of 300 housing units in the unauthorized outpost of Givat Habrecha, near the community of Talmon. . . .

The new construction is located around 13 kilometers east of the Green Line, on the “Palestinian” side of the separation barrier. According to the Sasson Report, this outpost was built without government approval and without a master plan and damaged private Palestinian property.

This is how the process works: outposts are established on private Palestinian land by heavily armed thuggish settlers, then the Israeli government aids these people through a master development, then the Israeli government cries that there are new facts on the ground and the poor government just cannot uproot settlers now.

The irony here is that the failure of a two-state solution in the end will not hurt the Palestinians, but the Israelis.