Tonight - November 9, 2009 - Israeli prime minister Netanyahu met with U.S. president Obama in a meeting that was off-limits to the press.

The timing - 7pm - was also meant to downplay the meeting. The whole reason for the whole secretness of the meeting it that it is expected to be a totally waste of time. It was scheduled a while back and neither party can back out now given the sensitivity of U.S.-Israeli relations. Netanyahu has ignored Obama’s demand for settlement freeze in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Obama - as if he was the leader of a tiny nation dependent on a superpower’s aid and diplomatic weight - gave in to Netanyahu’s demand and now the administration is sounding the same old pro-Israel propaganda.

Netanyahu knows he has won, and does not hide his inflated ego. He has outsmarted Obama, and knows full well that Obama is too cowardly and too concerned about his reelection to threaten cutting U.S. aid to Israel. And now Netanyahu is trying to position himself as a pro-peace candidate even though he does not believe in a Palestinian state (only endorsed only half-heartedly and with so many restrictions he knows Palestinians will never accept his unfair terms). Palestinians have rightly refused to reopen another pointless round of negotiations while Israel continues to colonize their land.

But now Netanyahu is calling for indefinite negotiations while Israel continues to build settlements, and is stating that the Palestinians are the only anti-peace because they have the temerity to demand that Israel stop stealing their land.

And Netanyahu has stated that on his negotiation table, the majority-Arab East Jerusalem will not be up for debate since Israel intends to keep all of Jerusalem. Palestinians want East Jerusalem - occupied since 1967 - as their future capital. Netanyahu’s game fools only fellow Zionist travellers. How can one claim a desire to restart peace negotiations will continuing to steal the other side’s land and tell them that their hope for a future capital cannot even be discussed?

This is the thuggery and propaganda of the Israeli leader. Of course, Palestinians will not enter into such a meaningless negotiation so that Netanyahu gets a propaganda victory while Palestine continues to be lost. And Obama will not have the courage to tell Netanyahu that he is wrong and is harming the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Netanyahu feels very proud: he has outsmarted the U.S. president and thinks that he is (only in U.S. stupid eyes) making the Palestinians look like anti-peace instead of his far-right government. But he is blinded by hubris and is only shooting the foot of his nation:

Mr Netanyahu’s refusal to call a halt to expanding settlements means in effect there will be no two-state solution.

If that is so, then the prospect is for a long and bitter fight for equal rights within one state. That would spell the end of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. It would come to resemble in many ways the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. If Mr Netanyahu believes that he has achieved a victory by refusing to halt the settlements, he is wrong. It is more like a project of national suicide.