The Bushama administration is playing politics with the lives of Palestinians just as every American administration since Truman recognized Israel.

The Bushama administration claims it wants a new relationship with the Muslim world based on “mutual respect and mutual interest.” It could win a lot of political capital if it helped Palestinians even a bit, but then there is a lot of political capital to lose in the United States for doing just that.

Bushama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not long ago committed on behalf of the administration $900 to help rebuild Gaza. It turned out that a great deal of that money wasn’t going to go to Gaza, but for training Palestinian security forces, and about $300 million was headed for the devastated Stripe after an indiscriminate assault and invasion by Israel that killed over 1,400 Palestinians; 960 of them civilians, 239 of them municipal police officers not affiliated with Hamas, and over 400 of them children. Never forget the massacre.

But now even that money may not make it through. Israeli daily Haaretz reports:

About $900 million pledged by the United States to the Palestinians will be withdrawn if the expected Palestinian Authority coalition government between Fatah and Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, Western and Israeli diplomats said Wednesday.

During her visit to the region last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas against forming a coalition with Hamas that will not meet the expectations of the Quartet.

[Bending over for Israel.]

I am for a unity Palestinian government that recognizes all previous Palestinian Authority agreements, which entails the recognition of Israel. But this inflexible demand is counterproductive. Hams and Fatah are finally [knock on wood, knock on wood, knock on wood] about to reconcile after nearly a two-year feud. Further, recently Hamas has criticized rocket attacks on Israel and “said . . . that it was not behind recent attacks and that it was investigating who was responsible.”

If the Bushama administration wants genuine peace it needs to be patient and allow for certain steps to be taken at the right time, instead of being dogmatic with self-defeating preconditions. I though Obama was supposed to break with that method of Bush’s diplomacy?[I just butchered that word in reference to Bush’s actions].

The Electronic Intifada put it most eloquently:

“It is ludicrous to demand that the stateless Palestinian people unconditionally recognize the legitimacy of the entity that dispossessed them and occupies them, that itself has no declared borders and that continues to violently expand its territory at their expense. If Palestinians are ever to recognize Israel in any form, that can only be an outcome of negotiations in which Palestinian rights are fully recognized, not a precondition for them.”

But such logic falls on deaf ears in Washington regardless of the party in charge, because both parties worship on the alter of placing Israel’s demands always above those of the Palestinians, whom are never seen as individuals who are to be treated as equals but simply a blob on which to make demands and impose solutions on. The Palestinians are anything but and Obama and Clinton can forget about building a new era in Muslim-American and more specifically Arab-American relations if this is how the treat the Palestinians.