NPR:  U.S. Envoy Cancels Trip As Feud With Israel Deepens

A U.S. envoy’s postponement of his Mideast trip appeared Tuesday to deepen one of the worst U.S.-Israeli feuds in memory — even as Israel’s foreign minister signaled his government had no intention of curtailing the contentious construction at the heart of the row.

WSJ:  Israel Rift Threatens U.S. Plans In Mideast

Israel signaled it won’t halt its building plans in the disputed territory of east Jerusalem, deepening a rift with the U.S. that threatens efforts to contain Iran and other American security goals in the Middle East.

Officials on both sides fear relations between the two allies are at their worst point in decades, after Israel scuttled hope for a new round of peace talks by announcing  new settlement plans last week during a visit by Vice President Joseph Biden. That led to an extraordinary public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

NPR:  The Nation: The Beginning Of The Israel Showdown Robert Dreyfuss writes:

The Israel lobby is mobilizing for what might turn into the most significant confrontation between the United States and Israel since, well, the Suez War of 1956, when President Eisenhower told Israel — and its covert allies, the UK and France — to halt the unprovoked assault on Egypt. Since then, US-Israel conflicts have been relatively small and tied to side issues, such as the fight over President Reagan’s sale of AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s or President Bush’s showdown with Israel in the early 1990s, when the United States threatened to withhold loan guarantees to Israel after a right-wing Israeli government stone-walled the peace process.

This time, if President Obama plays his cards right, he could bring down the extremist government of Bibi Netanyahu. But that depends on whether Obama displays the guts and gumption necessary for a full-frontal challenge to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its allies.

WP:  The U.S. quarrel with Israel Editorial:

Mr. Netanyahu already has conceded the last point and may give way on others; he is facing harsh domestic criticism. But Mr. Obama risks repeating his previous error. American chastising of Israel invariably prompts still harsher rhetoric, and elevated demands, from Palestinian and other Arab leaders. Rather than join peace talks, Palestinians will now wait to see what unilateral Israeli steps Washington forces. Mr. Netanyahu already has made a couple of concessions in the past year, including declaring a partial moratorium on settlements. But on the question of Jerusalem, he is likely to dig in his heels — as would any other Israeli government. If the White House insists on a reversal of the settlement decision, or allows Palestinians to do so, it might land in the same corner from which it just extricated itself.

Times UK:  For the first time there are voices questioning Israel’s strategic value Richard Beeston writes:

But for the first time there are other voices — in this case General David Petraeus, the hugely influential head of US Central Command — openly questioning Israel’s value as a strategic ally. His defining experiences as a soldier, and those of most Americans in uniform, have been Iraq and Afghanistan.

As America becomes more deeply involved in the Arab and Muslim worlds, with nearly 200,000 troops in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan, it will challenge anything that may threaten US lives.

The Pentagon may be coming to the conclusion that the failure to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace deal is the best recruiting sergeant for militant Islam. Live footage of Palestinians being beaten or shot by Israeli troops are beamed around the region on satellite news channels. They can whip up public fury and angry sermons from Cairo to Kabul. America may not be directly involved in these incidents but it is blamed for arming and funding Israel and providing the Jewish state with diplomatic cover at the United Nations. If America’s unwavering support for Israel is endangering the lives of US troops in Kandahar or Baghdad, then the Jewish state has a problem.

NYT:  The Biden Effect Roger Cohen writes:

Yet over the past decade the United States has been facilitating the costly settlements enterprise by pouring $28.9 billion into Israel. America’s strategic goal of Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side in security has been undermined by its own blank-check diplomacy.

Well, goodbye to all that — maybe. Something shifted when Biden (“You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist”) was thanked for his unstinting support of Israel with a snub: The announcement that another 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in east Jerusalem, a pure provocation when restarting peace talks is the core U.S. aim.

President Barack Obama was furious. In a top-down administration like this one, you don’t get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lambasting Netanyahu for 43 minutes and David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, speaking of “an affront” and “an insult” and a “very, very destructive” step if America’s measured leader is not immeasurably incensed. That truth is also worth knowing.

Obama has reason to be angry.

This is a watershed moment. Palestinian violence, Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement and jihadist infiltration of the Palestinian national movement all undermine peace efforts. They are unacceptable; Biden was right to “ironclad” the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. But it’s past time that Palestinian failings cease to serve as an excuse for Israel’s remorseless, cynical scattering of the Palestinian people into enclaves that make a farce of statehood. That is “an affront” to America.

Guardian:  Israel must help US tackle Iran Meir Javedanfar writes:

According to Mark Perry writing in Foreign Policy, one of the main parties in Washington calling for Barack Obama to put his foot down against Israel’s settlement expansion, even before Vice-president Joe Biden’s recent call, has been General David Petraeus. In the Pentagon’s view, the Obama administration’s inability to stop the expansion of settlements is eroding America’s military posture in the Middle East. Such erosion could embolden Muslim extremists to increase their attacks on US forces in the region.  Petraeus wanted to confront the settlements by getting the US government to include the Palestinian issue under his command in Centcom. This was denied. Obama preferred to let George Mitchell and Biden handle it.  But when Biden heard Israel’s recent announcement of plans to expand housing in East Jerusalem, he decided to be frank. He openly told Israel’s prime minister: “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Foreign Policy:  The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story Mark Perry writes:

On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”

The January Mullen briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue; which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus’s instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders. “Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling,” a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing says. “America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding.” But Petraeus wasn’t finished: two days after the Mullen briefing, Petraeus sent a paper to the White House requesting that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command — or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus’s reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged  in the region’s most troublesome conflict.

BBC:  Israeli FM reportedly boycotts Brazil’s President Lula

Israel’s foreign minister is reported to have boycotted the visit to Israel by the Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.