Vice President Joe Biden is reportedly angry and embarrassed over the poorly timed announcement from Israel yesterday that it planned to build 1,600 new homes for Jewish settlers in occupied East Jerusalem.

Vice President Joe Biden angry today after Israel undermines potential peace talks. Photo credit: Center for American Progress Action Fund

Yesterday, Biden was hopeful – almost to the point of folly, some observers implied – about the possibility of indirect negotiations conducted through US envoys reigniting peace talks between Israel and Palestine, especially after the Palestinian Authority dropped its opposition to the talks. But today, Biden stands a deeply disappointed and somewhat humiliate man after what the New York Post called a “slap in the face”.

Biden said today that it was “incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support,” and said that Israel’s plan to continue building undermined trust. Last night, after learning of the Israeli plan, Biden arrived an hour and a half late for dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, presumably time spent drafting today’s stinging put down.

But the situation is evidently more complicated than meets the eye – The New York Times reported today that the move to go ahead with the building in the ultra-orthodox Ramat Shlomo settlement was made by Netanyahu’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, leader of the right-win Shas Party. Yishai has long made Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem one of his major campaign points; the decision to build supposedly came as a surprise to Netanyahu and smacks uncomfortably of the political.

The implications of the move may be more than Israel bargained for, Simon Tisdall said in today’s Guardian. Calling it the “most brutally contemptuous rebuff so far to American peacemaking,” Tisdall wrote that Netanyahu has spent the last year frustrating the Obama Administration’s attempts to push the peace process forward. This latest, however, might just force the Administration to take a much tougher stance on Israel: “Now, Netanyahu has deeply angered his country’s best and most powerful friend – again. The coming message to Bibi: don’t over-reach.”

Uri Dromi, spokesman for the Rabin and Peres governments from 1992 to 1996, wrote in an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune today that Israel’s persistence in settling in East Jerusalem is folly: “Beside the blunder of rubbing it in the face of your best friend and ally, there lies a much more substantial error: By expanding settlements instead of separating from the Palestinians while we still can, we Israelis are dooming ourselves to lose the Jewish and democratic state that has been won with so much sacrifice.”