Our guest blogger is Moran Banai, U.S. editor of the Middle East Bulletin.

If today’s Army Radio reports are true, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister-designate, and Avigdor Lieberman, its likely foreign minister, have made a secret agreement to start building homes on a piece of land called E1.

Just yesterday, Middle East Bulletin published an edition focused on settlements -– one of the main stumbling blocks on the road to a sustainable two-state solution -– and included a primer about and photos of E1. E1 is a corridor of land between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim that has been a point of contention between Israeli governments and the United States for over a decade.

Israelis see Maale Adumim as a suburb of Jerusalem and one of the settlements that will remain in Israeli hands at the end of any negotiations and government ministers have said in the past that they are building E1 to establish contiguity between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim. There have been plans to build approximately 3,500 homes in E1 for several years, but they have been repeatedly put off.

In 2008, however, a police station was opened in E1 and overall, Israel has invested over NIS 100 million in infrastructure in the area. There are already signs in the area bearing the name of the new neighborhood –- Mevasseret Adumim. Establishing such contiguity through E1 would deeply cleave the West Bank at its narrowest point and separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank, leading to what President Bush famously cautioned must be avoided — a “Swiss cheese” state for the Palestinians.

Both Acting Prime Minister Olmert and designee Netanyahu have pledged that they are “partners for peace” with the Palestinians. Olmert signed on to Annapolis, under which the United States was to monitor both sides’ compliance with their obligations, and Netanyahu just signed a coalition agreement with the Labor Party that according to Haaretz includes the stipulations that “Israel will formulate a comprehensive plan for Middle East peace and cooperation, continue peace negotiations and commit itself to peace accords already signed.” Freezing settlement growth and taking down outposts is a Road Map obligation for Israel and the Sharm el-Sheikh fact-finding committee (chaired by now Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell) called in its 2001 report for a complete settlement freeze — including “natural growth.”

As Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) said in a hearing on rebuilding Gaza in February:

I think those of us… who are deeply committed to … the security of the state of Israel—must say, and must say it in an unequivocal fashion: It is incumbent upon Israel to freeze settlement activity. While in and of itself that is not the only part of this equation, the Palestinians have enormous responsibilities; but the notion that Israel can continue to expand settlements, whether it be through natural growth or otherwise, without diminishing the capacity of a two-state solution, is both unrealistic and, I would respectfully suggest, hypocritical.

The Washington Post reported this morning that “the Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase ‘global war on terror,’” encouraging instead the use of the phrase “Overseas Contingency Operation.”

In a conference call later this morning, however, OMB director Peter Orszag said he wasn’t aware of any such directive.

Hopefully that will change. As counter-insurgency expert John Nagl tells the Post, the “war on terror” was “enormously unfortunate because I think it pulled together disparate organizations and insurgencies.”

Our strategy should be to divide and conquer rather than make of enemies more than they are…We are facing a number of different insurgencies around the globe — some have local causes, some of them are transnational. Viewing them all through one lens distorts the picture and magnifies the enemy.

It’s important to recognize what a propaganda bonanza the “war on terror” has been for Osama bin Laden. The attacks of 9/11 made bin Laden a major figure in Arab media and culture; the decision by Bush and Cheney to cast him as the sinister leader of a global Islamofascist front against the West made him a legend.

Whatever actual methods were brought to bear against Al Qaeda, it would have been far better from a rhetorical standpoint simply to treat them as criminals. Rebecca Malloy writes in the latest CTC Sentinel (pdf) that, unlike the early Muslim warriors upon whom they claim to model themselves, the behavior of bin Laden and his ilk “fits Islamic legal definitions of brigands (muharibun) and rebels (bugha) who spread terror and destruction.” By elevating them to the level of soldier, the “war on terror” helped buttress bin Laden’s own self-glorifying narrative, needlessly complicating the work of capturing or killing him, as well as the much more important work of discrediting him.

Former Bush administration speechwriter Christian Brose warns, however, that while “dropping the war talk may build support for the mission abroad, or at least make it more tolerable, but it may reduce support for it at home.”

Regardless of what we call it, to be successful in this conflict requires significant domestic spending and unprecedented, often controversial authorities, even by Obama’s standards, as he is learning. Mobilizing and maintaining public support for these commitments is in large part why the War on Terror was proclaimed in the first place. It served a real domestic purpose, and though some took that too far (see Giuliani, Rudy), advocates of a new name, or no name, for the War on Terror must recognize that we are making the case a tougher sell to the American people.

Exactly. Call me old fashioned, but I think vast and enduring overseas military commitments should be a “tough sell” to the American people. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t ever undertake them, just that our leaders should be expected to make the case for them on the merits, in a way that recognizes the seriousness of the undertaking, and not try and sell them with apocalyptic half-truths.

As Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 2007 in a thorough evisceration of the Bush administration’s fear-mongering, “the damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves.”

The vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Brzezinski closed by asking “where is the U.S. leader ready to say, ‘Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia?’” By thus far eschewing the sort of imprecise bellicosity that characterized George W. Bush’s national security rhetoric, President Obama has shown that he may be that leader. It remains to be seen, however, whether he’ll take the important step of publicly disavowing the key framing device of his predecessor’s disastrous foreign policy.