Its all over but the ending
Earl Evleth
Does sinking Mideast peace process hold any hope?
Thu Nov 19, 2009 6:13am EST
By Douglas Hamilton - Analysis
o
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Efforts to rescue the sinking Middle East peace
process are losing support.
Influential U.S. pundits have lost faith. Those Israelis who never did
believe in it are saying: we told you so.
Some Palestinians believe it is as good as dead, strangled by Israel. They
talk gloomily of a moment of truth.
Middle East veterans say they have seen such hopeless spells before, and
seen them lead to outbreaks of violence.
U.S. President Barack Obama warned as much on Wednesday, saying it was
dangerous of Israel to continue building settlements, hampering an urgent
need to return to negotiations.
Besides Hamas Islamists in Gaza, however, there is as yet no obvious
groundswell of latent violence among Palestinians.
There may be a longing for new directions: suspending the hunt for an
elusive peace treaty could release energy for building a better life on the
truce that exists.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad wants to get on with founding a
state without waiting for a peace deal. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has already initiated moves to help build up the Palestinian
economy without waiting for a pact.
These aims may be more parallel than conflicting. Whether they can overcome
core issues is another question.
NO ALTERNATIVE?
However black the mood, Western envoys usually stick to the script: there is
no alternative to a negotiated peace treaty.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is working hard to deflate what
he considers such illusions.
"Whoever says that it's possible to reach in the coming years a
comprehensive agreement ... simply does not understand the reality," he said
last month. "He is spreading illusions and in the end brings only
disappointment and ... confrontation."
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner laments that Israel once had a
great peace movement but now "this desire has completely vanished, as though
people no longer believe in it."
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls the peace process "a bad
play" which no one believes in any more and which runs on repetitively, in a
triumph of hope over experience.
Neither side will compromise. "If the status quo is this tolerable," he
says, "let them enjoy it," but without the United States.
Times stable mate Roger Cohen has joined in, saying he is so pessimistic he
now agrees with Lieberman: a non-violent status quo, a truce, may be the
best that can be hoped for.
Ironically, a long-term truce is what Hamas might agree to.
THIRD WAY?
Fayyad is admired in the West for a pragmatic drive to find a third way
between more conflict and a final peace pact.
Palestinian detractors say he is putting the cart before the horse. However,
by raising hopes of prosperity, Fayyad may bring hope to a West Bank tired
of the interminable, empty peace process, provided the weak and hobbled
Palestinian Authority can deliver.
Netanyahu can help, by dismantling obstacles that Israel's occupation puts
in the way of normal Palestinian development.
If all he intends to permit is a "Mickey Mouse" state, Fayyad says, then the
Palestinian answer will be: forget it.
Fayyad suspects the state Netanyahu has in mind would be enclosed by Israel
with large areas still under Israeli control.
Israeli strategists applaud Fayyad for challenging advocates of more
resistance, but caution that his bid "to create facts on the ground" may win
major international support, perhaps even diplomatic recognition, if a peace
treaty looks impossible.
WHAT KIND OF STATE?
Given such worries, is Israel ready to go beyond dismantling checkpoints and
end its occupation? Will it, for example, permit Fayyad to build his planned
international airport?
A pullout of Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005 led to
an armed standoff with hostile Hamas, with 1.5 million Palestinians
suffering under a tight blockade and further war possible.
How would Israel keep a West Bank state from going the same way?
"What kind of state are we talking about?" is the question Palestinians want
Israel to answer, in their latest diplomatic bid for clear terms of
reference before any peace talks resume.
Lieberman says there are conflicts that have not reached a comprehensive
solution, yet people have learned to live with them, renouncing violence and
creating long-term conditions in which core issues can be tackled later.
He mentions Cyprus, an island divided militarily for 33 years. However,
Cyprus has no large population living under military occupation.
Pragmatic he may be, but Fayyad does not suggest his people can accommodate
themselves to indefinite occupation, and the only way to end that condition
is through agreement with Israel.
Netanyahu has persuaded columnist Aluf Benn of the liberal Israeli daily
Haaretz that he has the will to achieve peace with the Palestinians. The
Israeli leader, Benn wrote without elaborating, had already informed Obama
of an important political move he was about to make.
The mood of crisis seems to call for some master-stroke that might rescue
the peace process from death's door, save face for Obama, avert a rift with
Washington and prevent the collapse of the crumbling leadership of
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)
hls
Palestinians.
If they had done so, peace could have been attained.
And we sat there on a fool's mission trying to make something happen that
was
doomed to failure by two unwilling entities.
John Rennie
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Does sinking Mideast peace process hold any hope?
> Thu Nov 19, 2009 6:13am EST
>
> By Douglas Hamilton - Analysis
> o
>
> JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Efforts to rescue the sinking Middle East peace
> process are losing support.
>
>
> Influential U.S. pundits have lost faith. Those Israelis who never did
> believe in it are saying: we told you so.
>
So it's back to normal. Who on earth thought things would
change just because America has a new President? Things
will be very much the same in the Middle East a hundred
years from now barring of course several predicted world
catastrophes. When the British fuck things up they fuck
them up for good.
Earl Evleth
"hls" <h...@nospam.nix> wrote:
> I dont think that Israel EVER negotiated in good faith, nor did the
> Palestinians.
> If they had done so, peace could have been attained.
Rabin did, and other Israelis put that to an end.
Sharon knew how to enrage the Moslems, marching
across the Esplanade of the Mosque. Then there
are the walls.
Bill Bonde { 'by a commodius vicus of recirculation' )
hls wrote:
>
> I dont think that Israel EVER negotiated in good faith, nor did the
> Palestinians.
> If they had done so, peace could have been attained.
>
Israel has repeatedly given up land for peace, so I think they have
negotiated in good faith. But it's difficult with the Palestinians,
especially, because of their propensity to turn around and detonate
a belly bomb in a school bus or a pizzeria.
--
What I hate about flip flops is the flip and the flop.
Bill Bonde { 'by a commodius vicus of recirculation' )
Earl Evleth wrote:
>
> Then there
> are the walls.
>
Which may be a reason for the reduction in suicide bombings and
therefore the very chance for peace you are wistfully melancholy
about.
Happy99
"John Rennie" <john-...@talktalk.net> a �crit dans le message de
news:9cydndMh8rTr9ZjW...@giganews.com...
yitzhak in eretz isreal (sic)
> I dont think that Israel EVER negotiated in good faith, nor did the
> Palestinians.
> If they had done so, peace could have been attained.
The only two reasons for thinking that are either i) you're as thick as
shit, or ii) you have been exposed to 'Palestinian' (sic) propaganda.
And unless I've read you wrong, you're far from being thick.
Y.
--
Yitzhak Isaac Goldstein
AADP's 'left-wing Israeli intellectual'
'The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of
one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that
oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the
beginning if it is to be stopped at all'
(H.L. Mencken)
<http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/>
yitzhak in eretz isreal (sic)
> So it's back to normal. Who on earth thought things would change just
> because America has a new President? Things will be very much the same
> in the Middle East a hundred years from now barring of course several
> predicted world catastrophes. When the British fuck things up they fuck
> them up for good.
Anything and everything you write concerning Israel, Reichstag Rennie, must
be seen in the light of _the_ most anti-Semitic statement ever to be made
on news:alt.activism.death-penalty ..
'Israel should not exist'
<http://is.gd/YQ96>
Now please go and die, Scum.