Palestinians Will be the Losers ... Again
Obama's Bribe
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth
Watching
the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians drag on year
after year without conclusion, it is easy to overlook the enormous
changes that have taken place on the ground since the Oslo Accords were
signed 17 years ago.
Each has undermined the Palestinians' primary goal of achieving
viable statehood, whether it is the near-trebling of Jewish settlers on
Palestinian land to the current numbers of half a million, Israel's
increasing stranglehold on East Jerusalem, the wall that has effectively
annexed large slices of the West Bank to Israel, or the splitting of
the Palestinian national movement into rival camps following Israel's
withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
Another setback of similar magnitude may be unfolding as Barack
Obama dangles a lavish package of incentives in the face of Benjamin
Netanyahu in an attempt to lure the Israeli prime minister into renewing
a three-month, partial freeze on Jewish settlement construction in the
West Bank.
The generosity of the US president's package, which includes 20
combat aircraft worth $3 billion and backing for Israel's continued
military presence in the Jordan Valley after the declaration of a
Palestinian state, has prompted even Thomas Friedman of The New York
Times to compare it to a “bribe”.
Israeli officials said yesterday they were still waiting to see a
text of the deal worked out between Netanyahu and the US secretary of
state, Hillary Clinton, in seven hours of negotiations.
In addition to the concession in the Jordan Valley and the offer of
combat jets that would effectively double the annual aid from the US,
the deal is said to include
a promise by Washington to veto for the next year any UN resolutions
Israel opposes and to refrain, after borders have been agreed, from
demanding any future limits on settlement growth.
The signs are that Netanyahu will be able to secure the backing of
his right-wing cabinet for a brief settlement freeze that this time, the
US has indicated, will not include East Jerusalem.
So far, in attempting to resolve the conflict, Obama has nearly
exhausted his political capital. There were intimations this week that
the White House could not afford further humiliation and was going for
broke.
The timetable for negotiations now calls for reaching an agreement
on borders within three months -- the duration of the settlement
construction freeze -- followed by a final resolution of the conflict
within a year or so.
Washington’s hopeful logic is that a renewal of the freeze will be
unnecessary in three months because an agreement on borders will already
have established whether a settlement is to be considered included in
Israel’s territory and therefore permitted to expand or inside Palestine
and therefore slated for destruction.
In a similarly optimistic vein, the US apparently expects the
problem of refugees simply to dissolve through the creation of a special
international fund to compensate them. The right of return appears to
be off the table.
If these obstacles can be surmounted this way - a very big "if" -
only one significant point of contention, the future of East Jerusalem,
remains to be resolved.
This is where things get more awkward. The US is not proposing that
the three-month freeze apply to East Jerusalem, after
settlement-building there caused friction between Israel and the US
during the last moratorium.
This concession and the outlines of a previous US peace proposal
under president Bill Clinton hint at Washington's most likely strategy.
East Jerusalem will be divided, with the large settlement blocs, home to
at least 200,000 Jews, handed over to Israel while the Old City and its
holy places fall under a complicated shared sovereignty.
In the face of this intense US-Israeli diplomacy, Palestinians are
dismayed. They have described the agreement between the US and Netanyahu
as “deeply disappointing” and are demanding from the White House
similarly generous inducements to ease their path back to negotiations.
The Arab League, which has taken a prominent role in overseeing the
Palestinian negotiations, has also objected to the deal.
The Palestinians fear they will be left with a patchwork of
disconnected areas - what Israel has previously termed "bubbles" - as
their capital.
If the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, can be made
to swallow all this, which seems highly improbable, he will then have to
contend with Hamas, the rival Palestinian faction, which can be
expected to do everything in its power to disrupt such an agreement.
And then there is Netanyahu. Few Israeli analysts think he has suddenly
become more amenable to the US plans.
Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University in the
Negev and author of an important study of the occupation, believes the
Israeli prime minister is simply playing the part demanded by Obama.
"He is taking the US 'merchandise' on offer, but will hold firm on key
issues that guarantee the talks' failure. That way he gets the credit
for keeping the negotiations on track and lets the Palestinians take the
blame for walking out."
This sounds suspiciously like a re-run of the last proper peace
talks, at Camp David in 2000. Then, Israeli intransigence stalled the
negotiations, but Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was blamed by
the US and Israel for their collapse.
The Camp David failure led to the outbreak of Palestinian violence,
the second intifada, and the demise of the Israeli peace camp. Mr
Netanyahu may be prepared to risk a repeat of both such outcomes from
these talks if it means he can avoid making any real concessions on
Palestinian statehood.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the
Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook11172010.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Digest: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
