Al-Ahram
Sept 17, 2009
What more does it take to discredit current formulations of what constitutes the peace process, asks Ayman El-Amir*
Israel has decided to pre-empt the next stage in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process by rushing to issue new building permits for settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem in an attempt to establish new facts on the ground prior to negotiations. These are typical Israeli delaying tactics: to sow new obstacles that shift the focus and derail the process so that it can then restart from an off-field square, obviating the key peace issues and playing for time. The new step, advocated by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to placate his settler- colonialist partners in the Likud-led coalition has been rejected by US President Barack Obama, the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and Arab politicians of all shades. It reconfirms that Israel is not, and never has been, serious about a final peace settlement with the Palestinians. The peace process needs to be recast and rescued from Israel's Machiavellian designs.
The Arabs are in a bind. They dare not withdraw or freeze their 2002 collective peace overture to Israel. That would upset the US and the EU and play into the hands of a belligerent Israel. Infighting among the Palestinians, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's crackdown on Palestinian guerrilla fighters, is aborting any serious pressure against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the atrocities committed against the population. Additionally, pro-American Arab regimes are playing the Israeli game of focussing on the Iranian ascendancy as a threat to their survival while honouring the Palestinian cause with lip-service and circuitous consultations and conferences. In return, Israel is fomenting trouble in Egypt's most sensitive backyard -- African countries from which the water resources feeding the River Nile flow, a distracting source of worry for Egypt. President Obama's administration is trying to gently persuade a wild-eyed Israeli premier to engage in peace negotiations, keeping a wary eye on Congress and the Jewish lobby. It is a bleak picture.
Whatever hard-core Israeli chauvinists might suppose there is little doubt in the mind of the world's public that Israeli policies are confusing the quest for peace with territorial expansion and the persecution of Jews in Europe at the hands of Europeans. Israel is bent on expansion, annexing more Palestinian territory to create irreversible new realities that, when negotiated under the weight of occupation, will ensure Israel retains the lion's share of the Arab territories it occupies. Israel, backed by various US administrations, has flouted every international law, killed any number of Palestinians and transferred more than 260,000, seizing houses and land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under military laws of occupation that are no different from those of the Nazi occupation in Poland or Czechoslovakia during World War II. The Israeli wall of shame that runs for 386 kilometres on Palestinian territories and is 80- 100 metres wide was built in the name of security. It divided Palestinian families, separated farmers from their land to which they cannot cross, and locks nearly 100,000 inhabitants of East Jerusalem out of their city, which they can visit only if they possess a special permit issued by the occupation authorities. Needless to say, such permits are more often refused than issued. Israel is laying a choking siege to Gaza, starving its population and meting out a death sentence to the sick and the old. The Palestinian-Israeli peace process, of which the Oslo Accords signed in September 1993 represent an unprecedented capitulation on the part of the late Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat, has clearly reached a dead-end.
In the 18 years since the multilateral Madrid conference the Arab- Israeli conflict has been negotiated in a closed circle between the Arabs and the Israelis under US sponsorship. So-called peace efforts in the form of initiatives, shuttle diplomacy, the Quartet, the make-believe 2007 Annapolis conference, the much-touted two-state solution plan as well as the George Mitchell and Hillary Clinton rounds of negotiations have all come to naught. Israel continues to change tactics and shift the focus. It is time the whole package went to the international forum where it started -- to the United Nations.
The UN is notorious for adopting resolutions that sit dead on its books. The General Assembly and the Security Council have issued 19 resolutions on the status of Jerusalem and the responsibilities of the occupying power, each of which has been brushed aside by Israel. As far back as 1980 the UN Security Council adopted a landmark resolution (S/465) in which it determined "all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East". The US, then under the leadership of president Jimmy Carter, happily voted for the resolution, not least because it did not invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter that carries the power of punitive measures. It met the same fate of dozens of other General Assembly and Security Council resolutions on Palestine.
Israel hates to participate in international conferences on the Arab- Israeli conflict without the guaranteed protection of the US for fear of facing myriad resolutions defending the Palestinians. It prefers limited, backroom negotiations where it can manoeuvre, set conditions, avoid any binding framework, renege on any commitment and, eventually, pick up the ball and go home if it does not like the game, leaving behind hand-wringing Palestinian Arabs. Then the US pressures its Arab allies to offer more concessions. The Arabs agree and Israel comes back with another convoluted scenario. In the meantime, it expropriates more Palestinian land, levels more houses, detains or kicks out more Palestinians, introduces more restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, violates more human rights and builds more settlements for new immigrants to move into.
With the convening of the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly, scheduled for 15 September, the ball is now in the court of the Arabs. Will they have the temerity to pronounce the piecemeal process dead, bring the whole issue back to the United Nations and build new momentum behind it? Will they have the nerve to insist on Russian involvement in the face of US objections? Will they have the courage to shift the focus back from the Israeli-instigated Iranian threat to the clear and present Israeli danger to the region?
The Palestinians have been patient enough with the peace process, not least because of their internal strife. But there is no telling the circumstances or the timing of a possible third Intifada, or of the Israeli military setting the whole of the occupied territories aflame in retaliation. As Arab diplomatic and security officials busy themselves with the Gilad Shalit cause, the dangers posed by Iran and how to gain the favour with the Obama administration, Gaza remains under siege, as it has since the Israeli onslaught in December 2008. The Palestinians are in despair. It will not take long, or much, before they explode into another rebellion.
* The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/964/op15.htm