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22 November 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
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. |
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