Saturday, September 28, 2013

Why Obama Can't Make Peace in Israel-Palestine






He cannot make peace because there is no peace to be made that does not include a reformed Palestinian society that can be trusted by the Israelis. Until that moment we will have a wall and separation that precludes hostilities. And inevitably, this leads progressively to the alienation of more land and the steady diminishment of the Palestinian State.


It is incredibly simple. Lob a rocket and the Israelis will occupy the land it was fired from. Thereupon, illegal settlers will occupy said now protected ground and present additional inviting targets. So until you wise up and stop lobbing rockets against a powerful enemy you will keep losing land.


As I have posted before it is end game for the Israelis. Their object now is to negotiate with that portion of Palestinian society that wants normalization and make it easy for them to become Israelis. This soon leads to outright annexation and quick suppression and expulsion of the Dead Enders. Even better, the Israelis have all the time in the world.


The radical arms of Islam are burning themselves out in a desperate struggle for survival in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world as the people and their military struggle for security and secular freedom. To call it a distraction is the understatement of history.


Let us put this another way. Every Middle Eastern tribe wants independence and a democratic government just like Israel’s to protect themselves militarily and to modernize their society. Borders are hardly meaningful because modernism does not need agricultural land to establish wealth. Thus the natural future will be cultural centers and a blended hinterland supporting these centers.


It is likely now inevitable that Israel will secure its borders to the Jordan River even without a trigger event to make it easy.


Why Obama Can't Make Peace in Israel-Palestine


Saturday, 14 September 2013 10:00

By Sarah Gold



Chief among the reasons to be skeptical about the Obama administration’s latest gambit for peace in Israel-Palestine is its own record on the subject. Barack Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to Josh Reubner, resembles hammering a square peg into a round hole. And it’s no small surprise the pieces don’t fit.


Ruebner, the national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, lays out his argument in a new book, the accessible and engaging Shattered Hopes: The Failure of Obama’s Middle East Peace Process. It’s a biting critique.


Here is a book that does not ignore the enormous power differential between Israel and the Occupied Territories—that tells it like it is with no apprehension or sugar coating. Having consulted both leaked classified sources and publicly available documents, Ruebner fills Shattered Hopes with an abundance of evidence culled from primary sources, allowing readers to see for themselves the seemingly endless mistakes that characterize the so-called “peace process.”


The first half of the book presents a play-by-play history of the Obama administration’s attempts to negotiate a peace deal. One by one, Reubner offers a context, description, and critique of each attempt, as well as a report of Israel’s response. This section spans from the time preceding Obama’s election, including his prior relationship with the conflict and with Palestinians, to the events surrounding Operation Cast Lead and the 2012 bid by the Palestinian Authority to be recognized as a UN member state.


Ruebner examines Washington’s failure to involve the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations and lays bare the ugly details of Netanyahu’s plan for a neutered Palestinian state. He carefully illustrates the difficult positions Palestinians have been put into during past negotiations, such as when the Obama administration abandoned efforts to seek an Israeli settlement freeze as a precondition for talks, placing “Palestinians in the untenable position of either being forced to negotiate with Israel while it continued to colonize Palestinian land, or to rebuff the initiative and be portrayed by Israel and its supporters in the United States as the rejectionist party.” He details the many ways that Israel has continuously manipulated the United States into supporting Israeli actions—such as its aggressive settlement expansion—that defy stated U.S. policies and interests.


The second half of Shattered Hopes explores various themes that emerge in the Obama administration’s diplomatic policies, including its blocking of international efforts to hold Israel accountable for its actions. This includes its active opposition to the Goldstone Report (the result of a 2009 UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict), which helped to create a sense of impunity for Israel. Here Reubner also contrasts the strengthening of the U.S.-Israel military relationship ($3.1 billion dollars of military aid in 2013) with how U.S. aid to Palestinians is “specifically designed to de-develop the Palestinian economy” and “reconcile [Palestinians] to their open-air prison existence by making it slightly more palatable.”


Reubner also sheds some light on how Washington’s staunch support for Israel affects its relationships with its allies, such as when the United States “indefinitely postponed a planned multinational military exercise scheduled to take place in Turkey in October 2009” because Turkey, outraged over Cast Lead and protesting Israel’s continued colonization of Palestinian land, removed Israel from the exercise.


Reflecting on the standoff over Israel’s deadly 2010 attack on a Turkish-flagged aid flotilla to Gaza, Reubner quips that “the United States found itself in the unenviable position of trying to explain how both of its allies’ reports could be credible if they were diametrically conflicting.”


The book concludes with a final, clear analysis that explains the many reasons Obama has so far failed to broker a Middle East peace: Namely, Obama’s failure to recognize the asymmetry of power between Israel and Palestine—exacerbated by his provision of “unconditional military and diplomatic support” to Israel that “solidified the very conditions that made peace impossible”—led to a failure to create incentives for Israel to sincerely commit to a peace process. And all the while the administration relied on a “chauvinistic, heavy-handed approach to international diplomacy that belittled and quashed any alternative” to the failing U.S.-dominated effort.


Reubner ends with a defiant call for an end to U.S. “support for Israeli military occupation and apartheid toward the Palestinian people.” If his book is any indication, that’s a change that must come from without—not from within.


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