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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