Print

John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian talks are a cover for Aggression and Annexation
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, August 09, 2013
RT Op-Edge 9 August 2013
Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/5346561/5346561

The so-called “peace talks” initiated by John Kerry between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are meaningless theatrics that are part of a stratagem concealing and obscuring the real intentions of the US and Israel in the Middle East.

When US President Barak Obama went to visit Israel, in March  2013, the peace talks were not even a priority for his  administration. The world was bluntly told by Obama that the  so-called “peace process” was not even on the agenda for  discussion between the US and Israeli governments. Hence, the big  question on a lot of minds: why have the talks become a priority  for the US government now?

The “peace talks” illusion

The main purpose of the so-called peace process has been to serve  as a theatrical distraction. Initially, the Israeli-Palestinian  talks were used to keep the Palestinian people and Arabs at bay.  The peace talks and negotiations acquired another dimension with  time, when they became a convenient tool for distracting the  international public and influencing global public opinion by  presenting Israel as a reasonable entity willing to make  concessions for peace and security.

On the latter point mentioned above, on the concept of   “Israeli concessions” to the Palestinians, there is a  catch. Israeli concessions only exist in theoretical terms if  Israel’s illicit fancies are considered legitimate. In reality,  there are no Israeli concessions, especially when international  law is the measuring stick to evaluate the Israeli-Palestinian  conflict. Tel Aviv unlawfully claims the entire West Bank, which  it has no legal entitlement to under international law, as its  own territory. Israeli leaders present the attenuation of their  territorial claims on the West Bank, which they have been busy  annexing during the bogus peace talks, as some type of concession  to the Palestinians.

The so-called “Israeli settlements” in East Jerusalem and  the West Bank are categorically rejected by the United Nations as  illegal. They are a brazen violation of international law.  Israel’s settlements in the West Bank have unanimously been  identified as a war crime under the 1998 Rome Statute of the  International Criminal Court by all of the International Criminal  Court’s judges. The US is also an accomplice in this, because  Washington has prevented international action from being taken  against Israel. A spade should be called a spade: these Israeli  settlements in the West Bank are nothing more than Israeli  colonies.

There are no Israeli concessions, just demands

It is comical to hear US Secretary of State John Kerry ask for  both Israel and the PA to make “reasonable compromises.”   To put it bluntly, it has actually been the Palestinians which  have made the real compromises and then, on top of it, have been  the ones that have been forced by both the US government and  Israel into gradually making more and more concessions. In  addition to the recognition of the approximate 80% of Palestine  that is demarcated within Israel’s 1967 borders by Palestinian  officials, about 60% or more of the West Bank’s territorial space  is occupied by Israeli settlements/colonies.

The Israeli Hafrada (Separation) Wall or Apartheid Wall has cut  off East Jerusalem and the most economically important lands of  the West Bank off from their Palestinian inhabitants and owners.  Palestinians are not even allowed to manage their own resources  and their fresh water is stolen on a daily basis by the Israelis.  Notwithstanding all this, the corrupt Palestinian negotiators,  which have no popular or legal mandate to represent the  Palestinian people, have been willing to recognize and keep the  bulk of the Israeli settlements/colonies in the West Bank (on the  best land) and to forfeit the legal rights provided by the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International  Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to the Palestinian people  to return to their occupied homes.

Palestinian protesters wave the national flag as their comrades climb Israel's controversial separation barrier. (AFP Photo / Abbas Momani)Palestinian protesters wave the national flag as their comrades climb Israel’s controversial separation barrier. (AFP Photo / Abbas Momani)

 

Israel does not want a genuine negotiated settlement with the  Palestinians. It merely wants them to be what can best be  referred to as “Fourth Worlders.” In fact, establishing  more settlements/colonies in the West Bank has become a national  priority for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Aside from annexing  the best land in the West Bank, Tel Aviv wants to dictate its  terms for the creation of a ‘Palestinian Bantustan’ that  will be comprised of several disconnected enclaves essentially  controlled by Israel via proxies and will lack any real  legitimacy, any real political independence, and any real  economic capabilities.

The Palestinian Authority does as it is ordered by Washington and  Tel Aviv

Since the Oslo Accords, the occupation of the West Bank has  merely been outsourced to Palestinian collaborators. The PA and  its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, lack any popular mandate. There should  be little doubt that the morally bankrupt and illegitimate PA is  not fundamentally a US and Israeli client that polices the  Palestinians for Washington and Tel Aviv. Since the electoral  victory of Hamas and the defeat of Fatah in the January 2006  Palestinian general elections, the US and Israel have done  everything they could to prop up Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah  faction in Ramallah, while inversely crushing any semblance of  authentic democratic participation in the Palestinian  Territories. Since then no new elections have taken place and  Abbas has ruled via edict as a quasi-dictator supported by the  US, the EU, Israel, and the dictatorial Arab monarchies.  Moreover, Abbas has cancelled both the presidential elections and  the parliamentary elections.

There should be no illusions; the PA never had a choice about  entering the talks. The PA gets all its funding and authority  from the US and Israel, without which it would collapse. When  protests broke out in the West Bank against the PA, Abbas sent  envoys scrambling from Ramallah to see US and Israeli officials,  asking them to throw him a lifeline. He is not supported by the  people, but by brute force and the Israeli occupation. Via the  Israeli pledge to free several Palestinian prisoners that have  been held in Israeli prisons for decades the US and Israel are  even creating a cover for the PA to justify entering the  fictitious peace talks initiated by Secretary of State Kerry.

The return of Arch-Zionist Martin Indyk

One merely needs to examine the US official supervising the  talks, to get a sense of how ingenuous they actually are.  Arch-Zionist Martin Indyk, a former high-level lobbyist at the  American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that was  eventually given US citizenship by US President Clinton to manage  US foreign policy in the Middle East, will be mediating the talks  between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as Washington’s  so-called special peace envoy. Indyk has been tied to every  tentacle of the Zionist lobby inside and outside of the United  States ranging from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy  (WINEP), which is the research arm of AIPAC, to the  Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, which heavily influenced Qatar’s  Arab Spring foreign policy. According to a speech Indyk made to  the first convention of the self-described “pro-Israeli  organization” J Street in 2009, he deliberately emigrated to  the US as a means of ensuring that US foreign policy would serve   Israel’s interests. Indyk also served  as the US Ambassador to Israel twice, was an architect of the US  policy of containing Iraq and Iran, and an avid cheerleader and  apologist for Israel’s wars on the Palestinians in Gaza and  Lebanon. Now Indyk is in charge of the peace talks as a member of  the Obama Administration.

Equally disreputable as Indyk are the Israeli and PA negotiators  sitting at the table with him. On the Israeli side sits Tsipi  Livni, a brazen war criminal who was forced to cancel a trip at  the end of 2009 to the UK because an arrest warrant was issued for her. Sitting next to her from  the PA is a man who Livni knows very well, and who once told her  that he “would vote for her” if he were an Israeli. That  man, Saeb Erekat, is someone who no Palestinian takes  seriously or respects. In his entire career Erekat has done  nothing but grovel to US and Israeli officials; he said Senator  John McCain had a “genuine commitment to peace” after  McCain let it be known that he did not give a damn about the  Palestinians in 2008, Ekekat even called Israeli Prime Minister  Ariel Sharon—the Israeli official responsible for the Sabra and  Shatila Massacre in Beirut’s Palestinian refugee camps—his  friend, and on numerous occasions he has ridiculously apologized  profusely to the Israelis that the negotiations that Tel Aviv  itself has sabotaged have not succeeded.

The peace talks and the regional equation

The timing of the Israeli-Palestinian talks is linked to US and  Israeli plans to save their declining regional status in the  Middle East and their clients. Regionally, the events involving  Egypt, Syria, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood have additionally  had a big impact on the Palestinians and Israel. Abbas even made  a visit to Beirut in early July 2013 to tell the Palestinian  refugees in Lebanon to be neutral in the clashes taking place in  Syria and Lebanon.

Meanwhile in the Gaza Strip, Hamas has become more isolated. For  a while it looked like the Hamas government in Gaza was going to  win the favour of other Arab countries at the expense of Mahmoud  Abbas and his lackeys in Ramallah. The events in Syria and Egypt,  however, have hurt Hamas. Although he is not completely correct,  it is worth quoting what Eli Shaked, the former Israeli  Ambassador to Egypt, joyously said about Hamas as the Muslim  Brotherhood was being ousted in Egypt in early July 2013:   “Hamas has lost Iran, they have lost Syria and they are losing  Egypt. They are much more isolated.”  Despite the  suffering of Gazans, the isolation of Hamas has pleased Abbas and  his regime in Ramallah too, which went out of their way to  congratulate General Al-Sisi and the Egyptian military for  removing the Muslim Brotherhood from power in Cairo. Now a  military wave of terror has begun against Palestinians in  Egypt.

Palestinian Hamas security forces patrol near the border with Egypt in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on July 5, 2013. (AFP Photo / Said Khatib)Palestinian Hamas security forces patrol near the border with Egypt in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on July 5, 2013. (AFP Photo / Said Khatib)

 

The highly unpopular Abbas himself faces a potential rebellion in  the West Bank. A political crisis has been developing in his  fiefdom as his degenerate PA faces collapse with rising  unemployment, increasing economic stagnation, mounting  unpopularity, and its increasing repressiveness. The regime in  Ramallah has seen a wave of political purges and resignations by  officials trying to distance themselves from Abbas as the  situation in the West Bank becomes more desperate.

Talking peace while preparing for war?

It is ironic that the US and Israel, two of the three parties  involved in the peace talks, have been threatening to attack  Syria, Lebanon, or Iran. Perhaps most interesting of all, the  announcement about the renewal of the talks between Israel and  the PA came just when the US and Israel pressured the European  Union to designate the military wing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah as a  terrorist organization, not that the EU has any relations with  Hezbollah’s military wing or knows anything about it. The EU  decision is clearly a political one that is really tied to the US  failure of imposing regime change in Syria, where Hezbollah has  intervened and the foreign-sponsored anti-government forces have  been routed.

Historically, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have always been  linked to alleviating pressure tied to US war plans. Washington and  Tel Aviv could be contemplating some type of confrontation with  Hezbollah or even its patron Iran. Israel’s tattered  international image could dissipate even more, if a new  confrontation with Hezbollah takes the form of another Israeli  war on Lebanon. Netanyahu has also started threatening to  unilaterally attack Iran again, which would be impossible for  Israel without US involvement. Aside from providing cover for the  Israeli settlements/colonies in the West Bank and providing  relief from the international pressure on Tel Aviv, the renewed  Israeli talks with the PA could serve as a means of portraying  Netanyahu’s government as genuinely desiring peace before it gets  involved in some sort of adventurism. Additionally, the EU’s  terrorist label on Hezbollah could be used by the US and the  Israelis to justify such a confrontation as a fight against  terrorism.

Whatever the reasons are behind the renewal of the futile talks  between Tel Aviv and the PA, the US government and Israel are not  interested in a just resolution. Neither the talks nor the  negotiators nor the US government, as a broker, are genuine. The  Obama Administration is merely pursuing its own interests in the  wider Middle East.

Livni, the Israeli representative at the talks, set the tempo for  the outcome of the talks herself by declaring that people should  not be “optimistic.” Washington and Tel Aviv will not even  let the Palestinians create their own independent country by  ending the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip,  and the West Bank. While the destitute Palestinian people undergo  territorial disposition, the sham peace talks have served as  nothing more than a smokescreen for Tel Aviv to systematically  colonize what is left of the Palestinian homeland as Israeli  Lebensraum or “living space.”  There is no  other way to phrase it.

This article was originally published on RT.

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article.