“This parrot is no more,” rants former Monty Python member, John Cleese, in the English-speaking world’s best-loved television sketch. “It has ceased to be,” he tells fellow Python, Michael Palin, playing a pet-shop owner who insists that the obviously dead bird is still alive.
Same with the “Middle East peace process”— another old joke that is getting a bit creaky in the joints. The US state department, like the pet-shop owner, insists that the obviously dead process is still alive.
It’s a necessary fiction. Nobody in authority will admit that no Israeli government will take on the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and force through a “land for peace” deal, or that there is no unified government for Israelis to talk to on the Palestinian side anyway — that there is, in fact, no prospect of a peace settlement in this generation. But that is the reality; the rest is the theatre of the absurd.
“I welcome this American decision. It is good for Israel. It is good for peace,” said the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on December 13. Yet the United States of America had just abandoned all hope of getting Israel to freeze new building in the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories long enough to keep direct peace talks with the Palestinians going.
Netanyahu had agreed to a ten-month freeze in new construction as a condition for entering into direct talks with Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, but the ten months expired just after the talks opened, and he refused to extend the freeze. The US even tried bribing him with a multi-billion dollar pledge to give Israel new F-35 fighters, but to no avail.
Did Netanyahu refuse to grant Barack Obama the extra time because he was afraid that otherwise the settler lobby, which has powerful backers in his cabinet, would bring his coalition government down? Or was it because he has always secretly opposed a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians? Probably both, but we’ll have to wait for WikiLeaks to know for sure.
Lost faith
As for Abbas, he only controls the West Bank and must guard his flank against the more radical Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip and rejects peace with Israel. Abbas had gone as far as he safely could in agreeing to direct talks while building in the Jewish settlements was frozen.
Netanyahu knew that refusing to extend the freeze would force Abbas to end direct talks, but he was under great pressure from Washington to extend it. To divert that pressure, he introduced a new Israeli precondition for talks. The Palestine Liberation Organization long ago accepted Israel as a legitimate state; now, if it wanted the freeze to continue, it must recognize Israel specifically as a Jewish State. Meeting in Cairo on December 15, the foreign ministers of the Arab League declared that “resuming the negotiations will be conditioned on receiving a serious offer that guarantees an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict”. By a “serious offer,” they mean a US-backed proposal for a comprehensive peace settlement.
No US administration would dare make such a proposal: it would be torn to shreds in days by the Israeli lobby in the US and its allies in Congress. So there really is no peace process. Most Israelis want a peace settlement in principle, but there is just no consensus in Israel on the territorial compromises that would be needed to bring it about. Increasingly, there is no consensus on the Palestinian side either, with many people losing faith in the very idea of a ‘two-state solution’.
Is this an unsustainable situation? Not at all; it has lasted more than a decade already. It could last for several more, with occasional interruptions. It cannot go on forever, of course, but forever is a long, long time.
