[NYTr] Posing For a Peace Snap:

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

Toronto Sun via Common Dreams - Nov 25, 2007
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/25/5418/

Posing For a Peace Snap:

The Photo Ops in Maryland Will Be Easy.  
Developing a Fix for Mideast Woes, a Little More Difficult

by Eric Margolis

About the only things on which Palestinians and Israelis agree as they
head into this week's U.S.-orchestrated peace talks is their mutual
love of falafel and belief the conclave at Annapolis, Md., will be
little more than a photo op.

After creating disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Palestine,
and fanning worldwide anger against America, President George Bush
desperately needs a foreign policy success in the final year of his
ill-starred term.

So the same White House fib factory that produced such hit science
fiction epics as Saddam's Death Rays, Iran's Nukes Menace the Globe and
Muslim Terrorists Under Our Beds has been ordered to churn out the
pre-Xmas fantasy Bush Brings Peace to the Holy Land.

A bunch of U.S. clients has been dragooned into reluctantly appearing as
spear carriers. The cast includes Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, Palestinian
semi-leader Mahmoud Abbas, and delegations from U.S. Arab allies. Syria,
which fears a joint U.S.-Israeli invasion, debated whether it was more
dangerous to come or stay away. Great Satan Iran was not invited to
Bush's Maryland clambake.

Israel's strategy has long been to talk about talks about peace while
steadily continuing to expand by building settlements on the West Bank
and the former Syrian Golan Heights. Israeli settlements and military
bases now occupy over half the entire West Bank and its best farmland
and water resources.

Squalid Towns

Arid land and squalid towns occupied by Palestinians form a giant
outdoor gulag, reminiscent of the film Escape from New York, filled
with misery, crime, 50% unemployment and malnutrition, surrounded by
Israeli "security walls," checkpoints and hilltop settlements.

Abbas can't even control his own extreme factions that launch attacks on
Israelis, never mind militant Hamas Islamists who lob rockets at Israel
from that other open air prison, Gaza. Washington and Israel are trying
to starve Hamas and Gaza into submission while building up the
ineffectual, but obedient, Abbas, whom they engineered into power after
PLO leader Yasser Arafat's mysterious death.

America's other Arab clients proclaim their support of Palestinian
rights while secretly collaborating with Israel to thwart emergence of
an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank. Hamas' victory in
free democratic elections in Gaza sent tremors of fear through the
region's U.S.-backed monarchies and dictatorships.

Palestinian Mini-State

The Bush administration's goal is to get Olmert to agree to a feeble
Palestinian mini-state made up of tiny cantons isolated by Israeli-only
roads, led by U.S. and Israeli appointed yes-men who will keep their
more volatile compatriots in line.

But even this political Potemkin Village faces fierce opposition.
Olmert, still reeling from his fiasco in Lebanon last year, is already
under heavy fire from Israel's powerful right wingers and their U.S.
neocon supporters not to cede an inch of Biblical Israel.

Equally important, as election year nears, U.S. Republicans and
Democrats are vying to support the hardline positions of Israel's
expansionist right, ignoring the 50% of Israeli voters who support a
real land for peace deal.

As one of Israel's finest thinkers, Uri Avnery, notes, "the Jewish and
Evangelistic lobbies, together with the neo-cons, will not allow one
critical word about Israel to be uttered unpunished." Failure to fully
support Israel is the fifth rail of American politics.

This means Bush will be most unlikely to put any pressure on Israel to
create a viable Palestinian state.

Solution Ignored

The only peace plan that would work is being ignored: Return to Israel's
pre-1967 borders with some rectifications; sharing Jerusalem; dealing
with millions of homeless Palestinian refugees; and, eventually,
regional nuclear disarmament.

Nothing will happen without U.S. pressure. But Bush won't seize the last
chance to do some good for the world though, as a lame duck president,
he could at least try. Israel is happy with the status quo.

The Palestinians are too weak and divided to alter it, the other Arabs
too frightened and selfish to press for a solution to the world's
biggest international headache.

[Eric Margolis is a regular columnist for the Toronto Sun.]