'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Advancing to... 1949?

So now, Washington's "leadership" of the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy looks poised to rush forward to... 1949, and the proximity talks that Ralph Bunche convened in Rhodes that year.

Haaretz's reporters tell us there,

the American administration is hoping the sides will declare the beginning of indirect talks [on Sunday] morning, ahead of the arrival of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.

These "proximity talks" have been touted by U.S. officials as some kind of big deal, even though they are a major step back from what Obama was promising when he came into office 14 months ago.

The P.A. leadership has until now merely been asking that, if the Netanyahu government wants to talk, it should first comply with its own commitments under the 2002 Road Map. But they've gotten no support from Washington for that position, and Washington has been putting big pressure on Abu Mazen, including through Egypt, Jordan, etc., with the aim of getting him back into talks-- any talks, never mind about what!

The problem is not whether the two "sides" talk to each other; or how close they are when they take; or what shape table or configuration of hotel they might employ. The problem is getting Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

When Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, was Pres. G.H. W. Bush concerned about getting Iraqi and Kuwaiti leaders into a room together-- or in rooms in the same hotel together-- to "negotiate" a resolution? Of course he wasn't... Although, just possibly, there might have been a negotiated outcome to have been had. But he never gave anyone a serious chance to explore that avenue. Five and a half months after Saddam's forces moved into Kuwait, the international alliance that Bush brought together acted swiftly to evict them.

In the OPTs, the occupation has now gone on for nearly 43 years.

Israel has no more claim to the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan than Iraq had to Kuwait. Claims of "holy places" and such don't confer sovereign rights. Everywhere in the world, people have places they consider somehow sacred in other countries... and they go to visit them on pilgrimages. That's how it is.

International law concerns itself with quite different matters; and in the matter of the Israeli-occupied lands the Security Council has clearly stated the inacceptability of Israel's acquisition of those territories by force.

... In Palestine meanwhile, Abu Mazen's apparent decision to take part in the upcoming "proximity talks" farce has come in for a lot of criticism, including from one rather unexpected source: Muhammad Dahlan.

Maan News reported today that,

If the American policy is to "waste time pretending we are in negotiations" as Israel continues to build settlements and claim Palestinian heritage sites, Dahlan said, there is no point to go ahead with the talks.

"We have been sick of the occupation for years, and sick of negotiations since 2000," he said, referring to the start of the Second Intifada following civil unrest around a failure of the Oslo Accords.

Oh dear. It looks as if the project to rebuild Fateh's organizational integrity that was pursued with such fanfare last summer didn't do quite as well as hoped.