SPEAKING
FREELY The
mediation mirage in
Palestine By Nicola Nasser
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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A surplus of
mediators for peace in the Middle East has been
around all the time, including the heavyweight
Quartet of the United Nations, United States,
European Union and Russia. The terms of reference
of from UN security council resolutions, bilateral
accords and "roadmaps" have piled high and there
have been many marathon talks to leave no stone
unearthed. Add international and regional
conferences and the sum total is a mirage of a
"peace process," lavishly financed to keep it
moving.
Palestinian-Israeli is still an
elusive Waiting for Godot experience,
without a glimmer of light at the end of the
endless tunnel of
Israeli military
occupation of Palestinian territory and people. In
all practical terms, the peace-making process has
been on hold since 2000, and bilateral peace
contacts have been dormant since Israel's Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 2009,
with the exception of a failed five rounds of
"exploratory" talks hosted by Jordan last January.
The latest indirect exchange of letters
between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and
Netanyahu and the joint statement issued by their
couriers pledging mutual commitment to peace are
no less misleading: "No peace No War" is still the
name of the only game in town, which is in fact
the ideal prescription for the implosion or
explosion of an unsustainable status quo in the
Israeli - occupied Palestinian territories.
And the almost 20-year old US-led and
EU-financed "peace process" is still a non-starter
for any feasible, credible or sustainable
peace-making.
Failure of the "peace
process" to deliver is proof enough that it is
inherently infertile, but most importantly it is
proof enough that there has never been any serious
mediation, or the mediators themselves were only
either managing a process instead of trying to
solve a conflict, were unqualified, or the
parameters of their approach were the wrong ones.
The end result however is that all
mediators have failed. It is the time to
acknowledge their failure and to make room for
other options, like sending back the file of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the United
Nations, which was responsible for creating the
conflict in the first place: It was the UN General
Assembly's adoption of the non-binding resolution
No. 181 for partitioning Palestine in 1947 that
triggered a series of Arab-Israeli wars, thus
undermining the UN's mission as an organization
created for the sole purpose of maintaining world
peace.
Since 1947, the "two-state
solution" has been on the agenda. Sixty-five years
on, none is closer to that end. The US and EU
conduct over those years has been in effect to
reinforce the "one state solution", ie favoring
Israel.
Olivia Ward on May 1 speculated in
the The Star, a Canadian newspaper, that the
"one-state solution to Mideast peace may arrive by
default," but she might not have anticipated it to
be a bi-national, bilingual and bi-religious one
state for Israelis and Arab Palestinians, Arabic
and Hebrew and Jews and Muslims, which is a recipe
for apartheid in view of the prevailing balance of
power in favor of Israeli Jews in historic
Palestine.
I wonder whether US Republican
Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) was being completely out of
touch with a major foreign-policy reality or
satirically sarcastic when he responded to a
constituent last April in a letter calling for
peace negotiations between deceased Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat and former Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, who has been in a coma
since 2006?
The UN option is obviously
what President Abbas is left to try now as the
only option available for a man of peace like him,
and this is exactly the door which the US
administration is determined to close; for this
purpose, according to Esther Brimmer, the
Assistant Secretary for International
Organizations Affairs, in Miami on April 24 this
year: "Over the past several months, we have
engaged in a global diplomatic marathon to oppose
the Palestinian" option, "because … the United
States strongly opposes efforts to address final
status issues at the United Nations rather than in
direct negotiations." Brimmer's country failed to
mediate, revive and resume those negotiations
through the terms of the past three presidents,
who collectively failed to deliver on their
promises to the Palestinians to conclude
negotiations on final status issues in 1999 (Bill
Clinton), in 2005 (George W Bush), in 2008 (Bush
again) and within two years of Barack Obama
assuming office.
Not to honor US promises
and pledges to Palestinians could only be
interpreted as out of bad faith, bad management of
the "peace process" or failure to deliver, which
all dictate, as another option, a change of course
and that the US monopoly of the sponsorship of
peace-making should be discarded and replaced by
more efficient peace makers, or that the current
US-led peace mediators should be replaced by peace
enforcers.
Aaron David Miller of the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
noted on May 11 that, "The only three
breakthroughs in the history of Arab-Israeli
peacemaking - involving Israeli deals with the
Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians - came
about through secret diplomacy in which Washington
wasn't even involved." Miller stopped short of
saying that the US and Quartet mediation is no
more needed.
The International Crisis
Group, in an executive summary on May 7, concluded
that the US-led mediation efforts have "become a
collective addiction … And so the illusion
continues," adding: "All actors are now engaged in
a game of make-believe: that a resumption of talks
in the current context can lead to success; that
an agreement can be reached within a short
timeframe; that the Quartet is an effective
mediator, …" On April 26, the American Jewish
newspaper Algemeiner described the "Middle East
Quartet" as "An Institutionalized Failure."
Israel, the US and the Quartet mediators
are all winners in this "make-believe"
non-delivering mediation; the Palestinian people
are the only losers.
Palestinians have had
enough and now saying enough is enough: Peace is a
mirage, peace-making is a failure, peace process
is a sham, peace mediators are a fake, and if all
the parties involved can enjoy the luxury of
"addiction" to the status quo, Palestinians
cannot; their survival is at stake.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab
journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the
Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, and can
be contacted at nassernicola@ymail.com
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
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