Al Jazeera reports:
Israel’s move to expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank has threatened to sabotage newly agreed indirect talks with the Palestinian Authority before they can even begin.
George Mitchell, the US envoy to the Middle East, announced on Monday that the two sides had agreed a day earlier to begin indirect negotiations that have been stalled since the December 2008 Gaza war.
He said he hoped the indirect talks would “lead to direct negotiations as soon as possible” and appealed to the two sides not do to anything that could jeopardise the talks.
But news that Israel’s defence ministry had approved the construction of 112 new apartments in the West Bank settlement of Beitar Illit drew a sharp response from the Palestinians.
The apartheid racist Zionists will continue pretending to be working for a peaceful resolution when in fact it is obvious that the game is to thwart peace, continue to kill Palestinians who resist their oppression, and continue stealing evermore land from them.
Israel is a failed experiment. The World knows this, but the US continues to block any legal actions of Israel’s crimes so that US regional hegemony in the oil rich Middle East prevails. Israeli aggression and consequent instability gives faux-legitimacy for US military presence in the region, plus the siamesed Israel/US weapons industry will insure no immediate justice for Palestinians unless the rest of the World demands changes that the US will challenge.
Two-State isn’t a just solution anyway, as Israel will continue to dominate, not allowing Palestinians any real control over any state that Israel might “grant” Palestinians. (as if Israel has a right to grant anything to a people whose land is deemed unlawfully occupied by Israel – World Court of Justice decisions, Fourth Geneva Convention and numerous UN Resolutions; all of which Israel ignores with impunity and US protection.)
For there to be a lasting, just solution, Israeli Zionists will need to abandon or be forced to give up their racist dream of a Jewish State, and accept a true democracy from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River; One State, with equal rights for all of its citizens. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druse and others had lived in peace in Palestine for centuries before immigrant Zionists ruined it all by creating the abomination that is Israel. One thing we forget as the U.S. expands it’s so-called “War on Terror” is that before Israel we had no enemies in the Middle East, and Arab countries looked up to us.
It’s long past time that our U.S. government, particularly our AIPAC-compromised Congress quit supporting the War Criminals in Israel and let them go it alone with the enemies they have created by their murderous actions against innocent people. We should have spent the $3 Trillion that has kept Israel alive, making, not burning bridges with our belligerant. What would have been left over could have rebuilt a lot of our failing infrastructure in our bankrupted states.
It all comes back to the “security fence” (really a 20 foot movable wall) and how it has been used on the West Bank; the Zahal plays “amoeba” with it, creating “pseudopods” that surround a village that was unlucky enough to be next to the “fence.” Within a month a Palestinian village can be engulfed by the “fence” like the one-celled organism “eats” other, smaller animals – and the villagers have to leave their homes, the land is sold to the Land Trust, the houses knocked down for a new settlement. The “fence” is the greatest cheat ever devised by one people to disenfranchise another outside of the US “Indian” reservations and the now-zombified Ariel Sharon’s gift to the the IDF and the West Bank Palestinians; the thing cuts the best land from any Arab village and futher immiserates a mostly agricultural people. However, no matter if in Gaza or the West Bank, slow strangulation seems to be the policy because it keeps the Zahal in business; if Palestinians did not exist, the IDF would have to manufacture something like them to justify their funding levels.