Chas Freeman writes: It seems to me that the structure of these talks (even if it is not built on the preposterously one-sided formulas cited in Sam’s report) overlooks and violates a basic maxim of diplomacy. An agreement that excludes and fails to address the interests of those with the capacity to wreck it is no agreement at all. All Palestine has now been divided into four parts. The Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are ignored by both the Israeli authorities and forgotten by the international community. The other three parts of Palestine are the West Bank, Gaza, and the Diaspora Palestinians driven from their homes into residence in refugee camps and foreign countries. Of these three parts, the Palestinian Authority, which the United States has appointed to represent Palestinian interests in negotiations with Israel, and which is now talking to the government of Israel under U.S. auspices is the weakest. It lacks a popular mandate, is dependent on foreign subsidies and tax revenue collected by Israel, relies on Israel’s staunchest foreign backer to extract Israeli concessions that will permit self-determination by Palestinians, polices the Jewish state’s occupation of the West Bank and isolation of Gaza, and whines ineffectually as Israel’s colonial enterprise consumes its territory and displaces its people. The PA cannot speak for Palestinians in Gaza or in the Diaspora, neither of whom would be bound by any agreement it might reach with Israel.

In January 2006, Hamas gained a popular mandate to govern all of Palestine beyond the 1967 borders of Israel. It is now besieged in Gaza by both Israel and Arab opponents of Islamist democracy. Neither Hamas nor Gazan Palestinians are represented in the so-called “peace process.” Neither will have a stake in making anything that might emerge from it work. The 7 million Palestinians who live outside their homeland have not been represented in discussions of its future since the Oslo accords created the PA. Revanchism on their part would not be cured by a deal between Israel and the PA. I don’t see how the “peace process” Kerry has contrived is a path to peace even for the fifth or so of the Palestinians (those on the West Bank) whose future it purports to address. A peace that proposes to exclude about four-fifths of Palestinians is a fatally flawed diplomatic fraud — not, of course, the first one in this arena.

AFP reports: Almost 80 percent of Israeli Jews believe a peace deal with the Palestinians is impossible, an opinion poll found on Friday, two days after the resumption of negotiations in Jerusalem.

Asked whether “this time, we will reach a final agreement that will put an end to the conflict,” 79.7 percent of respondents said no, and just 6.2 percent said yes.

Another 14.1 percent expressed no opinion.

The survey, published in rightwing freesheet Israel Hayom, was carried out by Israeli research institute Hagal Hahadash among a representative sample of 500 Israeli Jews.

Asked about the government’s decision to release long-serving Palestinian prisoners alongside the resumed peace talks, 77.5 percent of respondents said they opposed it and just 14.2 percent said they were in favour.

As part of their continuing efforts to bring peace to the conflict-stricken region, Israeli government officials announced today the construction of a new settlement on Palestinian lands where future peace talks can be held. “After years of failed diplomacy, it has become clear that we need to make a fresh start, and what better way to do so than by appropriating a small amount of Palestinian territory where Israeli citizens can live and negotiators from both sides can talk about a peaceful way forward?” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the civilian Jewish community that will be constructed in place of multiple razed city blocks in the West Bank. “With this new settlement in place, I believe that our prospects of peace and unity will be brighter than ever. In fact, we should build more settlements so there can be even more places to negotiate.” Netanyahu noted that any individuals currently living on the future site of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have exactly 36 hours to leave before they are forcibly removed.

OK. In case you hadn’t already guessed: this comes from The Onion. But is the real news any less farcical?

The Associated Press reports: Israel approved building nearly 1,200 more settlement homes Sunday and prepared the release of more than two dozen long-held Palestinian prisoners — highlighting an apparent settlements-for-prisoners trade-off that got both sides back to peace talks after a five-year freeze.

Yet concerns were mounting, especially among Palestinians, that the price is too steep. Sunday’s announcement was Israel’s third in a week on promoting Jewish settlements on war-won lands the Palestinians want for a state. It fueled Palestinian fears of a new Israeli construction spurt under the cover of U.S.-sponsored negotiations.

(Just in case it’s not obvious: “Piece” process is not a typo.)

Noam Sheizaf writes: The New York Times on Sunday published one of its most out-of-context items from the West Bank in recent years – and it has published many of them. The piece consists of a study of “the culture of stone-throwing,” which apparently has become part of Palestinian life, in the same way that Friday dinners are part of Jewish life or Sunday walks in Central Park are part of New York life.

The head of the paper’s Jerusalem bureau, Jodi Rudoren (who has written decent pieces in the past), traveled to the village of Beit Ommar (north of Hebron), where soldiers and settlers are being repeatedly attacked by stones for some unknown reason. In an effort to unveil the mystery, she meets a local settler who explains how bad things have gotten. “It’s crazy: I’m going to get pizza, and I’m driving through a war zone,” she is quoted as saying. On Thursday, some settlers were forced to shoot the natives on this very same road. How unpleasant!

After talking to some locals, the author manages to get to the heart of the matter:

The youths, and their parents, say they are provoked by the situation: soldiers stationed at the village entrance, settlers tending trees beyond. They throw because there is little else to do in Beit Ommar — no pool or cinema, no music lessons after school, no part-time jobs other than peddling produce along the road. They do it because their brothers and fathers did.

This pseudo-anthropological investigation into the character and customs of the natives goes on with hardly any reference to the political realities, except for a brief mention of a Palestinian claim that nearby settlements took one-third of the village’s land (note this same subjective tone in the quote above). The word occupation doesn’t appear in the piece (a quote from a Palestinian – “they occupy us” – is as far as it gets), nor does “resistance.” Stone throwing, the author explains, is aimed against “Israel” as a whole.

“Children have hobbies, and my hobby is throwing stones,” a Palestinian teen is quoted as saying in a statement that Rudoren takes at face value. Apparently, confronting the Middle East’s strongest army, getting arrested and occasionally being shot to death is a local Arab tradition, formed in the desert due to a shortage in swimming pools and piano lessons, and then passed on from father to son. [Continue reading…]

Richard Falk writes: It was to be expected. It was signalled in advance. And yet it is revealing.

The only other candidates considered for the job were equally known as Israeli partisans: Daniel Kurtzer, former ambassador to Israel before becoming Commissioner of Israel’s Baseball League and Dennis Ross, co-founder in the 1980s (with Indyk) of the AIPAC-backed Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy who handled the 2000 Camp David negotiations on behalf of Clinton.

The winner among these three was Martin Indyk, former ambassador to Israel (1995-97; 2000-01), onetime AIPAC employee, British born, Australian educated American diplomat.

Does it not seem strange for the United States, the convening party and the unconditional supporter of Israel, to rely exclusively for diplomatic guidance in this concerted effort to revive the peace talks on persons with such strong and unmistakable pro-Israeli credentials?

What is stranger, still, is that the media never bothers to observe this peculiarity of a negotiating framework in which the side with massive advantages in hard and soft power, as well as great diplomatic leverage, needs to be further strengthened by having the mediating third-party so clearly in its corner. Is this numbness or bias? Are we so used to a biased framework that it is taken for granted, or is it overlooked because it might spoil the PR effect if mentioned out loud?

John Kerry, the Secretary of State, whose show this is, dutifully indicated when announcing the Indyk appointment that success in the negotiations will depend on the willingness of the two sides to make “reasonable compromises”. But who will decide on what is reasonable? Can one trust such a determination to a third-party that is unabashedly the political ally of Israel? [Continue reading…]

Paul Pillar writes: The two and a half years of uprisings in the Middle East known collectively as the Arab Spring have had an apparent hole in the middle; there has not been a new full-blown uprising during this time by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This fact is testimony to the ruthlessly effective control measures of Israel, with a security apparatus that outclasses any mukhabarat in the Arab world. The Palestinian outlook in the face of these control measures is a combination of despair and being deterred. The Palestinians have been there and done that, with two previous multi-year uprisings, known as the First and Second Intifadas, in their recent history. They have every reason to expect that the Israeli response to a third uprising — especially given the direction of Israeli politics since the previous two — will be to press down even harder on the levers of control, not to do anything to move toward self-determination for the Palestinians.

The Palestinians also can see that, despite some erosion in the international support that Israeli governments have long been able to count on, there is little sign that the reactions of the international community, and most importantly of the United States, will be appreciably different next time. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu — some elements of which are quite candid about this — evidently intends to retain the West Bank indefinitely, is continuing the colonization program that has been putting a two-state solution farther out of reach, and shows no sign of fearing pressure over any of this from the world and especially from the United States, even with the intensified international attention that a new uprising would bring.

None of this, however, changes the instability inherent in subjugation of the Palestinians. The humiliation, the heavy personal costs, the impairment of daily life and the frustration of national aspirations are all still part of that reality. Human reactions to such situations tend to be more emotional, more matters of anger and frustration than of calm calculation of the adversary’s likely responses. A new uprising thus is probably only a matter of time. Exactly how much time is unpredictable; the timing of spontaneous uprisings for which the ingredients are already in place is always unpredictable. But as a point of reference, seven years transpired between the end of the First Intifada and the outbreak of the Second. The Second Intifada did not have a clear-cut end, but it has now been about eight years since it petered out. [Continue reading…]

Akiva Eldar writes: President Shimon Peres’ nonagenarian birthday celebrations on June 18 took me back some 20 years to my farewell talk with him. Having just finished a 10-year tour as the political correspondent of Israeli daily Haaretz, I was getting ready to leave for Washington as the newspaper’s desk chief in the United States. Back then, I asked the 70-year-old toddler Peres to sum up in one sentence what he considered to be the greatest achievement of his entire public career. Serving at the time as foreign minister in the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s second government, Peres fired back in a flash: “My contribution is that Israel is strong enough to make peace.” I instantly understood that the first part of the sentence was alluding to Dimona, where — according to foreign sources, of course — Peres had initiated the establishment of Israel’s nuclear reactor. It was only two weeks later, on Sept. 13, 1993, that I understood the second part of that sentence — making peace — as I watched him and Rabin shake hands with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn.

As noted, 20 years have gone by since that meeting. Today, it seems that both notions — namely “Israeli strength” and “making peace” — are not what they used to be. The Iranian nuclear program is poised to chip away at what is called Israel’s “qualitative edge,” thus compromising its security. The status of peace isn’t heartwarming either. Notwithstanding, the replacement of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with President-elect Hassan Rouhani, and the growing interest in the Arab peace initiative open a window of opportunity for a new paradigm: Nuclear demilitarization in exchange for a comprehensive peace. Put differently, the old threat will be traded for new hope.

In June 2006, Flynt Leverett, who served as a senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council during the early years of the President Bush administration, disclosed that on at least two occasions the United States had ignored Tehran’s reconciliation overtures. Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Leverett related that in the spring of 2003, shortly after the US invasion of Iraq, the Swiss ambassador to Iran relayed to the White House an Iranian proposal to start a dialog with the administration on the nuclear issue. In the same breath, Tehran also proposed to discontinue its support of terrorism outside the occupied Palestinian territories and even embrace the principles of the Arab League’s peace initiative. (Iran abstained in the vote on the initiative that took place at the meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 2003).

A few weeks prior to Leverett’s disclosure, Rouhani — who at the time served as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative in the Supreme National Security Council and prior to that as Iran’s representative to the nuclear talks with the West — had made a far-reaching proposal for an International Atomic Energy Agency oversight of his country’s nuclear installations. In an article published in Time magazine (May 2006), he warned of a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race, pointing out the United States’ “double standard,” hinting at its longstanding support of Israel’s refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. [Continue reading…]