Date: September 24th 2009

Obama's peace effort has failed but our struggle continues

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
24 September 2009

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10791.shtml

There is the old joke about a man who is endlessly
searching on the ground beneath a street light. Finally, a
neighbor who has been watching him asks the man what he is
looking for. The man replies that he lost his keys. The
neighbor asks him if he lost them under the streetlight.
"No," the man replies, pointing into the darkness, "I lost
them over there, but I am looking over here because here
there is light!"

The intense focus on the "peace process" is a similarly
futile search. Just because politicians and the media
shine a constant light on it, does not mean that is where
the answers are to be found.

The meeting hosted by US President Barack Obama with
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Fatah leader
Mahmoud Abbas at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel on 22
September signaled the complete and terminal failure of
Obama's much vaunted push to bring about a two-state
solution to the Palestine/Israel conflict.

To be sure, all the traditional activities associated with
the "peace process" -- shuttle diplomacy, meetings, ritual
invocations of "two states living side by side," and even
"negotiations" -- will continue, perhaps for the rest of
Obama's time in office. But this sterile charade will not
determine the future of Palestine/Israel. That is already
being decided by other means.

Before coming to that, let's recall those heady days in
May when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set out the
Obama Administration's firm policy on Israel's
colonization of the West Bank: "We want to see a stop to
settlement construction -- additions, natural growth, any
kind of settlement activity -- that is what the president
has called for."

Obama's envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, traveled to
the region almost a dozen times to convince Israel to
implement a freeze. Every proposal he took, the Israelis
rejected. And to emphasize the point, the Israeli
government accelerated the approval of major new
settlement plans. Instead of threatening consequences for
such intransigence, Mitchell simply diluted American
conditions to meet Israeli objections until finally there
was little left of the American demands -- or credibility.

So it was that in his remarks at New York, Obama's call
for a total construction freeze was reduced to a polite
request to Israel merely to "restrain" itself from
devouring more Palestinian land.

Speaking to reporters after the New York meeting, Mitchell
dropped the demand for a settlement freeze and made the US
surrender official. "We are not identifying any issue as
being a precondition or an impediment to negotiation,"
Mitchell said, adding, "We do not believe in
preconditions. We do not impose them and we urge others
not to impose them."

This is of course completely untrue. The Obama
Administration, like the Bush Administration before it,
continues to boycott Hamas (which has a legitimate
electoral mandate to represent Palestinians under
occupation) on the grounds that Hamas has refused to meet
one-sided American preconditions!

The next day in his UN speech, Obama repeated the call for
negotiations without preconditions. He did not explain why
such negotiations would be any more fruitful than the
200-odd negotiating sessions held between the PA and the
previous Israeli government headed by Ehud Olmert. Obama
may have told the UN that the peace process must "break
the old patterns," but he is simply repeating them.

The New York meeting produced yet another image of an
American president cajoling reluctant Israeli and
Palestinian leaders to shake hands, a kitschy and tiresome
reprise of the famous 1993 White House lawn handshake
between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin with President
Clinton looking on, that sealed the ill-fated Oslo
accords. Unsatisfied by its failures to date, the Obama
Administration apparently craves more. It aims for a
resumption of "negotiations" within weeks, to be
inaugurated with what a US official called a "launch
event." Ideas under discussion, the unnamed US official
told the Israeli daily Haaretz, include "a meeting in
Sharm al-Sheikh in Egypt."

That this is the level of thinking within the Obama
Administration is utterly depressing. I can see it now --
as we have so many times before -- another meeting at the
Egyptian resort attended by all the usual suspects:
Israeli and Palestinian leaders (except of course Hamas),
"moderate" leaders of repressive US client regimes like
Jordan's King Abdallah and Egypt's President Hosni
Mubarak, and the whole pack of peace process parasites led
by Quartet representative Tony Blair and EU "High
Representative" Javier Solana. We can expect more
statements that there is a "window of opportunity," that
this is "the only game in town," and that "time is running
out."

If this is not absurd enough, consider what the US is
really saying to the Palestinians in the wake of
Mitchell's failure: "We, the greatest superpower on Earth,
are unable to convince Israel -- which is dependent on us
militarily, economically and diplomatically -- to abide by
even a temporary settlement freeze. Now, you Palestinians,
who are a dispossessed, occupied people whose leaders
cannot move without an Israeli permit, go and negotiate on
much bigger issues like borders, refugees, Jerusalem and
settlements, and do better than we did. Good luck to you."

Even if Israel agreed to a settlement freeze and
negotiations resumed, there is no chance for a viable
two-state solution or any just resolution coming out of
such talks. So like its predecessors, this administration
is substituting process and gimmicks for substance.

If the "peace process" is not driving events, then what
is? Israeli colonization -- as Obama initially understood
-- is the major factor determining the present and future
of Palestine/Israel. Geographer and former Israeli deputy
mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, has observed that
Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
effectively ended the 1948 partition. "The decades since
the war have proved that 1967 was not a disjunction but
quite the opposite, a union, and that the preceding period
was merely a reprieve," Benvenisti wrote in 2007.

After more than 40 years, Benvenisti views the
"occupier/occupied paradigm" as too limited and misleading
to describe the post-1967 reality. It is, he writes, an
"anachronism that hides behind the portrayal of a
temporary condition." He proposes instead that we call the
situation in Palestine/Israel a "de facto binational state
... because it describes the mutual dependence of both
societies, as well as the physical, economic, symbolic and
cultural ties that cannot be severed except at an
intolerable cost."

Repartition of Palestine would only change the shape of
the conflict, not solve it. Even if Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip were given a state, an
unreformed, ultranationalist "Jewish state" of Israel
would be more likely to turn its aggression and ethnic
cleansing against its own 1.5 million Palestinian citizens
than live in peace. After all, as Israeli Foreign Minister
Avigdor Lieberman has asked repeatedly, what is the point
of a two-state solution that doesn't produce an
exclusively Jewish state?

The 1967 boundary may have legal and political salience,
but it does not demarcate geographically compact,
ethnically homogenous and economically independent
geo-political units. Ramallah Palestinian Authority (PA)
Prime Minister Salam Fayyad may harbor fantasies about
creating a "de facto" Palestinian state in the West Bank,
but the close collaboration between Israel and the PA only
confirms the trend towards binationalism -- of the wrong
sort to be sure.

Isn't it ironic that the most enthusiastic boosters of the
ugly collaboration between the Israeli occupation army and
US-trained PA militias to suppress resistance to the
occupation, simultaneously insist that it is implausible
for Palestinians and Israelis to build a joint society
under conditions of equality? Apparently Palestinians and
Israelis can collude to maintain oppression and injustice
but not to transcend them!

A second factor determining the present and future is the
resistance in all its forms that Israeli colonization
continues to generate: the movement of Palestinians within
Israel for full equality in a state of all its citizens;
the refugees' steadfast insistence that Israel not be
allowed to prevent them returning home just because they
are the wrong religion; the refusal of Palestinians in
Gaza to buckle under a crippling blockade. During Ramadan,
hundreds of thousands of fasting Palestinians endured
unbelievable hardships to break Israel's ring of steel
around Jerusalem to enter the occupied city for Friday
prayers at al-Aqsa Mosque.

This spirit of resistance is expressed in millions of
daily acts and refusals by individual Palestinians, but
also in highly directed, creative and organized ways such
as the weekly demonstrations against Israel's apartheid
wall in the West Bank, or the rapidly expanding
Palestinian-directed international campaign of boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS).

These forms of organized resistance and solidarity are
changing the balance of moral and political power and have
the potential to force Israeli Jews to abandon their quest
for ethno-religious purity and domination just as
Afrikaners did in South Africa, Unionists did in Northern
Ireland, and white Americans did in the southern US. They
are bolstered by the growing calls for international
accountability, the most recent of which include the
Goldstone report's recommendation that Israeli leaders be
prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in
Gaza.

Official complicity with Israel's crimes -- such as the
Obama Administration's despicable decision to attack and
quash the Goldstone report -- are likely only to spur
further support for BDS. These sources of power are still
comparatively small compared to Israel's military and
diplomatic might, but their momentum is increasing and
official Israel's panic in the face of the growing
challenge is palpable.

For years, scholars and activists calling for serious
research and discussion about a unified state guaranteeing
the rights of all who live in it, were ignored or
ridiculed by defenders of the failed two-state solution.
But the growing appeal of a vision that inspires and
attracts individuals because of its universalism is
terrifying the high priests of partition. The peace
process industry, its think tanks and "experts,"
understand that they can no longer monopolize the
discussion. Peace will not be made at the Waldorf Astoria
in Manhattan; it will be made everywhere that people of
conscience are prepared to join the struggle for
liberation, justice and equality for all the people who
live in Palestine/Israel.

In one sense then, the significance of the New York
meeting was its utter insignificance. The real struggle
for justice carries on regardless.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.


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