A peace designed to fail

WITH A flurry of shuttle diplomacy, Secretary of State John Kerry has become the latest in a long line of U.S. officials who have sought to jolt the Middle East "peace process" back to life. But 20 years after it began, the outcome is already clear (hint: the Palestinian people aren't the winners), and the process continues only as a charade because the three main parties to the negotiations--the U.S., Israel and the Palestinian Authority--can derive narrow political gains from its continuation.

Kerry's gambit to resurrect the corpse of the "peace process" began back in May with a pledge of $4 billion to the Palestinian Authority (PA) to re-develop the economy of the West Bank. The promise of a massive cash infusion easily persuaded PA officials, who fear that the hot breezes of the Arab Spring might one day soon come knocking on their door, to participate in the peace process despite two decades of failure. And in any case, PA officials have become quite accustomed over the years to following the orders of their American patrons.

The first direct talks between the two sides thus got underway in late July under Kerry's watchful eye, but they were bookended by a string of subtle and not-so-subtle messages that Israel has no intention of offering any kind of meaningful compromises that might allow even a partial peace to break out.

First, there was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's trip in late June to dedicate an elementary school in a Jews-only West Bank settlement--illegal, as all settlements are, under international laws that prohibit an occupying power from transferring its citizens to occupied lands.

Then, just days after the first negotiating sessions took place in Washington, Netanyahu's cabinet in early August approved a list of 600 communities, including 90 West Bank settlements, "eligible for extra subsidies for education, housing, infrastructure projects, cultural programs and sports, along with better mortgage rates and loans for new homeowners," according to the New York Times.

In response, Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee, declared, "The Israeli government has approved a confidence-destruction measure...Israeli attempts to grab more Palestinian land and to provide settlers with preferential treatment will not be tolerated."

And these were the subtle signals. The blunt pronouncement that the new talks were dead on arrival came from Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, a hawk in Netanyahu's hawkish Likud Party. "There is no majority for a two-state solution," said Dannon, later adding that the Israeli public "has given up the idea of land for peace." He further said that Israel should unilaterally declare sovereignty over the Jewish settlements and empty areas of the West Bank.

In case anyone missed the point, Naftali Bennett, a senior minister and the leader of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home Party, declared at a conference of extremist settlers: "The idea that a Palestinian state should be established within the land of Israel has reached a dead end." (Of course, the New York Times reporting on these developments failed to note that this formulation reversed the historical facts: During the last 65 years, it's Israel that has established itself as a state on Palestinian lands.)

BUT JUST because the "peace process" hasn't produced a Palestinian state doesn't mean that the negotiations have been a "failure"--at least when considered from the point of view of those grasping the reins of power.

The PA is more desperate than ever to protect a diplomatic arrangement that they've invested in for the last 20 years: namely, that the "peace process" might actually deliver something approaching justice for the mass of Palestinians, especially at a time when Arabs throughout the region have mounted popular revolts to implement the changes that Arab heads of state have either opposed or failed to deliver.

The U.S. is similarly anxious to demonstrate its continuing influence in the wake of a series of disastrous setbacks to its domination of the region--first, its withdrawal from Iraq that served to amplify Iran's regional power; second, the overthrow of U.S.-backed dictators in Egypt and Tunisia; and third, the ongoing popular challenges to other regional strongmen and alliances that have largely redounded to the benefit of the U.S. in recent decades.

And while Israeli officials remain committed to forever fending off the creation of a Palestinian state, the fiction of negotiations has allowed them to neutralize a diminished PA while continuing with their project of the colonization of Palestinian lands.

The strategy has been enormously successful. During the 20 years since the beginning of Oslo, Israel's victories have been numerous. The number of Israelis living in Jewish-only settlements has roughly doubled; the Palestinian national movement has been decisively weakened by turning the PA-dominated West Bank and the Hamas-led Gaza Strip against one another; the process of home demolition, land seizures and other apartheid measures within Jerusalem and Israel proper has similarly advanced; and the devastation of the Palestinian economy--especially in Gaza but in the West Bank as well--has locked in Palestinian subservience to Israel's military and economic juggernaut.

THE PA'S self-delusion that the "peace process" might one day bring peace contains a bitter lesson. After the Palestine Papers, a collection of 1,600 documents that are mostly minutes taken by Palestinian officials during negotiations from 1999 to 2010, were leaked to the press two years ago, Palestinian commentator Saree Makdisi put it this way:

Men like [chief Palestinian negotiator] Saeb Erekat, [PA president] Mahmoud Abbas and [former PA prime minister] Ahmed Qurei...are of a type that has come forth in every colonial conflict of the modern age. Faced with the overwhelming brute power with which colonial states have always sought to break the will of indigenous peoples, they inhabit the craven weakness that the situation seems to dictate. Convinced that colonialism cannot be defeated, they seek to carve out some petty managerial role within it from which they might benefit, even if at the expense of their people.

This was precisely the point made by Palestinian intellectual Edward Said at the beginning of the Oslo process 20 years ago--but largely ignored by practically every current within the Palestine liberation movement. In 2000, the outbreak of the second Intifada shattered many Oslo illusions.

In a 2000 interview in the International Socialist Review, Naseer Aruri, author of Dishonest Broker: America's Role in Israel and Palestine, said:

Oslo has become a symbol of diplomatic paralysis for the Palestinian people. It is an instrument to prolong and consolidate the Israeli occupation of Palestine by pseudo-diplomatic means.

More Jewish settlements have been built since the start of the Oslo process in 1993 than at any other period in the past. Palestinians simply sat and watched the expropriation of their land for settlements and bypass roads--built for Israelis only--to connect the settlements to each other and to Israel proper, while at the same time atomizing Palestinian society. Oslo provided a cover for these conquests as people around the world watched a diplomatic charade that was packaged by the U.S. media and Israel's propaganda apparatus as "peace" negotiations.

For Palestinians everywhere, Oslo has meant the voluntary renunciation of internationally recognized rights in favor of agreeing to engage in talks during which they would have to convince the Israelis that they have rights. This is almost unprecedented in the annals of diplomatic history. The Palestinian people have been plagued by having one of the most stupid leaderships in modern history--and one of the most militarily powerful and ruthless enemies.

Today, however, there's an alternative to the dismal strategy of looking to those who seek "petty managerial roles" for themselves and their hangers-on. The Arab revolutionary wave and the explosion of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement illustrate that real change is possible through the collective efforts of masses of people--within and beyond the Arab world.

What happens at the negotiating table should be of secondary concern to what happens in the streets, in workplaces and on campuses to trumpet the cause of justice for Palestine and to expose the flagrant and repeated violations of basic international law and human rights by Israel.