Israel needs to periodically renew its mandate to "redeem" the Land of Israel - i.e. to clear the land of its non-Jewish population and make it available for Jews. In order to do so, it must demonstrate that its pursuit of peace goes unanswered and that it therefore reluctantly practices ethnic cleansing as its only recourse. The Annapolis Peace Conference, like its many predecessors, is designed to give a U.S. blessing to further repression and dispossession of the Palestinians.
U.S. presidents like to pursue Arab-Israeli peace in the twilight of their administration. G.H.W. Bush did so in Madrid, as did Bill Clinton at Camp David. Perhaps a waning presidency seems less beholden to electoral interests and therefore able to address difficult issues, but only Jimmy Carter achieved some success, perhaps because he started earlier.
G.W. Bush is not learning from past failures – or even successes. With his ratings as low as they can go, he is seeking a legacy that will mitigate or overshadow the Iraq debacle. Furthermore, he believes that the Fateh-Hamas split will enable him to make headway where others have failed.
He is wrong. If he would listen to his own State Department and CIA, he would learn that a weak and divided Palestinian leadership is not an opportunity. Palestinians cannot get much weaker than they have always been, and while the most obsequious of them – Abbas included – will strip Palestinian rights to the bone, none will accept their own ethnic cleansing, which is the standard that Israel requires.
Nor is it surprising that Israel maintains this standard. It has succeeded in colonizing ever larger sections of the West Bank, the real estate that it has always coveted. Any peace agreement would circumscribe such efforts. It is therefore not in Israel’s territorial and demographic interests to actually achieve a negotiated peace.
Participation in negotiations is another matter, especially when Israel’s U.S. sponsor assumes that a pliable Palestinian leadership will make the concessions. It is unlikely that Palestinians can ever concede enough, but if Israel is not expected to do so, the Palestinians will be blamed when negotiations fail.
Israel always comes out ahead. When there is an agreement, as with Oslo, the terms allow Israel to continue colonization. When they fail, Israel can justify a new pogrom against Palestinians, which also furthers its objectives. The failure permits U.S. administrations to wash their hands and give Israel free rein, as with Camp David in 2000 and the Road Map of G.W. Bush’s first administration. A failed effort in the lame duck years of an administration has the added benefit of dissuading the next administration from taking up the cause too soon.
Abbas is using his meager political capital to make his American sponsors see, as do State and the CIA, that a solution depends upon pressuring Israel. Although Abbas will never be in a better position than when Condoleezza Rice needs him at the negotiating table, it is all for naught. He cannot refuse to negotiate, and any concessions that he ekes out now will yield to Israeli supremacy.
Then what? First, Israel’s modest incentives to Abbas will disappear. His supporters who were given amnesty to reward their attacks on Hamas will again become fugitives. The few removed roadblocks and eased checkpoints will close. Abbas himself will be vilified as intransigent and ineffectual.
Given the already low Palestinian regard for Abbas, this will be his death knell. Even if he remains president, his support will further erode and accrue mainly to Hamas. Israel will then make the West Bank like the Gaza Strip. It will declare the shrinking, walled-in Palestinian areas to be "hostile entities," and apply an incremental "Warsaw ghetto" solution, cutting off livelihood, communication, and financial and public services, leaving only the most basic humanitarian relief.
This bleak Palestinian plight will then be punctuated by irregular military incursions that kill mainly civilians while ostensibly targeting "terrorists." The objective would be the same as with the Warsaw ghetto – to clear the territory of a despised ethnicity – but with Palestinians "choosing" to leave rather than being forcibly removed or slaughtered en masse. Thus will Palestine become as free of Palestinians as Indiana is of Indians.
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Paul Larudee is a former Ford Foundation project supervisor in Lebanon, a Fulbright-Hays lecturer to Lebanon and a contracted U.S. government advisor to Saudi Arabia.