Ayoon wa Azan (Peace, and asking for the impossible)

The United States secretary of state, John Kerry, wants new peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel to end next April, or in nine month's time, with a final status agreement between the two sides. As an Arab citizen, I say that Palestine extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. All of Israel today is a part of historical Palestine. I accept a Palestinian state in only 22 percent of the land of Palestine, to stop the violence and destruction. I insist that the Palestinian state should be free of any Israeli settlements or soldiers, and East Jerusalem should be its capital. It is the only Jerusalem, since West Jerusalem is only a recent suburb. I refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. I received a message from Mounib al-Masri, who is part of the Breaking the Impasse initiative, and he and they are warning also against any concessions. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said a similar thing when he was visiting Egypt, and met the transitional president, Adly Mansour. I have known Abbas for decades, and I have great confidence that he will not sign any agreement that is not based on a state within the 1967 borders. All of this means that an agreement is not possible, and is in fact impossible. Israel has a right-wing extremist government led by Neo-Nazis, and since I read the statements of Israeli ministers and other senior officials every day, I believe that an agreement is one of the world's great impossibilities. I do not deny the good intentions of President Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, and Secretary Kerry. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and in every previous confrontation between Obama and Israel, since the former's first term, the Fascist government there has insisted on its position, and the paid-for Congress has supported it, with Obama retreating from his stance. I still remember the first position taken by the US president involved halting settlements as a condition to resuming negotiations. Settlement never stopped, but rather increased, along with the occupation of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. Now, the Israeli government is preventing Palestinians from Jerusalem from returning, and has decided to give the rest temporary ID cards. If this criminal government continues with this position, there might come a day in which it confronts terror armed with Weapons of Mass Destruction. Meanwhile, Obama no longer mentions settlements, or the daily terror against Arab Jerusalem and its inhabitants. The pro-Israel mafia in the US has become mean and disturbed to the extent that it opposes the appointment of Martin Indyk as America's special envoy to the peace process. I read an article that harshly criticized him in the pro-Likud Weekly Standard, and considered him a professional politician who serves himself. It noted how he has changed his position to suit the moment. I oppose Indyk's appointment because he is pro-Israeli, and will support the Israeli position in the end. The Clinton administration gave the country's peace process negotiating team to American Jews as an endowed trust, and this team failed. However, Indyk's failure, along with the other losers, is considered expertise by the Obama administration, so that the earlier mistakes are not repeated. I argue that the coming talks will fail and agreeing to them would not have happened if the Obama administration had not used a carrot and stick policy with the Palestinians. It produced a plan for $4 billion in development money for the West Bank, as a price for what remained of Palestine, while Congress threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinian authority if it rejected the American proposals. I have an idea, which involves a bit of hope winning out over the bitter situation of today: President Obama realizes that the negotiations will fail, and he is preparing conditions to take advantage of this failure against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, in a final bid for peace during the second half of his current term, after the mid-term elections, when all restraints on the president's work will be gone. Perhaps that was the plan, and I believe that Obama will join his ten predecessors who failed before him. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arab Today.