Israel, U.S. tighten grip on Palestine after phony ‘peace’ deal unravels

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“The Peace Process is dead, long live the Peace Process!” This proclamation, of course, is borrowed from the one announcing the death of one king and the accession to power of the next. Its purpose is to make clear there will be no interregnum, no break in the continuity of the monarchical institution.

In the same fashion, the “Peace Process”—the U.S.moderated negotiations between the Zionist state and the rump of the U.S./Israeli-imposed Palestinian Authority—moves to its next stage once the current round is declared officially dead, a terminus not long off given numerous signs coming from Tel Aviv and Washington.

But just as we need to differentiate between transitions of monarchs based solely on lineage, as opposed to those rooted in war, conquest, or simply skullduggery, so too must we understand the context of the current peace process “failure” and the implications for Palestinian liberation.

We put “failure” in quotes as a reminder of who is bargaining and over what—that is, a colonial-settler state, the junior partner to the world’s foremost imperialist power, negotiating the terms of surrender of a puppet body set up to administer a “state” with no defense force and a completely dependent economy on a fragmented fraction of the land of historic Palestine. Such negotiations certainly deserve to fail!

The mainstream media has claimed the talks were derailed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to extend his freeze on settlements—a freeze which, in any case, was documented by the liberal Israeli group Peace Now to have never been seriously implemented. Such liberals, and the Obama administration, worried that the decades-long expansion of such settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem was making increasingly impossible a two-state solution (while being happy to ignore what such a “solution” meant for the rights of the millions of refugees around the world, and for the democratic rights of Palestinians within pre1967 Israel).

In fact, the hold of settlements over land in the West Bank has gone so far that openly right-wing figures in Israel have in increasing numbers put forward their own one-state solution—i.e., the open declaration that Palestinians would be second-class citizens in a “Greater Israel” from the river to the sea.

There’s no question that Netanyahu’s obstinacy over the settlement “freeze” angered Obama, who had already received his Nobel Peace Prize at least in part in anticipation of a deal that now appears off the table. Of course, Obama wanted to quiet down a global flash point at a time when the U.S. is increasingly sunk in the quagmires of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, YeKarim Kadim / AP (Above) LifeLine convoy members arrive at EgyptGaza border, Oct. 21, in attempt to break through the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

men—and soon perhaps Iran and elsewhere.

Israel, by the same token, saw the maneuvering room afforded by Washington’s difficulties in the region. It was more than happy to take advantage of those difficulties to satisfy the expansionary needs that flow, as in any capitalist state, from the internal and external rhythms (continued on page 5, in “U.S. stumbling to disaster in Afghanistan”)