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Israel rolls on....

"....Israel has not been reined in by the US and other Western governments for contravening international law and UN resolutions, and it therefore, has little reason to change its policies and practices. And now that the PA is in shambles - with Abbas in no position to negotiate anything of worth - Israel will simply be looking to consolidate its rule as it has always done."

So writes Sonja Karkar, of Women for Palestine, [based in Melbourne, Australia] in a piece, "Undermining a Viable Palestinian State" published on CounterPunch. Karkar is perfectly correct. Despite all the PR hype, rhetoric and photo-ops, all the moves in the Israeli PM meeting with President Abbas is a sham because all indications are that Israel does not intend to do much about the present situation in the West Bank or Gaza let alone the overall Palestinian "issue".

"Israel’s illegal settlement project and security policies are being pursued relentlessly and without interruption in the West Bank, despite the latest attempts to allow the Palestinian Authority (PA) to administer its own security arrangements as well as most civil Palestinian affairs.

The settlement project has devastatingly undermined the territorial basis for Palestinian self-governance established by the Oslo II accord of 1995 and gives Israel an excuse to intensify security which only adds to the unbearable day-to-day conditions endured by every Palestinian living under occupation.

The reality on the ground now is that the whole of the Palestinian West Bank is utterly fragmented: the Palestinians have been pushed into smaller and smaller sealed enclaves (about ten in all) while Jewish immigrants are being illegally settled on large tracts of Palestinian land which are then consolidated into even larger settlement blocs to allow for population growth – and all of them are connected to Israel by an exclusive by-pass road system."

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