Skip to main content

Middle East Talks? Doomed at Birth

As there is talk in the media about some sort of resolution of the present stand-off between the Israelis and the USA with respect to the on-going building and expansion of settlements by the Israelis - as well starting up, yet again, talks between the Israelis and Palestinians - Seth Freedman, writing from Israel in "Obama’s Middle East breakthrough? Dream on" on The First Post, says there is more than considerable reason for scepticism:

"News of Barack Obama's apparent breakthrough in the Middle East peace process makes for great copy, but the announcement's beauty is only skin deep. His 'success' simply amounts to having forced Prime Minister Netanyahu to agree to a freeze in settlement construction as a means to get both sides - Israelis and Palestinians - to the negotiating table.

While any kind of concession on the part of the hardline Israeli government must be seen as a positive sign, past form is the best guide as to how the latest round of peace talks will ultimately pan out.

Successive Israeli, Palestinian and international politicians have come, seen, and failed to conquer the seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the path to a true and lasting resolution to the conflict. Despite all the fanfare surrounding Obama's attempts at bridging the gulf between the two sides, the fact that Netanyahu has dug his heels in so hard at the first hurdle - settlement construction - indicates the near impossible task that lies ahead.

Obama squeezing a temporary cessation to settlement building like blood from a stone does not augur well for the far more serious items on the agenda.

According to Israeli officials, the Palestinian right of return is out of the question, likewise the suggestion to divide Jerusalem and give the eastern half to the Palestinians as their capital. Yet both issues are of sacrosanct importance to the Palestinian people, and any offer falling short on those fronts will see today's optimism quickly fizzle out once again."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more