When will Israel quit pretending it wants peace?
By Linda S. Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jun 4, 2008, 00:18

Successive Israeli governments have perfected the art of announcing one thing and doing just the opposite. Almost every member of the Israeli leadership says a two-state solution on the lines of “the road map” is the way forward, yet they do nothing at all to bolster the credibility of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas except throw occasional smiles and handshakes his way.

On Sunday, Israel’s Ministry of Housing angered Palestinian negotiators by inviting tenders for the construction of 884 homes to enlarge two illegal Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem -- Har Homa and Pisgat Zeev. President Abbas termed this move “a dangerous threat” to the peace process.

The skeptics among us might feel tempted to ask Abbas, “What peace process?” Is there one, or is it a mere illusion designed to keep tensions off the boil as the apartheid concrete wall splits communities and robs Palestinians of their land and livelihoods?

Sure, he gets to meet with the Israeli prime minister and his team from time to time behind closed doors where they supposedly thrash out the details. But progress reports are nonexistent so nobody knows whether they do anything more than complain about Hamas over coffee.

They probably won’t even be exchanging pleasantries shortly since Ehud Olmert is expecting his marching orders over accusations of corruption leveled against him. His successor is anyone’s guess, although Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a former Mossad agent who spent years chasing Palestinian militants around Europe, is said to be the favorite.

Was Annapolis just an empty exercise aimed at producing false hope in a people that have been battered, beaten and bricked-up for decades? If so, Washington is a partner in this deception just as it is when it comes to glossing over Israel’s nuclear weapons horde.

The world and its wife know that Israel is a nuclear power with as many as 100-200 sophisticated nuclear weapons and both short-range and long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering them to just about any target, anywhere.

Indeed Israel’s nuclear capability was confirmed beyond doubt in the mid-1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician who worked on the Dimona reactor and, more recently, when Prime Minister Olmert inadvertently slipped his tongue during a visit to Germany in 2006.

“Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map,” he told Germany’s Sat.1 Channel before asking: “Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel and Russia?” Oops!

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates also admitted that Israel had nukes before a Senate hearing, yet when former President Carter announced that Israel possessed a 150-strong nuclear arsenal last week at a literary festival held in Britain, America’s right-wing knives came out accusing Carter of betrayal, endangering national security and providing Iran with grist for its nuclear stance.

Here’s what Robert Maginnis, an American national security and foreign affairs analyst and strategist with the US Army had to say: “On May 26, ex-President Jimmy Carter demonstrated his disdain for Israel and disregard for state secrets when he announced that Israel has 150 or more atomic weapons. His statement likely breaks federal law, compromises the trust of a key ally and could help fuel Middle East nuclear proliferation.”

Fox News even interviewed a former CIA wallah, who said Carter’s admission had put America’s security in jeopardy, which confirms to me what I already knew: Washington and Tel Aviv are two sides of the same coin. Israel’s security and America’s security are one and the same. Although, admittedly, someone forget to tell Israel, which regularly spies on its devoted ally.

Such hypocrisy is surely beyond belief and even more unbelievable is the way the international community allows Israel to get away with such intelligence-insulting humbug. Israel has even coined a name for this blatant deception in an attempt to bring it into the realm of acceptability, “nuclear ambiguity,” which translated means “mind your own business!”

The fact is it’s everybody’s business and especially that of the governments and peoples of this region that have been calling repeatedly for a nuclear-free Middle East and getting precisely nowhere. The Arab League has also been asking for a genuine, long lasting and comprehensive peace process that would include all regional players, and has also been rebuffed.

But there’s a new wind blowing here where nations are beginning to adopt more realistic views and for the first time are coming together to achieve joint goals as we witnessed recently in Doha, where thanks to Arab intervention, Lebanon was gifted a fresh start.

Moreover, several regional countries have indicated their wish to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, including Egypt and Jordan, which unlike Israel are both signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Unless Israel comes clean and signs up to NPT safeguards and inspection, while demonstrating it is serious about its road map commitments, it might be worthwhile for those nations to shred their NPT memberships and adopt policies of “nuclear ambiguity” of their own. Israel has been allowed a free ride for far too long. It can’t be much longer before its neighbors become jaundiced at hearing endless hollow promises, distortions and excuses. There may even come a time when they will no longer be disposed to even pretend to believe peace is possible.

Israel should be made aware that the window of opportunity is closing each day that attitudes harden. Those 884 houses to be constructed on stolen Palestinian land in a flagrant breach of the road map represent another factor hastening the dreadful day that window will finally shut fast for all time.

Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at  heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.

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No Middle East Peace Without Tough Love
By Henry Siegman

25/04/08 "Al-Hayat" -- - We now have word that Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East Quartet (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), and German Chancellor Angela Merkel intend to organize yet another peace conference, this time in Berlin in June. It is hard to believe that after the long string of failed peace initiatives, stretching back at least to the Madrid conference of 1991, statesmen and stateswomen are recycling these failures without seemingly having a clue as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is even more hopeless today than before these peace exercises first got underway.

The scandal of the international community's impotence in resolving one of history's longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is but does not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with it. The next peace conference in Germany (or in Moscow, where the Russians want to hold it) will suffer from the same gutlessness that has marked all previous efforts. It will deal with everything except the problem primarily responsible for this conflict's multi-generational impasse.

That problem is that for all of the sins attributable to the Palestinians - and they are legion, including inept and corrupt leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of the rejectionist groups-there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never intended allowing such a state to come into being.

It is one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain Israeli security concerns were dealt with. But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands that even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

Given the overwhelming disproportion of power between the occupier and the occupied, it is hardly surprising that Israeli governments and their military and security establishments found it difficult to resist the acquisition of Palestinian land. What is astounding is that the international community, pretending to believe Israel's claim that it is the victim and its occupied subjects the aggressors, has allowed this devastating dispossession to continue and the law of the jungle to prevail.

As long as Israel knows that by delaying the peace process it buys time to create facts on the ground that will prove irreversible, and that the international community will continue to indulge Israel's pretense that its desire for a two-state solution is being frustrated by the Palestinians, no new peace initiative can succeed, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people will indeed become irreversible.

There can be no greater delusion on the part of Western countries weighed down by guilt about the Holocaust than the belief that accommodating such an outcome would be an act of friendship to the Jewish people. The abandonment of the Palestinians now is surely not an atonement for the abandonment of European Jewry seventy years ago, nor will it serve the security of the State of Israel and its people.

John Vinocur of the New York Times recently suggested that the virtually unqualified declarations of support for Israel by Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are "at a minimum an attempt to seek Israeli moderation by means of public assurances with this tacit subtext: these days, the European Union is not, or is no longer, its reflexive antagonist." But the expectation that uncritical Western support of Israel would lead to greater Israeli moderation and greater willingness to take risks for peace is blatantly contradicted by the conflict's history.

Time and again, this history has shown that the less opposition Israel encounters from its friends in the West for its dispossession of the Palestinians, the more uncompromising its behavior. Indeed, Olmert's reaction to Sarkozy's and Merkel's expressions of eternal solidarity and friendship have had exactly that result: Olmert approved massive new construction in East Jerusalem- authorizing housing projects that were frozen for years by previous governments because of their destructive impact on the possibility of a peace agreement-as well as continued expansion of Israel's settlements. And Olmert's defense minister, Ehud Barak, declared shortly after Merkel's departure that he will remove only a token number of the more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks that Israel has repeatedly promised, and just as repeatedly failed, to dismantle.

That announcement shattered whatever hope Palestinians may have had for recovery of their economy as a consequence of the seven billion dollars in new aid promised by the international donor community in Paris last December. In these circumstances, the donor countries, not to speak of the private sector, will not pour good money after bad, as they so often have in the past.

So what is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or clever adjustments to previous peace formulations, but the moral and political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the
peace process has been turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel's occupation-maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighter planes, targeted assassinations and military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian lands-is not itself an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?

Israel's designs on the West Bank are not much different than the designs of the Arab forces that attacked the Jewish state in 1948 - the nullification of the international community's partition resolution of 1947. Short of addressing the problem by its right name-something that is of an entirely different order than hollow statements that "settlements do not advance peace"-and taking effective collective action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what began as a noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace conferences, no matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of international diplomacy.


Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, is research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Siegman is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.