Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 October 2010
NOTE: I usually don't like this writer's comments, but I am posting this one anyway.
".....Further stirring the pot with characteristic insouciance, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, is due to visit Lebanon this week, where his political and military allies in Hezbollah are thought to be preparing new attacks on Israeli targets.
Arab press reports say Ahmadinejad will visit the Lebanon-Israel border and make a symbolic gesture by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers – a possible reprise of the famous act of defiance by the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, in 2000.
Israeli officials are already describing Ahmadinejad's visit as a provocation, and are pressing the Lebanese authorities to rein him in. A row would doubtless delight Hamas, the rejectionist "other half" of the Palestinian nation, that has consistently reviled the latest peace efforts from its isolated Gaza ramparts.
The collapse of the talks process, so laboriously constructed, would almost certainly spell a humiliating end to Obama's peace drive, although indirect diplomacy may stutter on. It would entrench Netanyahu and the Israel right, whose priority is confrontation with Iran, not compromise with the Palestinians. And it would serve to further convince the Palestinians themselves, and the wider Arab world, that a two-state solution is not attainable.
In the absence of a better idea, and notwithstanding the multiple tragedies of the past, many may thus conclude that a return to violence is their only way."
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