Friday, September 10, 2010

The Photo before the Storm: Peace Talks Already Failed


By Ramzy Baroud
Palestine Chronicle

".......What we can be sure of is that that the halfhearted peace attempt will garner nothing good. If an agreement is somehow concocted, it is doomed to fail. The Palestinian people, the absent but real party in any lasting solution, will simply not allow it. The Palestinian collective has the tendency to watch charades to their end, and then react at the opportune moment to defeat them. Almost every Palestinian revolt in the past has resulted from similar processes, the Second Palestinian Uprising of 2000 being the most pertinent example. When Arafat was being humiliated and forced into submission to US-Israeli diktats, Palestinians of all parties and from all sections of society rose in anger. Israel understood the revolt as a Palestinian attempt at extracting concessions and used unprecedented violence to quell their revolt. Many thousands were killed and wounded, and the rest is history.

If violence spirals this time around, it promises to be much worse than before. Those who cling to resistance in Palestine have been bolstered by the success of Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. More, they are emboldened by their political legitimacy as a result of the democratic elections of 2006. Predictably, Netanyahu will not shy away from interpreting Palestinian protests as a conspiracy to intimidate Israel. The problem with violence is that once it reaches a new threshold, it rarely retreats to old parameters. What took place in Gaza at the hand of the Israeli army in 2008-09 was frighteningly genocidal in its scope. Future violence is likely to stay within this category.

To avoid this, Washington’s strategists really need to reconsider the long-term consequences of their government’s policies. Obama’s choreographers might succeed in getting a few leaders to stand in perfect order before a crowd of reporters, but they will fail to contain the political chaos that will ensue when the talks fail, as they surely will."

No comments: