Saturday, December 18, 2010

Nowhere to Go But Up


(Click on cartoon by Khalil Bendib to enlarge)

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch


"Can anything be more dismal than prospects for any decent resolution of the Israel/Palestine issue? Seemingly not. The hopes of January, 2009, at the dawn of Obama’s presidency, are dead. Washington has now given up all efforts to restart the direct Israeli-Palestinian talks and has wearily begun a new round of mediated talks instead.

Across the past two months Obama inscribed one solid achievement in history’s ledger, where all said the feat would be impossible. He actually raised the bar for Presidential acts of craven ass-kissing towards Israel. In mid-November he was offering the Israelis $3 billion to pretend for 90 days that they'd stopped settlement construction. The Israelis would be paid $33 million per day for every day they agree to back the lie he is suggesting.

There has been no limit to the servility of Washington to Tel Aviv. On July 8 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz revealed that the Obama Administration was planning to start transferring nuclear fuel to Israel in order to build up Tel Aviv’s nuclear stockpile. In other words, amid an unrelenting campaign against Iran -- the Wikileaks files reveal it to be the US’ prime diplomatic obsession – for enriching uranium and planning to make a nuclear bomb, Washington is flouting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by aiding Israel’s nuclear weapons program......

....but what alternatives are there? 2010 has been the year when the phrase “peace process” have been definitively exposed as the fraud it always was. There’s nowhere to go but up. "

No comments: