Opinion Editorials, September 2009

Obama, Abbas, & Netanyahu in New York:

Another Farcical Show

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, September 23, 2009

One doesn’t have to be a prophet to predict the outcome, or more correctly failure, of the three-way meeting between President Obama, the Israeli premier Benyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (whose term in office expired in January 2009), which took place in New York on Tuesday.
 
The meeting comes on the heels of two important events: First the nearly total failure of Obama’s personal Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, to convince the extremist Israeli leadership to freeze Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
 
Mitchell met numerous times with Israeli officials in the hope of convincing them to walk in the path of peace. However, instead of listening to Mitchell, who represents the President of Israel’s guardian-ally, Israeli leaders chose to announce fresh settlement expansion plans every time the American diplomat arrived in Jerusalem.
 
Moreover, the numerous promises made to Mitchell with regard to a settlement freeze, even including the pledged dismantling of so-called illegal outposts, have all failed to materialize.
 
Hence, one can assume that the New York meeting is actually a timely recognition by the Obama administration of the utter failure of Mitchell’s shuttle diplomacy.
 
Second, the three-way encounter comes a week after the publication of the Goldstone’s Commission report which asserted that Israel knowingly and deliberately committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the December-January blitz against the Gaza Strip.
 
Needless to say, during the Nazi-like onslaught, the Israeli army, or Jewish Wehrmacht, murdered, maimed and incinerated thousands of innocent Palestinians. In addition, thousands of buildings, mostly civilian infrastructure such as homes, mosques and schools were utterly bombed and destroyed.
 
This is not Arab propaganda. Any human being can travel to Gaza and see for himself or herself the huge magnitude of the shocking holocaust.
 
For those who can’t travel to the besieged coastal territory, they can have access to “Google Earth” and see for themselves. The important thing is not to succumb to the Zionist hasbara machine. These people lie as often as they breathe, to put it mildly.
 
It is therefore shameful and immoral for the American President, who had promised ad nauseam that decency and dignity would loom large in his administration, to invite and welcome the leader of a criminal entity whose modus operandi continues to consist of murder, lie and land theft.
 
This really forces many to pose the following question: What would it take to get the Obama administration to adopt a meaningful stand against Israeli expansionism, racism and bellicosity?
 
Obama is not a stupid man. He must be fully aware of the twisted modes of Israeli thinking. Even a brief argument with an Israeli leader or diplomat would reveal the striking morbidity of the Zionist mentality.
 
This is why it is hard to fathom how an intelligent man continues to believe that the fudge-and-compromise approach would still be working with such racist-minded Zionists who think that the entire universe was created for the sake of the Jew.
 
My prediction of the New York encounter’s failure is not a matter of soothsaying.  It is rather a careful reading into consistent Israeli political behavior since time immemorial. To put it simply, Israel will not give up the spoils of the 1967 war, unless it is forced to. Israel will not give up the bulk of Occupied East Jerusalem unless it is forced to. Israel will not allow the thoroughly-savaged refugees to be repatriated to their former homes and villages unless it is forced to. Finally, Israel will not remove these children of rape, otherwise known as “settlements” unless it is forced to.
 
In light, it is perfectly legitimate to wonder if the US which has been utterly unable to get Israel to stop the construction of even a few settler buildings in East Jerusalem, or even in the rest of the West Bank, would ever be able to compel the Zionist regime  to undo the entire Zionist project.
 
This is why one must always be cautious and realistic when appraising the inherently oblique American-Israeli-Palestinian axel. In particular, one must resist the temptation of thinking that the US is the dominant player in this scandalous tripartite game of conspiracy, bullying, betrayal, domination, and compulsion.
 
President Obama might be tempted to view with favor misleading Zionist arguments that the Palestinians would have to compromise and give concessions just as Israel is demanded to give concessions.
 
But this argument is inherently mendacious and unfair. After all, Israel has been devouring rather gluttonously the contested piece of cheese for many decades, so much so that very little of it has been left anyway.
 
Hence, the question that imposes itself on the conscience of conscientious men and women around the world, people who value honesty and justice, is whether it is fair and just to divide the remaining little of the proverbial cheese between Israel and the savaged Palestinians.
 
In 1948, Zionist Jews usurped our country, committed hideous massacres, destroyed our homes and villages before deporting the majority of  native Palestinians  to the four corners of the globe.
 
The Nakba was our national catastrophe and in a certain sense was our holocaust as well. The harsh impact of this cardinal disaster remained relevant today as it was more than 60 years ago.
 
However, instead of seeking genuine reconciliation with the Palestinians, if only by recognizing their basic human rights, successive Israeli leaderships constantly sought to consummate Zionism by trying to effect our national annihilation.
 
Didn’t the infamous Gold Meir claim that the Palestinians didn’t exist? Don’t the shipyard dogs of Zionism continue to this day to argue that a Palestinian state never existed as if people not confined into a nation-state structure didn’t have the right live on their respective homelands?
 
As to the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, it is crystal clear he is not the best person to lead his people and represent their enduring aspirations for freedom and justice. He is not an eloquent tongue that would fearlessly defend our people’s cause  nor is he a tough and  principled leader who wouldn’t budge under pressure.
 
Moreover, Abbas stands at the helm of an entity whose very survival depends to a large extent on the “good will” and politically-motivated charity provided by western countries and their Arab puppet regimes.
 
This is why it is extremely important that the Palestinian people must closely monitor Abbas’s behavior in the coming weeks and months. I am saying this because in the absence of a clarion, determined and collective “NO” to any prospective concessions by the PLO leadership, especially with regard to our national constants, Netanyahu and his criminal comrades could have their way of imposing de facto capitulation on an un-sovereign leadership that is more concerned about defeating Hamas than ending the Nazi-like Israeli occupation of our country.
 
In the final analysis, people whose aspirations don’t go beyond owning a smart car and having a hefty salary at the end of the month can’t be entrusted to be honest representatives of the Palestinian people.
 
And a final word to the new Fatah leadership. You repeatedly described yourselves as the new patriotic leadership of the Palestinian people. We listened to you with indifferent silence because we didn’t believe a word of what you were saying.
 
Now it is your turn to prove us wrong.