NOW THEY THINK HE'S A MAGICIAN?:

What Is Happening in the American-Dominated Middle East Is Something New: Democratic Occupation (Neve Gordon, 2-11-05, In These Times)

It is not surprising that, following the Sharm El-Sheikh summit on Feb. 8, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas used almost the same language to announce a cessation of hostilities between the two peoples. Reading from a prewritten script, they both stated that the Palestinians would stop all acts of violence against Israelis, while Israel would cease all military activity against Palestinians. The director of the show was not Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the host of the event, but newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. To be sure, neither Rice nor any other American was present at the summit, but the Bush administration’s spirit was ubiquitous.

Many reporters and analysts applauded the meeting, claiming that it will pave the way for a resumption of dialogue and cooperation. They seemed to suggest that Israelis and Palestinians are on the doorstep of a new era. All of this begs the question: Will the Bush administration manage to stop the seemingly endless cycle of violence and rekindle the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process?

The answer is a resounding yes-­on the condition, of course, that one believes in magic.

President George W. Bush would have to succeed in casting at least one of two spells in order to create fertile ground for negotiations. He would need to charm Abbas into renouncing the three most essential demands that have informed the Palestinian struggle since the late ’80s: Israel’s full withdrawal to the 1967 borders, the establishment of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and the recognition of the rights of Palestinian refugees. Or alternatively, Bush would have to enchant Sharon and get him to abandon his plan of creating Palestinian Bantustans in the Gaza Strip and in approximately 50 percent of the West Bank, with no Palestinian right of return and no sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem.

Here's a classic case of someone who mistakenly thinks issues are settled by negotiations, rather than by the fact of negotiation. Israel recognized the inevitability of a Palestinian state when it sat down to talk to the PLO at Oslo. The PLO has now recognized that Israel gets to decide Palestine's borders, via the Wall, by sitting down in Sharm el-Sheikh. It's all over except for some secondary details.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2005 6:08 AM