peace process |

Nov 20

Economy first in Palestine?

With Israeli domestic politics focused on the election early next year, the various players are busy manoeuvring themselves into positions they feel will count in their favour come voting day, including Likud’s strong contender, Binyamin Netanyahu.

On Sunday, Netanyahu repeated his belief that the best way forward with regard to Israeli-Palestinian peace was to prioritise helping the Palestinian economy from the bottom up. Insisting this was not an “alternative” to negotiations, ‘Bibi’ argued that “economic prosperity significantly reduces terror and the foundations of war”. Read more

Aug 7

One for the shelf

Yesterday, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published what seemed like a significant development in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, reporting that PM Ehud Olmert had presented Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president “with a detailed proposal for an agreement in principle on borders, refugees and security arrangements between Israel and a future Palestinian state”.

The “offer” is nothing too different to what we’ve seen before: Israel keeps the main settlement blocs, including around Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, Maaleh Adumim, and, the Ha’aretz article suggests, Efrat and Ariel too. There is no mention of arrangements for the Jordan valley, crucial territory that Olmert has previously declared his intention to annex. Read more

Aug 7

The power of one

For the past fortnight, rumours have been circulating that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is considering a unilateral declaration of statehood. “Many agree that it’s time to end all this negotiation nonsense and work on peaceful resistance,” a Palestinian insider confided this past week.

The PA is considering several options: stopping all negotiations with Israel and severing diplomatic contact, unilaterally declaring Palestinian statehood, or removing PA security forces, which act as a cover for humiliating Israeli military operations, from West Bank cities – a move suggested by the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad. Read more

May 22

Money in the bank

Bethlehem recently got a spring-clean. The frenzied rubbish collection and freshly painted road markings meant only one thing – important visitors were expected. This week, an estimated 1,000 foreign representatives from hundreds of companies gathered in the West Bank city for the Palestine investment conference, to discuss private-sector projects valued at around $2bn.

According to the conference organisers, the three-day event, co-ordinated by the Palestinian Authority, had a simple slogan: “You can do business in Palestine.” Scheduled speakers included Tony Blair, in his role as the Quartet’s special envoy, the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, and the United Arab Emirates minister of economy, Sheikha Lubna Khalid Sultan al-Qasimi. Read more

May 20

Peace Process: Has Annapolis Lost Its Appeal?

They are a rare breed, but you can still find them, in positions of political power and newspaper opinion pages. Their motives are mixed, but they have one thing in common; they are optimistic about the Israeli-Palestinian Annapolis peace process. For some, their job requires them to paint a rosy picture about the international community’s ‘peace process’. For others, there is a blind naivety that perhaps this time, the speeches and announcements might actually amount to a positive change. Some of these optimists, desperate to protect Israel from critique and sanction, are compelled to suggest the ‘two sides’ are on the verge of a ‘breakthrough compromise’. Read more

Feb 4

The interior diaspora

Last week, the Israeli attorney general ruled against reopening the investigation into how 13 Palestinians (all but one of them Israeli citizens) were shot dead by police during unrest in October 2000. The decision did not come as much of a surprise, given the seven-year long refusal to bring charges against either police or senior officials.

These deaths – and indeed, the subsequent lack of accountability – have served as a reminder of the difficult relationship between “Israeli Arabs” and the Jewish state. With the creation of Israel 60 years ago, four-fifths of the Palestinians inside the new state’s borders were expelled; the others remained (albeit with a quarter becoming “internally displaced“). Read more

Jan 18

West Bank bantustan

Once more, there has been an upsurge of violence in the Gaza Strip. Israeli military attacks have killed over 30 Palestinians in the last few days, while in the neighbouring Israeli city of Sderot and across the Negev, Palestinian rockets have fallen in their dozens.

At the same time, however, there is also a renewed emphasis on negotiations – it was only Monday that Israelis and Palestinians began to discuss issues such as Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and the borders of the proposed Palestinian state. Most of the media coverage this week has dealt with these parallel stories by referring to the fresh bloodshed as coming “despite” the “renewed peace talks”, or as representing an ill-timed challenge to the successful continuation of the top-level meetings. Read more

Nov 20

The Peace Paradigm

At the core of much of the discussions scheduled to take place in Annapolis later this month will be ‘rights’: human rights, refugee rights, the right to access holy sites, the right to live in peace and security. But when it comes to negotiating peace in Palestine/Israel there is a significant problem with the framework embraced by the majority of statesmen and analysts.

From the United Nations to the UK government, from the EU to Washington, everyone is agreed that some rights are not just sacrosanct in theory, but also in practice. While lip service is paid to Palestinian ‘rights’ of self-determination, three core Israeli rights are always assumed. Read more

Nov 15

A real peace process?

US support for Israel is public knowledge. The enormous military and economic aid figures are well known, as are the dozens of vetoed UN security council resolutions and “No” votes in the general assembly. The regular votes on Capitol Hill in solidarity with Israel and condemning “Palestinian terrorism” are not secret.

Somehow, however, journalists and analysts continue to maintain the fiction that the US-driven “peace process” is a sincere attempt at securing a just solution to the conflict in Palestine/Israel. The most that is ever acknowledged is that in the “Arab world” the US has a problem in perception as an “honest broker”; the weightiest criticism, incredibly, is that Washington is not doing enough. Read more

Nov 7

Facts on the ground

When Israeli politicians and diplomats leave for Annapolis later this month, they will be taking with them many more bargaining chips than the last time they participated in the peace charade. In fact, with every passing year of the occupation, Israel acquires a greater stockpile of ready-to-make “painful concessions”, from settler “outposts” and town-sized colonies, to Jewish-only roads and the Separation Wall.

Israel’s policy of creating “facts on the ground” in the Occupied Territories since 1967 has often been based on the assumption that should the state eventually be forced into some kind of negotiated “compromise”, the more land that has already been colonised then the more crumbs there are to toss from the table. The policy also exemplifies Israel’s strategic essence: more land, fewer Arabs. Read more