History should give everyone pause to reflect.  Past peace talks have never  amounted to anything and there is nothing to suggest that this summit will  achieve anything either. One has only to recall the failures of Oslo, Camp  David, Taba, the Saudi Peace Plan, the Road Map and the Geneva Accord.   Yet, the Palestinians are again allowing themselves to be swept up in the  diplomatic contredanse, with America confidently waving on the show.

 

Although a seasoned performer, the efforts of the US as interlocutor have  never been balanced, and without an unbiased third party mediator, these  talks have no chance of success. In fact, everything has been so  stage-managed that by the time the summit comes around, we will probably  already know what we know now – that peace without justice can never work.

 

To complicate matters further, a majority of Israelis believe the US has no  right to determine the concessions that either side may have to make in  reaching an agreement.[1] The bone of contention for Israelis is the fate of  Jerusalem which they believe belongs to them, despite its international  status and despite the overwhelming number of Palestinian neighbourhoods in  East Jerusalem that Israel illegally annexed after the 1967 War.

 

If the peace conference fails, the festering frustrations built up in the  fourteen years of zero-advances since Oslo, may well spill over inciting a  third intifada, which in turn could blow out Middle East tensions already at  boiling point. Some would regard this as part of the “constructive chaos”  based on Sunni-Shia divisions planned for by US neo-cons – otherwise known  as the “discord” model long used by Israel to divide and rule [2] – and used  by the US to devastating effect in Iraq.

 

Certainly, a US war on Iran requires Arab “Sunni” support to counterbalance  what the US posits as the Iranian “Shia” threat.  But, the US knows that as  long as the Palestine question remains unresolved, it would be almost  impossible to get the populace of any of the Arab countries to provide that  support.  Hence, the talk about mass aid and “institution-building” in  Palestine that might pacify the people enough to allow Arab states to  normalise their relations with Israel and then make them more amenable to an  eventual strike on Iran.  This though is no solution to the dangerous issues  of our time and of no honourable benefit to the Palestinians.

 

All in all, the current moves towards peace are looking very much like the  empty promises US President George W Bush made about a Palestinian state in  2001 in the hope that those promises would draw Arab public opinion into his  anti-terrorism coalition.   If that were indeed the case, a third intifada  would be more than likely.  No doubt Israel would again announce that it has  no partner for peace and with US backing would move very quickly to try and  quell such an uprising.  However, it would not win the hearts and minds of  the Arab populations. While it might put paid to US plans for an  Arab-Iranian conflict, who knows what other conflagration not imagined in  the neo-con “constructive chaos” scenario might be ignited if Israel’s  deputy prime minister Avigdor Liebermann has his way and packs Palestinians  onto buses for collective transfer out of East Jerusalem. [3]  Such  ince

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