Since 1947, the "two-state solution" has been on the
agenda. Sixty five years on, none is closer to that end. The
Olivia Ward speculated in the Canadian "The Star" on May 1
that the "one-state solution to Mideast peace may arrive by default," but she
might not have anticipated it to be a bi-national, bilingual and bi-religious
one state for Israelis and Arab Palestinians, Arabic and Hebrew and Jews and Muslims,
which is a recipe for apartheid in view of the prevailing balance of power in
favor of Israeli Jews in historic Palestine.
I wonder whether U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) was completely out of touch with a major
foreign-policy reality or was he satirically sarcastic when he responded to a
constituent last April by a letter calling for peace negotiations between
deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and former Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, who has been in a coma since 2006?!
The UN option is obviously what President Abbas is left to try now as the only option available
for a man of peace like him, and this is exactly the door which the U.S.
administration is determined to close; for this purpose, according to Esther
Brimmer, the Assistant Secretary for International Organizations Affairs, in
Miami on April 24 this year:
"Over the past several months, we have engaged in a
global diplomatic marathon to oppose the Palestinian" option, "because,
" the United States strongly opposes efforts to address final status issues at
the United Nations rather than in direct negotiations," which Brimmer's
country failed to mediate, revive and resume through the terms of the last
three presidents who collectively failed to deliver on their promises to the
Palestinians to conclude negotiations on final status issues in 1999 (Bill
Clinton), in 2005 (George W. Bush), in 2008 (G.W. Bush again) and within two
years of his assuming office (Barak Obama).
Not to honor U.S. promises and pledges to Palestinians
could only be interpreted as out of bad faith, bad management of the "peace
process" or failure to deliver, which all dictate, as another option, a change
of course and that the US monopoly of the sponsorship of peace-making should be
discarded and replaced by more efficient peace makers, or that the current U.S.-led
peace mediators should be replaced by peace enforcers.
Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars noted on May 11 that, " The only three breakthroughs in
the history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking - involving Israeli deals with the
Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians - came about through secret diplomacy
in which Washington wasn't even involved ." Miller stopped short of saying that the
The International Crisis Group, in an executive summary on
May 7, 2012, concluded that the U.S.-led mediation efforts have "become a
collective addiction, " And so the illusion continues," adding: "All
actors are now engaged in a game of make-believe: that
a resumption of talks in the current context can lead to success; that an
agreement can be reached within a short timeframe; that the Quartet is an
effective mediator, " " On April 26, the American Jewish newspaper
"Algemeiner" described the "Middle East Quartet" as "An
Institutionalized Failure."
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