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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/25/09

U.S. --" led World Community Fails, Palestinians on Brink of Explosion

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"In the absence of all hope, we cry out our cry of hope," Palestinian Christian leaders, representing churches and church-related organizations, meeting in Bethlehem on December 11, concluded in their 13-page document titled "Kairos Palestine 2009: A Moment of Truth," enlisting Christians worldwide in proactive efforts to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Their "cry" symbolizes the popular mood of their people as well as the political status quo.

On both sides of the inter-Palestinian divide between the U.S. backed presidency and the Israeli hunted legislative, the Fatah led West Bank (where the leadership of the Palestine Liberation organization (PLO) is committed to peace, direct negotiations and security coordination with the Israeli occupying power, but the 16 year old "peace process' has reached an impasse and the negotiations are deadlocked in a one year old stalemate over the cancer like expanding Jewish colonial settlements) and the Hamas led Gaza Strip (where the Islamic resistance Movement (Hamas) is strictly committed to ceasefire save in self defense while conducting indirect negotiations mediated by Egypt and Germany over an exchange of POWs), both political and military solutions for the over half-century old Arab/Israeli conflict have failed and aborted all prospects of peace, which have proved an elusive mirage, a stark failure of the U.S. led world community. An imminent explosion seems the only breakthrough ahead.

"There is no bilateral solution. The fastest road to the next round of violence is through another failed negotiation process ... and it has zero chance. Next year "could be ripe for an explosion," Gershon Baskin of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information told a Russian-sponsored debate on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea last week. The "dangerous standstill" needs a "rescue mission," the speakers said, according to Reuters. Former Russian Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov warned that a "real crisis" could develop if the international community did not intervene, adding that the role of the so-called Middle East Quartet (the United States, United Nations, Russia and the European Union) was in default. On December 15, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the PLO Central Council in Ramallah: "Now the ball is in the international community's court and in America's court."

But Abbas seems to knock at the wrong door. Barack Obama will go down in history as the first U.S. president who pushed a life-long Palestinian ally like Abbas to publicly pronounce the first ever pronounced Palestinian "disappointment" with the United States and its role as the mediator in the conflict, despite the Palestinian euphoria Obama invoked when he chose Abbas as the first foreign leader to give a phone call as soon as he set foot in the White House. The Obama Administration "made zero progress. Not only, of course, has it failed even to get negotiations going " but there isn't the slightest shred of evidence to believe that anything is going to change in the rest of its term," director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary university, Barry Rubin wrote in Global Politician on December 19.

Obama shot down the mission of his presidential envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, when he sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton early in March ostensibly on a mission to bring together Palestinian and Israeli leaders to resume their negotiations, but her mission was a resounding failure because she did exactly the opposite, which made her visit the milestone of her administration's shift from what was believed by the Palestinians as an honest broker to a mediator who aborted his mediation by completely adopting the views of the Israelis.

The following U.S. Israeli deal to kill the Goldstone report in the bud -- allegedly because it created a "fairly substantial gap" between the two sides (Assistant U.S. Secretary of State P.J. Crowley on December 10) -- indicated that Clinton's failure was not a personal one but an official policy that should have been expected after Obama failed to back up his earlier demand for a "freeze" of Israeli colonial settlement as a precondition for the resumption of Palestinian Israeli talks, a demand that misled Abbas to demand no less, and to become the hostage of an un-honored U.S. promise and of his own decision to put all his eggs in the American basket.

Obama and his administration show no regrets, but are following in the footsteps of the traditional U.S. Israeli strategic alliance, dispelling whatever remains of Obama's promises of "change' to his voters. Last week Obama signed the foreign aid budget law for 2010, raising security aid to Israel by US$225 million the next year to US$2.775 billion, an aid which under a MoU is to rise from $2.55 billion in 2009 to $3.1 billion in 2013. Arabs, including Palestinians, view this aid as fueling the Israeli intransigence in the peace process. The $500 million allocated to the Palestinian Authority (PA), including $100 million to be used by US General Keith Dayton, practically boils down to a contribution to keep the PA floating as a collateral for Israel's security.

Even in the best of times, long before the inter-Palestinian division, the 2002 military reoccupation of the PA territory in the West Bank and the current tight siege imposed on Gaza, the PA has become dependent on donors since the PLO-Israeli "Declaration of Principles" (DoP) was signed in Washington DC in 1993, relieving the Israeli occupying power of its obligations under international law.

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*Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait, Jordan, UAE and Palestine. He is based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
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