PALESTINIANS are once again being threatened with a dirty deal after the Netanyahu-Brown meeting in London.
After a Brown declaration that Britain is Israel’s ‘true friend’, Netanyahu agreed that Israel would not begin any new settlements in the West Bank, but insisted on the right for the existing Israeli settlements to have a ‘natural growth’, which he presented as a legitimate expansion.
He also insisted that Israeli settlement building would continue in occupied East Jerusalem, and Brown tolerated this position, despite the fact that such settlement building is illegal under international law.
In fact, the Palestinian masses are insisting that East Jerusalem must be the capital of their state. The Netanyahu position, tolerated by Brown, is that there are no such things as Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, since Jerusalem is Israel’s indivisible and eternal capital.
Netanyahu’s final condition for a resumption of ‘peace talks’ with the Palestinians is that they must accept that Israel is a ‘Jewish state’ and that any Palestinian entity that emerges must be completely demilitarised, and unarmed down to its policemen, while being surrounded on land and sea by the might of the Israeli armed forces, and, of course, being overflown by the Israeli airforce.
Netanyahu’s Palestinian entity is to enter the world bound hand and foot, with Israel’s boot on its throat.
All these conditions proved to be a perfectly level playing field for peace talks to begin, as far as Israel’s ‘true friend’, Premier Brown is concerned. He gave his tacit support to Netanyahu’s ‘bridging formula’ which in reality is a bridge to disaster that the Palestinian masses are determined never to cross.
Netanyahu then had the nerve to call on the Palestinians to be ‘courageous partners for peace’. In reality Netanyahu’s peace is the peace of the grave for Palestinians, and not the ‘Peace of the Brave’ that Yasser Arafat worked for tirelessly.
As a parting gesture Israel’s ‘true friend’, Premier Brown, said that his government shared the ‘same concerns’ as Netanyahu about Iran’s nuclear power programme, knowing full well that the different Israeli regimes and their military, have made no secret of the fact that they all had a surprise military strike against Iran under consideration.
Netanyahu is meanwhile discussing with John Mitchell to see what economic and political concessions the Arab states are prepared to make if Israel permits ‘peace talks’ to be resumed.
Abbas’ Prime Minister Fayyad, said earlier this week that he wanted those meeting Netanyahu to leave him in no doubt that Israel has to stop building homes on occupied land.
‘Unless we do this decisively and convincingly, how are we to expect people on both sides of this divide to buy into this process?’ he said.
Abbas and Fayyad are going to be pressed by Obama and Mitchell, using all of the weight that the US ruling class can muster, into talks, on the basis of the position that Netanyahu has put to both Brown and Mitchell.
The most that Netanyahu will ‘concede’ is that all new settlement building by the gangs of Zionist fanatics in the West Bank will be halted for six months pending the peace talks.
Talks on this basis will be like a pistol to the head of the Palestinians. Nevertheless the prospect is that Abbas and his supporters will agree to them.
There is no doubt that the Palestinian masses will rise up against such talks and their consequences.
Now is the time for all Palestinians, from Marwan al Barghouthi through to the Hamas leadership in Gaza, to insist that only the Palestinian basic demands must be negotiated.
They are: Palestine must be a secular state, East Jerusalem must be its capital, all Israeli settlements in the West Bank must be abandoned, and all refugees have the right to return. Arafat would not give way on these demands and the Palestinian masses will not give way either.