PRESIDENT Obama has summoned the Palestinian Authority leader, Abbas, and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington for talks beginning on September 2, to resolve the Palestinian ‘problem’ within a year, a vital part of the US plan to stabilise the Middle East, and prepare for action against Iran.
Netanyahu said on Sunday that there will only be peace if the Palestinians guarantee Israel’s security and recognise that Israel is a Jewish state.
Netanyahu continued that a Palestinian state must be demilitarised, that it is not to have an army, navy or air force, while Israel is armed to the teeth with every conceivable kind of weapon of mass destruction.
One implication of the recognition of Israel as the ‘Jewish state’ is that the Palestinian population will have to be ‘thinned out’ so that it can never become the majority of the population in Israel, and the Palestinian refugees’ right to return will have to be sold off for as much as the US is willing to pay.
Also implicit is the notion that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel.
This aim is being worked for by the Judaisation of occupied East Jerusalem, where evictions and the demolition of Palestinian homes are continuing, and from where ‘foreign Palestinians’ are being deported to Gaza and elsewhere.
A sustainable Jewish majority is to be achieved by the annexation of the massive Israeli settlements in the West Bank, where hundreds of thousands of settlers live, already cut off from the rest of the West Bank by the ‘Separation Wall’, and also by the annexation of the Jordan Valley, where currently entire villages are being demolished.
In return for this, the Palestinians will be given a chunk of the Negev desert as part of the land and population swap, and perhaps a few suburbs of East Jerusalem to be their capital.
This is the solution that Israel is working for, aided and abetted by the United States.
Israel and the Palestinian Authority have agreed to start direct peace talks on September 2 in Washington.
‘These negotiations should take place without preconditions,’ US Secretary of State Mrs Clinton said, ‘and be characterised by good faith and a commitment to their success, which will bring a better future to all of the people of the region.’
This ‘good faith’ and ‘commitment to a better future for all’ is apparently being shown by the latest US attempt to force the Palestinians to make even greater concessions to Israel.
The PLO’s Hanna Amirah said yesterday that the United States has been pressuring them to agree to a change in the Quartet’s statement, which was issued in Moscow in March, from ‘a halt to settlement construction’ to ‘a halt to provocations’, but that this was refused by the Palestinians.
The statement, which was supposed to have been issued on August 16 by the Quartet (the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia) to serve as a basis for launching direct negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, has been postponed because the government of the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu refused to give a commitment to halt all settlement building.
The Israeli government is insisting that the invitation for the resumption of direct negotiations is issued by Washington, and that Washington not the Quartet is in charge.
Abbas’ determination to enter direct talks regardless of the US and Israeli programme for a solution has split the Palestinian movement and is opposed by Hamas, the PFLP and other Palestinian movements.
These direct talks, which are directed at imposing a settlement, can only end in disaster for the Palestinians. It is clear to the Palestinian masses that the State of Palestine will only be established by the Arab revolution driving imperialism out of the Middle East and by the Palestinian masses ending the occupation with a Third Intifada.
