Talking Turkey: A parody of peace

As another deadline on the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio stares the energetic US secretary of state John Kerry and the world in the face, even he is muttering dark warnings about time limits. Yet the nature of the talks and their interminable duration are revealing a truth. The only serious mediator in the field is biased towards Israel and over time has made Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, long past his elected mandate, and his team accomplices in a process which is a parody of peace.

Over the decades, the so-called peace process has been so weighted against the Palestinian cause that were the Palestinian Authority to display some spine, it would have refused to talk on the terms set, with illegal settlements continuing to expand and other humiliations being piled on Palestinians each day. Perhaps to rescue his tattered reputation, Mr Abbas has sought to seek recognition from a number of United Nations organisations, which persuaded the Israelis to call off the release of a new batch of Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinians have observer status in the United Nations.

The question many Palestinians and the world are asking is: how long will this charade continue, with Israelis throwing some crumbs to Palestinians under American advice and another round of talks are resumed? Even the patient Palestinians, left in the lurch by much of the world, are beginning to explode. And Mr Abbas and his faithful officials, accustomed to a life of perks and discussions in world capitals for decades, have begun to feel the heat.

The simple question is: how long can crumbs of territory for Palestinians serve a process that has brought anything but peace? And if the Israelis do not want to give Palestinians equal status in a unified state and refuse to countenance a viable Palestinian state, where do Palestinians and the world go from there? The stark reality is that but for full US support, Israel would not have mocked the world by first becoming a nuclear weapon power and then continue gobbling up Palestinian land even as Oslo and other so-called accords have punctuated the diplomatic scenario.

America’s dilemma is that its links with Israel are buttressed by two factors: its strategic needs in a troubled region and the immense weight of the American Israeli lobby in moulding Washington’s relations with Tel Aviv. The last major US strategic success was in the Camp David accords under President Jimmy Carter, but that was because Israel gained a famous victory by surrendering the Sinai peninsula in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt. Israel won a great victory by ensuring that Arab states would not be able to wage a new war with it with the most populous Arab nation out of the picture.

The Oslo process was partially tilted towards Israel but offered a new beginning. Over time it transpired that Israel was in no mood to make real concessions to make a two-state solution, the mantra of the international community, a success. And even as the annexation of the occupied Arab East Jerusalem was effected, the prospect of East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state receded. As a succession of US Presidents played at making peace, with their hands tied by the Jewish lobby, illegal settlements proliferated and the vice-like grip on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip tightened.

In fact, the only effective instrument Palestinians have come up in their desperation is to seek the boycott of Israeli goods produced in the occupied territories and to encourage the world’s academic institutions not to have relations with their Israeli counterparts. The movement Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) was launched in 2005 but is only now gathering momentum. What is more, Europeans who are in the forefront of expressing righteous anger over ethical wrongs in other societies are beginning to display some pangs of conscience. The largest Dutch pension fund and the largest Danish bank, for instance, have stopped dealing with Israeli entities with roots in the occupied territories.

Europe is a major trade partner of Israel, and as the BDS movement grows, it will affect the country’s economy and well-being even though American bounty for the self-declared Jewish state is limitless. Dr Hanan Ashrawi of the Palestine Liberation Organisation has described BDS as “a legal, moral and inclusive movement struggling against the discriminatory policies of a country that defines itself in religiously exclusive terms, and that seeks to deny Palestinians the most basic rights simply because we are not Jewish”. The lame response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev has been that the world is holding his country to a higher standard than any other nation. A minor victory of sorts for the anti-BDS movement came in the shape of the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s argument that it was anti-Semitic. While the American Studies Association endorsed an academic boycott of Israel, more than 200 university and college presidents have publicly opposed the movement.

Many suggest that the BDS is against academic freedom, but the force of the movement springs from Palestinians’ lack of options. With the United States, still the most powerful nation on the planet, backing Israel to the hilt in whatever it chooses to do and much of the Arab world preoccupied with its own national interests, there are few takers for the Palestinian cause, despite the flow of rhetorical support. Hitting Israel where it hurts takes the battle a stage further.

With the BDS showing signs of new life, it represents a much-needed moral victory for Palestinians. The only antidote the United States has to offer is to continue to hold talks between Israelis and Palestinians of one kind or another to give the impression of movement. Perhaps the time is approaching when no one believes in the efficacy of American-mediated talks on Palestine.