Direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians has become the purpose sought after by President Obama's administration, as well as the slogan it is looking for to announce its “success” in resolving the Middle East conflict. Thus, instead of current talks between Washington, Tel Aviv and Ramallah focusing on the content of the negotiations and on what should be reached in order to establish just and comprehensive peace (an expression that has become devoid of any meaning), they have instead come to revolve around whether Presidential Envoy George Mitchell, who has been unlucky in this task, will be sitting with the two sides in separate rooms or in the same one! This administration has succeeded in deluding itself into believing that its proximity talks, which have been interpreted as being indirect negotiations, were the “gift” or the concession it has granted the Palestinians in exchange for Netanyahu agreeing to freeze settlement-building in the West Bank for a period of ten months (which ends on September 26). However, everything that has been leaked about the rounds undertaken by Mitchell indicates that they have failed to achieve anything that would increase the chances for peace. In fact, on the contrary, they have helped to show the extent o which the gap has widened between the stances of the Palestinians and those of the Israeli government. The reason is the ongoing Jewish settlement of Jerusalem, and its clearly provocative spread into Arab neighborhoods it had not reached before, in addition to the doubts harbored by Palestinians over this Israeli government's intentions to achieve the minimum of the requirements of peace. Yet the more important reason for the failure of proximity talks is the fact that Obama has been standing idly before Israel's constant aggression against the opportunity to achieve peace, in addition to his announcing from the first few days of launching these negotiations that he had overestimated the chances of success of the US role. Yet if he had been sincere, he would have admitted that the main reason for the failure of these negotiations to achieve any progress has been his inability to impose the necessary conditions for peace on the Israeli side, considering it to be the party that controls the land from which its withdrawal represents the obvious condition for the establishment of the promised Palestinian state. By being biased towards the Israeli stance, which has since the beginning been insistent on direct negotiations before achieving any progress in the negotiations currently taking place, Obama has removed from his person every asset of neutrality towards the conflict and completely surrounded himself with Israeli guise. The problem that the Palestinians and the Arabs have with him regarding his demanding of them to sit face-to-face with Netanyahu is that he is selling them illusions – such as that the negotiations will lead to real results before the end of his term in office, or that the Israeli Prime Minister is willing to make “painful concessions” in order to achieve peace. When the Arabs hear Obama talk about Netanyahu that way, after what was said of previous disagreements between the two men due to Netanyahu's settlement-building policy, they can only remember the words of George Bush Jr. about Ariel Sharon, whom he used to describe as a “man of peace”. At least the ideological blindness in Bush's head drove him to become convinced that what he was saying about Sharon was true, but what is in Obama's head is only cheap political and electoral opportunism, one which the Palestinians and Arabs can only confront, so as not to pay the price themselves for the way in which the US has blatantly turned against the conditions and requirements of achieving peace. Certainly Netanyahu has succeeded over the past few months at moving the ball of disagreement with Obama from the Israeli to the Palestinian and Arab court. He has also made the Palestinians' rejection of direct negotiations seem like a rejection from their side of achieving peace. In the face of such blackmail, a unified Palestinian stance is imperative, a stance that should begin by ending the shameful division between the Palestinians in the face of the threats that confront them. As for the Arabs, who supported proximity talks or indirect negotiations under the condition and as a result of US guarantees, it is now their duty to support the Palestinian stance and to insist on a decisive US role towards Netanyahu's policy… or to demand that the US withdraw its mediation, which has become a greater threat to the peace process than Israel's policies themselves.
