Among the signs pointing to the retreat of the settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the list of goals of President Barack Obama's administration, is the fact that Obama himself chose the Sudanese referendum at the beginning of 2011 to mobilize the unity of the Security Council members with whose representatives he met at the White House. There is nothing more indicative of the American double standards than the American president's praising of the role of the United Nations, at a time when the United States' traditional approach remains the elimination of any attempt by the international organization's General Assembly seeking to influence the decisions of the Security Council if they go against Washington's wishes and interests. Is Israel's insistence on guaranteeing the permanent American veto right not a “preemptive” blockade imposed on the General Assembly to prevent the success of any attempt to see the Security Council embrace the proclamation of the Palestinian state? Obama is praising the role of the United Nations which is practically condemning Israel's undermining of any chance of progress at the level of any negotiations under the umbrella of the two-state solution. Washington is returning to square one and is not despairing from trying with Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas, while the settlement activities and the plans to transfer the Falasha and Iranian Jews to the Hebrew state only prove that the Israeli right-wing has modernized its policies of playing on the ropes of Palestinian, Arab and American blackmail. While 2010 witnessed Obama's capitulation on the ropes of the Israeli extremist government, the United Nations' recognition of the “dangerous retreat” at the level of the course toward the two-state solution will not get the American president to confront the Israeli prime minister. It will rather promote the justified pessimism in regard to seeing the burial of this solution in 2011. Without dwelling into the Israeli-American conspiracy theory, especially since the Hebrew state is no longer embarrassed to voice its intentions or convey its list of demands from the United States, the talk about the Arab inability to find a solution or a means to confront Israel's monopolization of the Palestinian authority's “entity” in Ramallah and the “entity” of Hamas's authority in Gaza is collapsing. This is not due to the fact that reality is conveying the opposite of impotence, but because the act itself is like dissecting a corpse. The act here is the diagnosis of the reasons which stopped being unknown or provoking any Arab a long time ago. Hence, is it enough to hold on to the Arab initiative to say that it is the utmost negotiable ceiling while waiting for Israel to succumb to peace? This was possible before the division of the Palestinians, considering that the divide between their factions and the conflicts of the two authorities over political programs, eliminated all the dreams of the civilians who are displaced in their own land, except for the dream of leaving Palestine. Settling for the ceiling of the initiative was possible before the spread of the projects to divide the region and the nightmares of mobile strife, either through the spirit of sectarianism or through the use of the cloak of Islam to harm all the causes of the Arabs, at the head of which is Palestine. Consequently, the question now revolves around the alternative that will break the wall of expectation, while Israel is busy with its security-military projects. And whether Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin was maneuvering or acting intentionally when he described its leaders as being “dogs” because “they do not care about the interests of their people,” and whether Shimon Peres is dividing the roles with them or has become “a caller for peace” – although his name is linked to massacres – the fact is that those leaders who were urged by Peres to be reasonable, can say they have extracted the most American concessions in the peace process and the greatest security-military deal with Washington. The Arab alternative that might convince the Americans to stop the series of submission to the desires of the Israeli right-wing, should firstly feature a unified plan to exert pressures on the Palestinians and get them to restore unity and relinquish the illusions of the conflict between the resistance and the authority. This is due to the fact that neither the resistance remained one against the occupation, nor the authority continued to uphold what could have at least enabled it to run the affairs of a rule over a land being eroded by the settlements cancer. There is a great difference between the current status of the Palestinians and their status when they signed the Mecca agreement. There is also a great difference between the current reality of the Arabs who are blockaded by crises, volcanoes and disappointments, and their situation when the Arab peace initiative was born. If everyone, at the head of which are the resistance movements, are complaining about the “conspiracy” that is definitely uniting the Israelis, what is the alternative to unify the Arabs – at least on the minimum level – apart from the “wisdom” of waiting and the policy of hiding behind the ghosts of the “conspirers?”
