I have read enough news about Israel in the last days to come down with a heart condition. But before I had a stroke, I reviewed the Arab position and found it to be cohesive enough to cause me not to despair. However, the cohesiveness of any Arab position is the exception to the rule. Therefore, I was afraid that there was something about which I was unaware, so I called Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League. He affirmed to me that the consensus exists, and is real, and that halting Israeli settlement should precede any Arab step in return, and not follow it. On the Israeli front, the construction of settlements continues. The Obama administration threatened to halt some assistance, then back-tracked. Senior US officials visited Israel and each returned empty-handed, because we have not heard about any success. Had there been a bit of success, news about “an unprecedented breakthrough” would have filled the world's media. Defense Secretary Robert Gates met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, and National Security Advisor James Jones met with Mossad in the middle of Israel. The US envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, returned for the third or fourth time in two months, and met Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and presidential advisor Dennis Ross has joined the caravan of visitors. The fascist Israeli government responded to all of this by moving settlements from the West Bank, where it is building 700 new housing units, to the heart of Arab Jerusalem, and specifically in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, where Palestinians' homes are being demolished and they are being prevented from even entering their city. The Jews are taking homes near the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Resurrection; the Israeli religious right, or neo-Nazis, are demonstrating in front of Palestinians from the Galilee to the Negev, prompted by religious fairy tales. I noticed that the background to all of the above is the absence of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and some of the reason is that the Americans do not want to deal with him, especially on the immediate topic of settlements. This extremist, who worked as a brothel guard in Moldavia, lives in a settlement. The more important reason is that the minister is facing a judicial investigation. The latest chapter in this has seen the police recommend to the attorney general that he indict Lieberman on bribery, money laundering, obstructing justice and threatening witnesses. If an indictment is issued, he will be forced to leave office, and I read in the Israeli press about possible candidates to succeed him. If I could translate all of the above into words that the Arab reader can understand, it would be the following: peace is impossible with the current government in Israel. This was the position of Saudi Arabia's Prince Faisal, at a news conference along with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In her presence, he rejected the idea of offering any concessions, and said that the step-by-step approach would not lead to a solution. There should be final status negotiations instead. In Damascus, President Bashar al-Assad told George Mitchell what we all know: that Syria will not accept anything less than Israel's return to the 4 June 1967 borders. No opposite stance has been taken by any Arab state, from Morocco to Gulf. There were a few peaceful statements as a response, but they did not offer anything. Everyone is adhering to the position taken by foreign ministers at the Arab League, i.e. the Arab Peace Initiative, and normalization follows this, not precedes it. The first step is to halt settlements, as Amr Moussa said. Netanyahu's government does not want peace. It is working against it, and is still trying to retain the division between Fatah and Hamas, by spreading information about its assistance to Fatah in convening its conference in Bethlehem, and the training of security agencies with the supervision of an American general. Then, it scolds Fatah for not recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and retaining a provision about armed struggle in its conference program; it also is indignant that the Mahmoud Abbas government is working to turn over the leaders of the barbaric Israeli attack on Gaza to the International War Crimes Tribunal in La Hague. Then, there is personal anger about Abbas, because he refused to negotiate before a halt in settlements. Israel decided to go for the easier of the two. It wants the two factions to fight, so that they can do the job for her. The fascist government, headed by Netanyahu, is talking about economic solutions, while tightening the noose on the Palestinians, to make them emigrate. As for talk of peace with Israel, this is a fantasy.
