Unimaginative Middle East Policy
Published in die Presse
(Austria) on 3 November 2011
by Wieland Schneider (link to original)
In order to get the peace process moving again, U.S. leadership is much needed.
No one expected anything otherwise: Palestine's acceptance as a member of UNESCO — before it had even become a state — had hardly happened before Israel fired back. Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered the pace of settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to be accelerated. The motto there seems to be if you make trouble for me, you'll get it right back. Obviously not a strategy designed to solve Middle East problems.
Settlement expansion fits right into the strategy Netanyahu has long been pursuing despite international criticism. The only difference is that he now intends to pursue that strategy even more rigorously. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas handed him the pretext to do so.
By getting Palestine accepted as a full member of UNESCO, Abbas put pressure on Israel but didn't get any closer to his main goal of gaining statehood for Palestine. That can come about only at the negotiating table, but it now seems less likely that Palestinians and Israelis will ever assemble around that table.
Forcing both sides back into negotiations will require more leadership from the United States, but there is not a single trace of that leadership at present. What happened with UNESCO should be a wake-up call. A road map for negotiations has to be quickly put together. It is in the best interests of the Palestinians who want and deserve their own country; it's also in Israel's best interests in order to halt its rapid slide into global isolation.
No one expected anything otherwise: Palestine's acceptance as a member of UNESCO — before it had even become a state — had hardly happened before Israel fired back. Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered the pace of settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to be accelerated. The motto there seems to be if you make trouble for me, you'll get it right back. Obviously not a strategy designed to solve Middle East problems.
Settlement expansion fits right into the strategy Netanyahu has long been pursuing despite international criticism. The only difference is that he now intends to pursue that strategy even more rigorously. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas handed him the pretext to do so.
By getting Palestine accepted as a full member of UNESCO, Abbas put pressure on Israel but didn't get any closer to his main goal of gaining statehood for Palestine. That can come about only at the negotiating table, but it now seems less likely that Palestinians and Israelis will ever assemble around that table.
Forcing both sides back into negotiations will require more leadership from the United States, but there is not a single trace of that leadership at present. What happened with UNESCO should be a wake-up call. A road map for negotiations has to be quickly put together. It is in the best interests of the Palestinians who want and deserve their own country; it's also in Israel's best interests in order to halt its rapid slide into global isolation.
I disagree that the U.S. is not providing leadership in the Middle East, but to see that leadership perhaps requires different eyes than those normally used, as it comes backed up by a big stick and out of the barrel of a gun. I submit that the U.S. is still under the control of neocon imperialists, bent on any type of domination necessary, including aggressive war, to secure American economic interests worldwide. However, I ask that peoples around the world not be deceived by the propaganda that has duped so many Americans over the years to support this agenda, or think that all Americans today agree with it. Recently, public figures like Ron Paul, Andrew Napolitano, Noam Chomsky, and Jesse Ventura have gained a few more ears with their reasoning and evidence that the U.S. has indeed gone astray from its own roots and own law. While public sentiment is changing, unfortunately it is not doing so fast enough to put Paul in office. In the short term, that is the only thing that will change the course my country is on. But in the long term, as the education of the American public undertaken by people like those above continues, things may change. If it is in time to prevent another war, probably with Iran, I doubt, but I agree with Elie Wiesel when he says we must live by hope.