Peace and Its Opposite

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that President Barack Obama will make a new attempt to push the peace process during the coming weeks. And the questions that cast a shadow over this new effort are: What foundations will it be based on? And how will it differ from the American efforts that faded into oblivion and that were sold to the Arabs and Palestinians, which were always empty talk?

The quick, short answer to questions like this is that successive American administrations only gave the Arabs and Palestinians false impressions on the one hand, and emphasized their strategic alliance with the “Israeli entity” on the other, supplying it with all kinds of weapons, announcing its support of settlements and [Israel’s] waging of wars without any consideration of human rights or international legal principles and resolutions.

The American administration was only yesterday using its weight on the Security Council to issue a veto against an Arab resolution that demanded that settlements in the Occupied Territories be condemned. And it also fought in the Human Rights Council to prevent the Goldstone Report from taking its natural course in international organizations in order to hold Israeli war criminals accountable for their grisly massacres.

And the American administration only yesterday mobilized the world to impose a “no-fly zone” over Libya and cried “crocodile tears” over democracy, freedom and protecting civilians. Then we see it close its eyes to the civilians in Gaza, who are besieged by tanks and bombed by Israeli planes without mercy.

And after all that, anyone in the world who follows America’s plans or its efforts for peace in the region must be very doubtful, because those who want peace don’t do the opposite.