Still no peace

President George W. Bush has been using somewhat stronger language than he has uttered previously about the Israeli-Palestinian situation and has made some optimistic predictions of a peace agreement within a year. Nevertheless, there is little reason to hope that the president is any more serious about or is any more likely to be successful in bringing about a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

The United States still rejects the application of international law in settling the conflict, opting instead to use as its starting point the status quo based on Israel’s 40-year occupation. This underscores the longstanding and inherent contradiction between the United States simultaneously playing the role of chief mediator in the conflict and being the chief military, financial and diplomatic supporter of the more powerful of the two parties. As a result, Israel, the occupying power, has little incentive to compromise and the relatively powerless Palestinians under occupation have little leverage to advance their struggle for an independent viable state.

Harry Siegman, who headed the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994 and subsequently served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has faulted the Bush administration for failing to acknowledge “the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making élites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank.” Observing what most independent observers of the peace process have noted since the election of a right-wing coalition government in Israel in early 2001, Siegman writes that “Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land….”

As far back as 2004, Dov Weissglas, senior advisor to the Israeli prime minister, admitted that the U.S.-backed Israeli government’s decision was to effectively suspend diplomatic efforts to create a Palestinian state. As Weissglas told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.” Citing the support for this policy by both the Bush administration and Congress, he went on to observe that the Israeli government could do this “with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Indeed, the Bush administration, the leadership of both parties in Congress, and the leading Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have all made clear that they will not pressure Israel to move the peace process forward or even to comply with a series of relevant UN Security Council resolutions. For example, as reported by the BBC, , when asked as to why the United States refused to insist that Israel abide by a series of UN Security Council resolutions addressing the outstanding issues in the peace process, President Bush responding by proclaiming that “the choice was whether to remain stuck in the past, or to move on.” This was necessary, according to the president, because “the UN deal didn’t work in the past,” ignoring the fact that these earlier UN efforts failed as a direct result of the United States blocking the Security Council from enforcing its resolutions regarding Israel’s international legal obligations.

The resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse comes down to four major unresolved issu