Talking peace.

When someone with a history like that of George W. Bush convenes a peace conference, it should inspire little more than joyless laughter. The fact that the focus is the middle east makes it doubly ludicrous. Dubya wants peace in the middle east? How simple is that? Just stop bombing the place, there's a good chap. If peace is so bloody important to the bugger, why doesn't he pull the troops out of Iraq and leave Iran the fuck alone? Simple answer - George Bush doesn't care about black people, or brown people, or pretty much anybody outside of his circle of millionaire cronies. So, why hold a mid east peace conference now? Well, I'm inclined to agree with Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery (see his recent column here). You have three leaders who are politically on the ropes. Bush's stock is pretty much in the toilet. Olmert is dangling by a thread, merely keeping the prime minister's chair warm for someone worse (i.e. Netanyahu). Abbas, at best an invented leader, is now president of Eric the Half-a-Rump State. There's practically no where to go but up for any of them.

This conference is what Avnery might call a not-so-funny joke. It has nothing to do with solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - it's just a way of playing the "peace" card while continuing to press your war hand. It's public relations, pure and simple. We've heard this not-funny joke before. In the early 90s, when the Oslo agreement was being implemented, Israel went right on building settlements on the West Bank, just like they had during the previous 25 years. Through Labor, Likud, and the current coalition administrations alike, they have continued to expand the colonization of the occupied territories regardless of the state of play between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships. Step by step, block by block, Israel has systematically dismantled the economic and cultural infrastructure upon which the livelihood of every Palestinian depends, cutting their portions of the West Bank into isolated cantons, ripping up fruit groves, and erecting insurmountable barriers to nationhood in the form of separation walls, Israeli-only highways, and heavily fortified settlements... not to mention monopolization of water resources.

The demographic impact of this ongoing process has been devastating. A recent issue of Counterpunch includes some sobering evidence drawn from recent studies by UN agencies and others. But does this ever enter into "peace" negotiations? Is Palestinian suffering, both in the territories and in the diaspora, ever a factor? Right now the U.S. and Israel (along with a pusillanimous European Union) are strangling Gaza's 1 million residents to death as punishment for last year's election of Hamas and their failure to support the subsequent U.S.-supported coup against that parliamentary majority. In the midst of this gross violation of international law (see "collective punishment"), we are hosting a sham negotiation between Israel and a Palestinian president hand-picked by the Israeli government and dependent on Israel and the U.S. for his very survival. How can Abbas be considered a co-equal partner in any such negotiation? How can he be seen as representing the interests of the Palestinians when he has acted as an enforcer for the power that is grinding them down, day by day?

Make no mistake - the Palestinians voted for Hamas not because they are Islamists, but because they are independent of the Israelis. Hamas and the Palestinian people will accept an equitable two-state solution - it is the Israeli and U.S. governments that will not allow it. That's why this "peace" conference is just more talk.

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