Peace tank.

Has George W. Bush finally decided he needs some kind of positive legacy, if only to strengthen his "brand" as a defense / oil industry consultant in the near future? Perhaps. Though one could hardly imagine a more flaccid and lackluster initiative than the one he has set in motion with the Annapolis conference. It took some real effort to sustain the delusion that the United States was some kind of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton; with the current administration, the suggestion is merely laughable. For almost seven years, Bush has aligned himself with some of the most reactionary political forces in Israel. He called Sharon a "man of peace" even as he was smashing the life out of hundreds of Palestinians during the dark days of Spring 2002 (I recall a Newsday article by Ed Gargan from that time describing how IDF soldiers even vandalized a girl's school, smashing windows, stealing musical instruments, and scrawling obscenities on blackboards). He backed that killer whale with arms, diplomatic support, and cash as settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem expanded and multiplied and the infrastructure of apartheid broke the Palestinian nation into a hundred pieces.

Now Dubya has taken it into his tiny head to visit some of the rubble that he so gleefully helped to generate over his two grisly terms. I'm sure he would be glad to see a peace agreement signed before next January. The fact is, they may well push Abbas to sign some piece of paper in the next year, but it's not likely to address even the most minimal concerns of the suffering populations in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. As weak and unpopular a leader as Olmert is, he at least has the resources of a functioning state with well established institutions and a military that rivals those of the most powerful of our NATO allies. Abbas is a Palestinian leader chosen by Israel, elected under occupation with no meaningful opposition allowed, and "presiding" over a divided rump state effectively controlled by an invader and superimposed by the ever-expanding footprint of colonialism. Is the world supposed to view this as a negotiation between equals?

In any case, since when is an occupied people expected to negotiate their liberty from the power that illegally invaded and colonized them? Would this have been expected of Poland in the 1940s? Of Hungary in 1956? Shouldn't we find the very idea morally repugnant, in addition to being a grave breach of international law? For chrissake, even if you could argue with any justice that the Israelis needed to occupy the territories beyond their pre-June 1967 borders for these forty years (a dubious notion), how can anybody... anybody justify the official policy of incentivizing Jewish-only settlements on those lands - a practice that has been in effect from the very beginning of the occupation? If Israelis feel that the very presence of Palestinians poses a danger to them, why do they insist on building colonial outposts in their midst? Palestinians would have to be utter morons to think that the state of Israel had no designs on their land... or that they had any serious intention of giving it back at some point. They would have to be insane to think that the U.S. - and particularly this president - which has financed, at least indirectly, the expansion of Israeli settlements and related infrastructure, will ever act as an honest broker.

If Bush wants "peace" on his resume, he should face facts. Real peace will only come when Israel packs up its settlements and returns to its internationally recognized borders. That's where negotiations should begin.

luv u,

jp