A week ago Israel suspended participation in the peace talks in response to news that the Palestinian Authority's (PA) Fatah had for a third time concluded a unity agreement with the Hamas leadership of Gaza. Such a move towards intra-Palestinian reconciliation should have been welcomed by Israel as a tentative step in the right direction. Instead, it was immediately denounced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the end of the diplomatic road, contending that Israel will never be part of any political process that includes a terrorist organisation pledged to its destruction. Without Hamas' participation, any diplomatic results of negotiations would likely have been of questionable value, and besides Hamas deserves inclusion. It has behaved as a political actor since it took part in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and has repeatedly indicated its willingness to reach a long-term normalising agreement with Israel if and when Israel is ready to withdraw fully to the 1967 borders and respect Palestinian sovereign rights. The contention that Hamas is pledged to Israel's destruction is pure hasbara – a cynical means to manipulate the fear factor in Israeli domestic politics, as well as ensuring the persistence of the conflict. This approach has become Israel's way of choosing expansion over peace, seemingly ignoring its own citizens' mandate to secure a stable peace agreement. Israel had days earlier complained about an initiative taken by the PA to become a party to 15 international treaties – again, a step that would be viewed as constructive if seeking an end to the conflict was anywhere to be found in Israel's playbook. Such an initiative should have been interpreted in a positive direction as indicating the Palestinian intention to be a responsible member of the international community. Israel again responded with a contrary lame allegation that by acting independently the PA had departed from the agreed roadmap of negotiations, prematurely assuming the prerogatives of a state rather than waiting, Godot-like, for such a status to be granted via the bilateral diplomatic route. To remove any doubt about the priorities of the Netanyahu-led government, Israel during the nine months set aside for reaching an agreement, authorised no fewer than 13,851 new housing units in the West Bank settlements, added significant amounts of available land for further settlement expansion, and demolished 312 Palestinian homes. These acts were not only unlawful, but actually accelerated earlier settlement trends, and were obviously provocative from a Palestinian perspective. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy observed in a TV interview, if Israel authorises even one additional housing unit during the negotiations, it is sending a clear signal to the Palestinian people and their leaders that it has no interest in reaching a sustainable peace agreement. The revival of direct negotiations last August between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was mainly a strong-arm initiative of the US government, energised by US Secretary of State John Kerry who has put relentless pressure on both sides to start talking despite the manifest futility of such a process from its outset. Such resolve raises the still unanswered question of why. Kerry melodramatically proclaimed that the negotiations were the last chance to save the two-state solution as the means to end the conflict, in effect declaring this new round of US-sponsored negotiations to be an all-or-nothing moment of decision for the Palestinian Authority and Israel. Kerry has reinforced this appeal by warning that Israel risks isolation and boycott if no agreement is reached, and in the last several days he declared behind closed doors that Israel was taking a path that could lead it to becoming an apartheid state by this apparent refusal to seek a diplomatic solution. It is probably beside the point that no one at the US state department informed Kerry before he started to walk this tightrope that the two-state goal that he has so unconditionally endorsed was already dead and buried as a realistic option. Furthermore, no one seems to have informed him that Israel established an apartheid regime on the West Bank decades ago, making his supposedly controversial statement better understood as “old news.” In other words, Kerry showed himself as being awkwardly out of touch by issuing future warnings about matters that were already in a past tense. With respect to apartheid, Kerry discredited himself further by apologising for using the “a-word” in response to objections by Israel supporters in the United States, however descriptive “apartheid” has in fact become of the discriminatory nature of the Israeli occupation. American leaders present themselves as craven in relation to Israeli sensibilities when they retreat in this manner from reality without showing the slightest sign of embarrassment. The agreement of Israel and the PA to sit together and negotiate formally expired on 29 April, yet the indefatigable Kerry rather remarkably pushed the parties to agree on an extension by a flurry of meetings in recent weeks, disclosing a mood hovering uneasily between exasperation and desperation. Even if the talks were to resume, as still might happen, it should not be interpreted as a hopeful development. There is no reason to think that a diplomatic process in the current political climate is capable of producing a just and sustainable peace. To think differently embraces an illusion, and more meaningfully, gives Israel additional time to consolidate its expansionist plans to a point that makes it absurd to imagine the creation of a truly viable and independent sovereign Palestinian state. So long as the political preconditions for fruitful inter-governmental diplomacy do not exist, calls for direct negotiations should be abandoned. Both sides must approach negotiations with a genuine incentive to strike a deal that is fair to the other side, which implies a willingness to respect Palestinian rights under International Law. For the reasons suggested, those preconditions do not exist on the Israeli side. This makes it deeply misleading to put the blame for the breakdown of the talks on both sides, or sometimes even to point the finger at the Palestinians, as has been the practice in the mainstream Western media whenever the negotiations have hit a stone wall. It has been painfully obvious ever since the Oslo Accords in 1993 that there is something fundamentally deficient about the double role played by the United States in relation to such negotiations. How can it be trusted when American officials declare over and over again that the country will forever remain the unconditional ally of Israel, and yet at the same time give even minimal confidence to the Palestinians that it is a neutral third party seeking to promote a just peace? The short answer is that it can't and it won't. From the very outset of the recent diplomatic initiative this contradiction in roles was resolved in Israel's favour by the US President Barack Obama's appointment of Martin Indyk as US special envoy entrusted with the delicate symbolic role of overseeing the negotiations. Indyk has a long public career of involvements supportive of Israel, including past employment with the notorious American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby that exerts its disproportionate pro-Israeli influence over the entire American political scene. Only the weakness of the Palestinian Authority can explain a willingness to entrust its diplomatic fate to such a framework that is already strongly tilted in favour of Israel due to Israel's skills and strengths as an experienced political actor on the global stage. Against this background we have to ask what is gained and lost by such fruitless negotiations. What is gained by Israel and the United States is some hope that while negotiations proceed the conflict will not escalate by taking an unwelcome turn towards a Third Intifada that forcibly challenges Israel's occupation policies associated with the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. There is also the sense that so long as the US is seen as backing a two-state solution it satisfies regional expectations and provides a rationale for supporting even a futile diplomatic effort because it is the only game in town, and it seems perverse to challenge its utility without presenting an alternative. The Arab world itself endorsed and recently reaffirmed its 2002 regional peace initiative calling for Israel's withdrawal from occupied Palestine and formal acceptance of Palestinian state within 1967 green line borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. Such a vision of peace derives from the unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 242 that was premised on Israel's withdrawal from territories occupied in the course of the 1967 War, but additionally on a just solution of the refugee problem. And there is near universal appreciation expressed for Kerry's dedication to resolving the conflict, and so it is a kind of public-relations success story despite the serious drawbacks mentioned. In effect, a global consensus has existed since 1967 on establishing peace between Israel and Palestine, reinforced by the apparent absence of alternatives, that is the only possibilities that are widely believed in are either two states or the persistence of the conflict. It should also be appreciated that way back in 1988 the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), then speaking for all Palestinians under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, gave up its maximalist goals. It formally indicated its willingness to make peace with Israel based on the 1967 borders, with an implied readiness to compromise on the refugee issue. Such an approach allowed Israel to possess secure borders based on 78 per cent of historic Palestine and limited the Palestinian state to the other 22 per cent. This is less than half of what the UN had offered the Palestinians in its partition proposal of 1947, which at the time seemed unreasonable from a Palestinian perspective. In appraisals of the conflict, this historic Palestinian concession, perhaps imprudently made by the PLO, has never been acknowledged, much less reciprocated, by either Israel or the United States. In my view, this absence of response has exhibited all along a fundamental lack of political will on the Israeli side to reach a solution through inter-governmental negotiations, although some would interpret the Camp David initiative in 2000 as the last time that the Israeli leadership seemed somewhat inclined to resolve the conflict diplomatically. The Palestinian Authority depends on Israel to transfer tax revenues upon which its governing capacity rests, and it can usually be brought into line if it acts in defiance of Tel Aviv and Washington. Also, collaboration on security arrangements with Israel creates both co-dependency and gives a measure of stability to the otherwise frozen situation. Occasionally, seemingly with quixotic intent, the PA and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas challenge this image by suggesting their option to quit the political stage and return the responsibilities of administering the West Bank to Israel. The two-state consensus has been increasingly challenged over the years by influential Palestinians, including the late Edward Said who towards the end of his life argued that in view of intervening developments subsequent to 1988 only a one-state solution could reconcile the two peoples in an acceptable manner based on mutual respect for rights, democracy and equality. The advocacy of a single, secular and democratic state draws on two sets of arguments – a pragmatic contention that the settlement process and the changed demographic of East Jerusalem are essentially irreversible, and thus there is no feasible means at this time to create a viable Palestinian state, and this becomes more apparent with each passing day, and a principled contention that it makes no political or ethical sense in the 21st Century to encourage the formation of ethnic states, especially as in this case 20 per cent of the Israeli population is Palestinian and subject to an array of discriminatory legislative measures. In some respects, the essence of the Palestinian predicament is to acknowledge that it is too late for the two-state solution and seemingly too early for a one-state solution. Assuming that the diplomatic route is blocked, is the situation hopeless for the Palestinians? I believe that Palestinian hopes for a just peace should never have rested on the outcome of formal diplomacy for the reasons given above. Put succinctly, given the Israeli failure to heed the call for withdrawal in UN Security Council Resolution 242, its non-response to the 1988 PLO acceptance of Israel within the 1967 borders, and its consistent commitment to settlement expansion, no sane person should have put much faith in Israeli readiness to make a peace respectful of Palestinian rights under International Law. Currently, the best prospect for realising Palestinian self-determination is by way of pressures exerted through the mobilisation of a movement from below, combining popular resistance with global solidarity. Such a process, what I have called a “legitimacy war,” exemplified by Gandhi's non-violent victory over the British Empire in India and more recently by the success of the global anti-apartheid movement against racist South Africa, represents the latest strategic turn in the Palestinian national movement and seems even compatible with the recent outlook of Hamas as expressed by its leaders and confirmed by its behaviour. It is time to appreciate that the current approach of the Palestinian national movement rests on two broad undertakings: the adoption of non-violent resistance tactics and an increasingly strengthened global solidarity movement centred on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) initiative that is gaining momentum throughout the world, especially in Europe. These developments are reinforced by UN calls to Member States to remind corporate and financial actors under their national control that it is problematic under International Law to continue engaging in business dealings with the Israeli settlements. In effect, there are horizons of hope for Palestinians with respect to seeking a just and sustainable peace between these two ethnic communities that is gaining most of its impact and influence from the actions of people rather than the manoeuvres of governments. Of course, if the political climate changes in response to legitimacy war pressures, governments could have a crucial future role to play, taking advantage of a new balance of forces that could enable diplomacy to move towards solutions. Constructive diplomacy would contrast with what has recently transpired, which seemed to combine deflection from Israeli expansionism followed by participation in a childish blame game. It is important that world public opinion rejects as meaningless the diplomatic charade of the peace talks while the fate of a people continues to be daily sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics. The writer is an International Law and International Relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for 40 years. In 2008 he was appointed to serve a six-year term as UN special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
