"Trapped in their dreams... Walking in circles now... Do not disturb." These are the lyrics of a song that was not meant to sum up the launch of the proximity talks between Israelis and Palestinians that US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell announced this week. They could, however, serve comfortably as a good resume -- albeit poetic -- of the history of Palestinian-Israeli talks over the past decade or so. On again and off again, the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced its despair with Israel and threatened to stop negotiations unless Israel commits to peace requirements. This sentiment of "resistance" was short lived. By some or another "American promise", "new US initiative", "renewed Arab commitment to peace", or "European diplomatic demarche", the PA always finds a U-turn and slip road towards a new round of talks. This is "the last chance" before Arabs go to the UN Security Council to demand a full overhaul of the peace process as administered for the past couple of decades, said Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa last week in the wake of a considerable Arab consensus for launching proximity talks. Moussa's statement sounded familiar. Maybe he said it, in one way or another, after the Annapolis Conference in the autumn of 2007... or was it a year earlier or a year later? With some official "Arab cover" that Egyptian diplomacy carefully fitted, the PA is going into a new round of talks out of despair. "I have no alternative," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Arab ministers in Cairo last week. A quick reading through a concise history of Palestinian-Israeli talks could offer endless examples of the preordained failure of despair-induced talks. Abbas is going into indirect talks with Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu who is aggressively confiscating Palestinian territories, tampering with Islamic heritage in the occupied Palestinian territories, and is being "honest" about his intentions to start talks that would not necessarily go anywhere. This, the Palestinian leader is doing at a time of firm refusal to compromise with his national compatriots (and competition), the Hamas resistance movement. It is all walking in circles. Arab, American and Israeli officials who proudly announced the imminent launch of four-month proximity talks did not share the agenda of these talks. Nor did they say what is expected to come out of the talks, or what would be the conditions for expanding the 120-day period that started 4 March. Hamas and other Palestinian factions appealed to Abbas to refrain from going into talks with an undetermined agenda and unclear projected outcomes. They warned that these talks would only help Netanyahu pursue his aggression against the Palestinians under occupation while pretending he is negotiating for peace. Those appeals were shunned by Abbas while 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza are suffocating under a harsh and relentless Israeli siege that is barely challenged by Arab regimes. "Scream in silence, everyone is sleeping," go lyrics in the rest of the same song.
