Most Palestinians view the vague "ideas" being floated in Washington on resuming peace talks with Israel as pipe dreams, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have described renewed hopes for the resumption of peace talks with Israel as "highly exaggerated and unwarranted". "I don't see any real change in the Israeli stand. [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu says every morning that settlement expansion will continue and that Israel will never end the occupation. In fact, every day new plans for expanding settlements are announced. So I wonder how the peace process can be resumed under such circumstances," said Ghassan Al-Khatib, head of the Palestinian Government Press Office in Ramallah. Khatib told Al-Ahram Weekly that there was no basis to reports that Netanyahu would come to terms with the creation of a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders and that he intended to accept certain American proposals to that effect. "It is true that Netanyahu wants to see the peace talks resumed. But he refuses to freeze the settlement expansion, and he is clinging to his rejectionist attitudes regarding Jerusalem, the refugees and all other issues defining the conflict." Other Palestinian officials have opined that the Egyptian leadership might have either misunderstood or misinterpreted Netanyahu's remarks during his latest encounter with President Hosni Mubarak earlier this week. Netanyahu reportedly told Mubarak that Israel was willing and ready to discuss all contentious issues, including Jerusalem and the refugees. Some Egyptian officials reacted "positively but cautiously" to Netanyahu's remarks, hoping that the Israeli premier was finally retreating from his long-standing intransigent rejectionist views. However, just hours after returning to Tel Aviv from Cairo, Netanyahu told cabinet ministers and Knesset members that he was sticking to the erstwhile Israeli position including the "inviolability" of the status of Jerusalem as Israel's "eternal and undivided capital" and the rights of Jews to build anywhere in "the land of Israel". In fact, if actions speak louder than words, Netanyahu seems to be leaving no room for a positive interpretation of his remarks in Cairo. On 4 January, Israel announced plans for the expansion of a Jewish settler outpost on the Mount of Olives in the heart of East Jerusalem. According to the Hebrew newspaper Maariv, the Jerusalem municipality has already approved plans to expand a Talmudic school at the site and construct 24 settler units. This would be the first step of a larger plan to attract a large number of settlers to the area. Maariv also pointed out that the Israeli government was planning to build 6,500 settler units throughout East Jerusalem in "the next phase of a master plan". The new buildings would be constructed in the settlements of Hizma, Pizgad Zeev, Navi Yaccov and Jabal Abu Ghneim, in addition to the new settlement at the Mount of Olives. Meanwhile, it has been reported that efforts to restart the peace process were centred on several American "ideas" that would encourage the Palestinian leadership to return to the negotiating table with Israel without any explicit pledge by Israel to freeze settlement expansion. These ideas include a possible Israeli agreement to release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners, especially those affiliated with Fatah, possibly including the popular Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, and the transfer of territory under Israel's full control (Area B under the Oslo rubric) to PA security control (Area A). In truth, such classifications have been rendered meaningless as the Israeli army enjoys full freedom to operate in every street in the West Bank, as seen recently in Nablus when Israeli forces stormed the city, classified as Area A, and murdered three Fatah operatives in full view of PA security forces. In addition, the US is formulating an "offer" to the PA whereby the Obama administration will see to it that a territorially contiguous Palestinian state would see the light within two years. However, it seems that the PA is unlikely to accept the American ideas, at least for the time being. They seem mainly intended to induce PA President Mahmoud Abbas to resume the peace process more than they are to reach a genuine final status settlement to the conflict. For example, the American ideas have not been coordinated with Israel and are unlikely to be accepted by the Netanyahu government, probably the most extreme rightwing government in Israel's history. Second, the ideas noticeably sidestep the issue of settlement expansion, which means that Israel would effectively have carte blanche to create more "facts on the ground" in the West Bank under the cover of a peace process that serves to shield it from international pressure and criticism. Using the words of one Palestinian official, by the end of the two-year period, and instead of ending up having a viable Palestinian state, the Palestinians might reach a situation where there would be nothing left to negotiation as Jewish settlement expansion would devour whatever left intact of the West Bank, especially East Jerusalem. More to the point, Abbas, who has been vowing that he won't agree to resume "peace talks" with Israel unless the latter brings all settlement- expansion activities to a complete halt, should be worried that accepting the American ideas without solid guarantees would seriously undermine his public standing and that of Fatah, his political party. This explains the mounting opposition within Fatah to any Palestinian concessions vis- à-vis the settlement issue. The prominent Palestinian commentator, Hani Al-Masri, has argued that Abbas would be committing nothing less than a "political suicide" if he agreed to resume the peace process while Jewish settlement expansion was going on. "Because then no one would take the Palestinian Authority seriously; not the Israelis, not the Americans, not the Arabs, not even the Palestinians themselves." To be sure, the PA leadership, whose continued survival -- and even relevance -- depends to a very large extent on the existence of a promising peace process, would like to see a genuine revival of that process sooner rather than later. However, with the bitter outcome clear of nearly 18 years of futile peace talks with Israel, even the most moderate of PA leaders are not willing to return to the negotiating table at any price, especially in the absence of credible guarantees clearly defining the "endgame". Egypt, which fully understands and even sympathises with the Palestinian position, is dispatching Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit and General Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to Washington to inquire about the details of the reported American ideas that some media pundits are beginning to call an "initiative" or "plan". However, it is widely assumed that the latest American effort will meet the same fate and same failure that past American efforts met when Israel says "no" to it, as Israel is expected to do. Many Palestinians and non-Palestinians already refuse to give the latest ideas from Washington the benefit of the doubt. They argue that if the Obama administration is unable to force Israel to behave on such a comparatively minor issue as freezing Jewish settlement building in the West Bank for a few months, it will be foolhardy and naïve to expect the US, whose Congress is tightly controlled by the American Israel lobby, to give up the spoils of the 1967 war and allow for the creation of a genuine and viable Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. This is not even mentioning the more cardinal issue of the plight of Palestinian refugees and their right of return.
