The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has failed to deliver and it is time to look at other options, writes Nicola Nasser A surplus of mediators has been around recently, including the heavyweight Quartet of the UN, US, EU and Russia, as have heaps of terms of reference for UN Security Council resolutions, signed bilateral accords and "roadmaps", in addition to marathon bilateral talks that have left no stone unturned. International and regional conferences on the Israel-Palestinian conflict have never been as numerous as they are today, all intended to facilitate the lavishly funded "peace process". However, Palestinian-Israeli peace-making is as elusive as ever, with peace being rather like Godot in Samuel Beckett's play, without a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories and people. Palestinian-Israeli peace-making has for all intents and purposes been on hold since 2000, and bilateral peace contacts have been dormant since Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu came to power in 2009, except for the failed five-round "exploratory" talks hosted by Jordan last January. The latest exchange of letters between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Netanyahu, and their joint statement pledging mutual commitment to peace, is no less misleading. "No peace, no war" is still the name of the only game in town, which is in fact the ideal prescription for the implosion or explosion of the unsustainable status quo in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. The almost 20-year-old US-led and EU-financed "peace process" is also a non-starter for any credible or sustainable peace-making in the foreseeable future. The failure of the "peace process" to deliver is proof enough that it is inherently infertile. Even more importantly, it is proof that there has never in fact been any serious mediation. Either the mediators were only trying to manage the process rather than trying to solve the problem, or they were unqualified, or the parameters of their approach were the wrong ones. The end result is that all mediation efforts have failed, and it is time to acknowledge their failure and to make room for other options. These include sending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict back to the United Nations, which was responsible for creating the conflict in the first place when the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine in 1947. This triggered a series of Arab-Israeli wars, the UN thus undermining its own main mission as an organisation created to maintain world peace. Since 1947, the "two-state solution" has been on the agenda, but 65 years later no solution is close at hand. US and then EU conduct over those years has aimed to reinforce a "one-state solution," i.e. one favouring Israel. Journalist Olivia Ward speculated in the Canadian Star newspaper on 1 May that the "one-state solution to Mideast peace may arrive by default." She might not have imagined that this would be a single, bi-national, bilingual and bi-religious state for Israelis and Arab Palestinians, in which Arabic and Hebrew speakers both work and which has a Jewish and Muslim population, but which nevertheless is an apartheid state, given the balance of power in favour of Israeli Jews in historical Palestine. Was Republican Party US representative Joe Pitts completely out of touch with US foreign policy reality, or was he being sarcastic, when he responded to a constituent last April with a letter calling for peace negotiations between deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who has been in a coma since 2006? The UN option is obviously the only thing that Abbas now has left to try, being the only available option for a man of peace like him, but this is exactly the door that the US administration is determined to close. As Esther Brimmer, assistant US secretary of state for international organisation affairs, explained in Miami on April 24 this year, "over the past several months, we have engaged in a global diplomatic marathon to oppose the Palestinian [option] because the United States strongly opposes efforts to address final-status issues at the United Nations rather than in direct negotiations," which Brimmer's country has nevertheless failed to mediate or resume. The last three US presidents collectively failed to deliver on their promises to the Palestinians to conclude negotiations on final-status issues, in 1999 (Bill Clinton), in 2005 (George W Bush), in 2008 (G W Bush again), and within two years of his assuming office (Barack Obama). Not to honour US promises and pledges to the Palestinians can only be interpreted as an act of bad faith, or alternatively of bad management of the "peace process" or of its failure to deliver. Whatever the case may be, it indicates that another option -- a change of course -- should be selected, and that the US monopoly over the sponsorship of peace-making in the Middle East should be discarded and replaced by more efficient peace makers, or the current US peace mediators should be replaced by others. Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the United States noted on 11 May that, "the only three breakthroughs in the history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking -- involving Israeli deals with the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians -- came about through secret diplomacy in which Washington wasn't even involved." Miller stopped short of saying that US and Quartet mediation was no longer needed. The NGO the International Crisis Group, in a report issued on 7 May, concluded that US-led mediation efforts have "become a collective addiction�ê� and so the illusion continues". "All actors are now engaged in a game of make-believe," the report said, "that a resumption of talks in the current context can lead to success; that an agreement can be reached within a short timeframe; that the Quartet is an effective mediator." On 26 April, the American Jewish newspaper Algemeiner described the Middle East Quartet as "an institutionalised failure." Israel, the US and the Quartet mediators are all the winners in this "make-believe", non-delivering mediation. The Palestinian people are the losers. The Palestinians have had enough, and they are now saying that enough is enough. Peace is a mirage; peace-making is a failure; the peace process is a sham; the peace mediators are fakes. If the other parties involved can enjoy the luxury of their "addiction" to the status quo, the Palestinians cannot. Their survival is at stake. The writer is a journalist based in Bir Zeit in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
