The US should give priority to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process as a way towards solving the crisis with Iran, writes Nicola Nasser Keeping "all options on the table" means US-Israeli plans to change the incumbent Syrian and Iranian regimes and neutralise what the US and Israel perceive to be imminent "threats" against them. But the formula leaves out the entirely feasible option of defusing the perceived threats peacefully, which would obviously be much cheaper in terms of money and human souls. On 19 August, the former head of the Operations Directorate of the Israeli military, retired General Uri Saguy, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak "Rabin strove to achieve agreements with our neighbours before the Iranians got a bomb. If we had peace accords today with the Arab countries and with the Palestinians, what exactly would the Iranians' conflict with us be about?" Yet, Israel has been running away from peace-making to promote war-mongering instead, risking the embroilment of the United States in a war on Iran that Washington does not want, at least for now. The four-star General Martin Dempsey, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, said on 19 August that he had been conferring with his Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz on a regular "bi-weekly" basis and "we've admitted to each other that our clocks are turning at different rates." Israel's envoy to Washington Michael Oren acknowledged in a CNN interview the following day that Israel's clock was ticking faster than Washington's. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali "Khamenei has ['probably'] not given orders to start building a [nuclear] weapon," according to Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak in a CNN interview on 20 April, and his Iranian counterpart Ahmed Vahidi has dismissed Israeli war-mongering as a "psychological war". Dempsey also cautioned against any Israeli strike on Iran, saying it would not destroy Iran's nuclear programme. Israeli President Shimon Peres last week joined senior security, military and political experts to warn against a unilateral Israeli strike not coordinated with the US. In the RAND Review of spring this year, US Ambassador James Dobbins, who directs the international security and defence policy centre at the RAND Corporation, a US think tank, and three expert analysts argued that "an Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would make it more, not less, likely that the Iranian regime would decide to produce and deploy nuclear weapons. Such an attack would also make it more, not less, difficult to contain Iranian influence." Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government has been beating the drums of war, linking the Iranian "threat" to a "second holocaust", a comparison dismissed by Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Netanyahu's newly appointed home Defence Minister Avi Dichter says that "Israel's existence is threatened", and Israel's top-tier missile defence system has been upgraded and missile alert system tested. In a nationwide experiment, text messages warning of incoming missiles are being sent to cell-phone users in Israel. Gas mask centres in Israel have already distributed more than four million masks. Yet, Israeli war-mongering is creating, in Saguy's words, an "orchestrated and purposely timed hysteria" in Israel, as if "someone is lighting a fire, then yelling that it has to be put out." Financial markets are shivering, foreign investors are on guard, and the Israeli shekel is growing increasingly weak against the dollar. The international stand-off on Iran's nuclear programme and the Syrian crisis is tightly linked to the impasse that has seen the Arab and Palestinian-Israeli peace process reach a dead end. The Syrian crisis in particular is closely tied to the impasse in the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, since, de-linked from this conflict, it would boil down to an internal crisis that could be solved by the Syrians themselves. Regional and international involvement in the Syrian crisis has nothing to do with the internal crisis per se, but it has exploited the internal crisis because it has a lot to do with US-Israeli plans to isolate and contain what both countries perceive as being the Iranian regional threat to their interests. To this end, Israel and the US are now doing all they can to break the alliance between Iran and Syria and the Syrian bridge linking Iran to Lebanese and Palestinian movements resisting Israeli military occupation, thus cutting Iran off from the Mediterranean and depriving these movements of Syrian support, by coordinating "regime change" in Damascus. Over the four years since Netanyahu came to power, Israel has risked a confrontation with the administration of US President Barack Obama over the order of priorities in the Middle East, which gave precedence to reaching a negotiated political settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a precondition to building a US, Arab and Israeli front against Iran. Netanyahu advocated a reversed order of priorities, and he has succeeded in pushing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict down from the top of the US's regional agenda in favour of solving the US-Israeli-Iranian conflict first. This rearrangement of Israeli and US priorities has marginalised the Arab-Israeli peace process. However, developments have shown that this rearrangement of priorities is counterproductive and is playing into Iranian hands, making Iranian regional alliances stronger, perpetuating the Syrian crisis, around which a new multi-polar world is emerging, and sidelining the Palestinian peace partners, leaving them with no other option but to take the deadlocked peace process to the United Nations. The aim of the latter would be to put the Palestinian-Israeli conflict back at the top of the international agenda in the Middle East, thus creating a fait accompli that would make the Arab-Israeli-US front against Iran impossible, even though Washington has been trying to build this over the past few years. But forcing the Palestinians to take the United Nations option, while changing nothing on the ground to end the Israeli military occupation, would in no time see them lose faith in peace-making, forcing them to align themselves with the other side and exacerbating the Iranian "threat" rather than containing it. The writer is an Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
