There is little time left for the international community to show that it is really in favour of a Palestinian state, writes Salim Nazzal* The result of American Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell's recent round of talks in the Middle East will have come as no surprise to the majority of Arab observers. Arab thinker Clovis Maksoud is not alone in assuming Binyamin Netanyahu's real aim is to freeze peace and not settlements. Israel's rejection of even a temporary freeze on settlement building signals one thing, which Netanyahu has constantly emphasised: Israel intends to continue its policy of stealing Palestinian land in obvious contradiction to the international community's commitment to the establishing of a viable Palestinian state. While settlements compose only a portion of the Palestinian question they are a useful barometer to measure the intention of Israel to integrate in the region. Israel, like all racist and fascist states in history, cannot live without oppressing or stealing land and, consequently, cannot live without war. The essence of the Palestinian question concerns the displacing of a native population by a racist and murderous ideology that seeks to replace them with people from all over the world whose only link is their religion. What will the US do given the Israeli rejection of American peace plans? Will Obama realise that backing an apartheid state is against the interests of America? Will he place more pressure on Israel to comply with America's peace plans? Many Arab commentators fear that Washington, having failed to persuade Israel to freeze settlements, will now press Arab states to make more concessions and normalise relations with Israel. The meeting that took place in New York last week between Obama, Abbas and Netanyahu has been portrayed by Israeli pundits as a success for the Israeli prime minister. They openly boast that Netanyahu challenged Obama and rejected the American proposals. Arab states say that they have made concrete proposals and the ball now is in the Israeli court. At the Beirut summit of 2002 Arab states offered Israel full diplomatic relations in return for a complete withdrawal from the West Bank. Now they face a situation in which Washington will press them to make normalisation gestures in return for Israel building "only" 3,000 units in occupied Palestine. Hardly surprising, then, that some Arab capitals now wonder if the new US administration is capable of drawing a line under the biased position of its predecessor. One Palestinian politician to whom I spoke following Obama's speech at the UN wondered what the US president could possibly mean when he called for a halt to Palestinian agitation against Israel. "Do Palestinians need somebody to agitate them against Israel when they see with their own eyes how Israel makes their life hell on daily basis? Does Obama expect Palestinians to dance when Zionist Jews steal their land and humiliate them daily at 600 checkpoints most of which have no security significance for Israel but are there only to humiliate Palestinians and to break their will?" he asked. The Libyan leader's speech at the UN posed serious questions about the role of the international organisation in several Third World cases, Palestine among them. Most Arab observers consider Gaddafi's speech as the clearest Arab protest so far against an organisation that has failed to prevent more than 65 wars or to provide justice to the Palestinians. It is a dismal fact that occupied Palestine has witnessed no real change on the ground. The apartheid state of Israel changes its propaganda tactics from time to time but its goal remains the same: to steal as much of Palestine as possible while systematically terrorising the Palestinian population is the preferred modus operandi of the Zionist apartheid state. The reality on the ground clearly demonstrates that Jewish settlements make even a small Palestinian state impossible. The major Palestinian town of Qalqilya is now surrounded by a wall on three sides, a small example of the huge destruction Israel has caused, and is still causing, to Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. According to a source in the Palestinian civil defence whom I met recently, several fires in the town were not extinguished because Palestinian fire engines were prevented from reaching the sits of the blaze, held up at Israeli checkpoints for hours. Jewish fascism is getting stronger with each day, and any hope of reaching a reasonable solution is fast disappearing. All this is contributing to an atmosphere of hopelessness and pessimism across the region, consolidating the view that the international community is unable, or unwilling, to make Israel respect international law. In the view of many Arab observers the failure of American plans will sooner or later push the region towards a comprehensive war, the logical result of aggressive Zionist policy. It is difficult to tell whether we are heading towards an eighth Arab Israeli war. What is certain is that the absence of a serious pressure on Israel is creating an atmosphere of despair and militancy. * The writer is a Palestinian-Norwegian historian of the Middle East.
