Israeli-Palestinian talks once again appear on the brink of collapse over the illegal settlements, writes Khaled Amayreh i n Ramallah Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) continue to assert near diametrically opposed stances with regards to virtually all core issues, including conditions for the continuation of talks. This week, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who is coming under a hail of criticisms from Palestinian and Arab quarters for succumbing to Israeli and American bullying, has warned that he won't continue "a single day" of direct peace talks with Israel if the latter refuses to extend an eight-month settlement expansion freeze, due to expire next week. Abbas was quoted as saying that talks will only continue as long as the settlement freeze continues. Abbas reiterated his uncharacteristically strong stance after colleagues in Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) warned that they wouldn't be able to support continued talks with Israel while settlement expansion in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was underway. Abbas's colleagues in the Fatah and PLO executive committees argued that conducting peace talks with Israel in the shadow of Jewish settlement expansion would make a mockery of the PA and the entire Palestinian cause and portray the PA as "being subservient to Israel and the US and oblivious to Palestinian national interests". Abbas's statements came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel would resume settlement building in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem upon the expiry of the settlement freeze 26 September. While Netanyahu continues to insist on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, Palestinians interpret a formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state to imply a total or semi-total negation of the right of return for more than five million Palestinian refugees, uprooted from their homes and villages in 1948 in what is now Israel. Moreover, such recognition could also imply giving Israel the right to expel the large Palestinian minority in Israel that constitutes more than 23 per cent of the overall population. In addition to demands for recognition of the "Jewishness" of Israel, Netanyahu has once again said that in the context of any final peace agreement with the Palestinians Israel must have the right to deploy forces along the Jordan River. The Palestinians reject this demand on the grounds that such a deployment would nullify Palestinian sovereignty and allow Israel to perpetuate its occupation and control of the West Bank. In addition to the main sticking point, namely vowing to resume settlement activities, Israeli officials have introduced the so-called "Pollard affair" as one more bargaining chip in talks with the Palestinians. Although the Palestinians have nothing to do with the US imprisonment of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, jailed in 1987 for spying for Israel, Israel has consistently demanded that he be freed in return for concessions to the Palestinians, such as releasing Palestinian political prisoners languishing in Israeli jails, as if the US is somehow in league with Hamas. This week, unnamed sources in the Israeli prime minister's office reported that Netanyahu had already approached Washington with a deal to continue the moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank for another three months in return for the release of Jonathan Pollard. Israeli sources said Netanyahu would seek to convince the Americans that releasing Pollard would help the Israel government sell concessions pertaining to the settlement freeze to members of his cabinet and also to the settlers. Meanwhile, hawkish Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has been calling for the ethnic cleansing of Israel's non-Jewish -- especially Arab -- citizens if the latter don't recognise the supremacy of Jews over non-Jews in Israel. One Arab leader, a former member of the Israel Knesset, retorted: "We were here hundreds of years before this Ashkenazi thug immigrated to our land from a distant land a few years ago. Besides, it is obvious that Lieberman is trying to mimic and even emulate the Nazis who also demanded that German Jews recognise the mastery of Germans over non- Germans throughout Germany." Palestinian sources close to the peace talks have intimated that Israel is planning to introduce a host of "red herring" issues in order to confuse and exhaust Palestinian negotiators. These distractions reportedly include compensation for "Jewish refugees" from the Arab world and the possibility of placing them on an equal footing with Palestinian refugees, and purging Arab textbooks of "anti-Semitism". For the Palestinians, such demands are simply Israeli propaganda stunts.
