Even Fayyad admits there are no peace prospects, reports Khaled Amayreh from the West Bank As sounds of the drums of war coming from Israel are getting louder and louder, Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders are showing growing signs of impatience with the slow-moving talks with Israel. Visibly frustrated Palestinian officials have been speaking of Israel's "lack of will" to reach a genuine final-status settlement that would end the 40-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. This week, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was quoted as saying that he didn't see any real possibility for reaching a peace deal with Israel in the year 2008. Fayyad's assessment is clearly at odd with President Bush's outspoken predictions that 2008 will witness the creation of a sovereign and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. Fayyad, a financial-data analyst by training, is not known for making hyperbolic statements. Hence, his pessimistic appraisal of peace talks with Israel should be taken seriously. According to Palestinian officials, there are several reasons for Palestinian frustration: First, Israel's understanding and interpretation of the roadmap (the main legal reference upon which Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are based) is substantially different from the Palestinian understanding of the American-conceived plan. "Israel views the roadmap as negotiable and open to modifications. For our part, we are demanding that it be implemented right away without any further delay," says Nimr Hammad, a political advisor to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. Hammad said, "Israeli practices were leaving no room for optimism. If talks with Israel fail we will call for an urgent Arab conference to take a collective stand." In fact, Israel and the PA have never been able to formulate a common understanding of the roadmap and what it exactly means. The main reason for that is Israel's insistence that the territories Israel seized during the 1967 War are actually disputed not occupied. Obviously, this stand is inconsistent with the rule of international law and all UN resolutions pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On 11 February, Fayyad, in a speech to Arab Americans, diplomats and journalists, said Israel was reneging on commitments to the roadmap. "Annapolis was a major step forward, but I cannot say we are not having difficulties. In the two months following Annapolis, Israeli incursions and bombings of Palestinians and their property claimed the lives of 165 people, injured another 521, and caused untold damage to property. What I see has not happened, not happened to the extent it should or it can, is progress on these issues, progress on the implementation of commitments under the roadmap. I don't see sufficient commitment on the part of Israel to the settlement freeze." Fayyad spoke of continuing Israeli settlement building particularly in East Jerusalem where Palestinians would like to have their future capital. He also complained about the continued presence of hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank, which he said were choking the Palestinian economy and seriously limiting Palestinian mobility in their own country. Israel, however, seems to give little or no concerns to Palestinian objections. This week, the Israeli press quoted Housing Minister Zeev Boim as saying that, "bids will go out soon to build 1,100 apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem." Boim, a former deputy defence minister, said 350 settler units would be built in the Har Homa settlement and 750 in Pisgat Zeev, north of Jerusalem. More to the point, the fundamentalist Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupliansky, has defied the Israeli government with regard to settlement expansion in East Jerusalem. According to Haaretz, Lupliansky vowed that he would turn Jerusalem into an "illegal outpost". There is no doubt that the Jerusalem issue and the large Jewish colonies built on the West Bank since 1967 make up the most difficult problem facing peace talks, in addition to the strategic issue of Palestinian refugees. Hatem Abdul-Qader, a PA official in charge of the Jerusalem File opined that Israel "simply wants to Judaise as much as possible of East Jerusalem to the point where there will be no Jerusalem left and then they will tell us what you see is what you get. But then the very idea of Palestinian statehood would be futile and impossible, and the entire two-state solution concept would be finished forever. Israel is simply killing the two-state solution by continuing Jewish demographic expansion in Arab East Jerusalem." There is an additional problem, or more correctly, excuse. Israel is utilising the situation in Gaza to the fullest to drag its feet with respect to peace talks with the Palestinians. It is preparing to launch a large-scale incursion into the blockaded coastal territory, controlled by Hamas. The declared goal is to stop the so-called rockets fired by Palestinian guerrillas onto Israeli territory. However, the real reason is to destroy the Hamas government in order to lower the ceiling of Palestinian national expectations. Israeli leaders, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, have been warning non-stop that no peace deal would be possible and no Palestinian state could be created unless the homemade projectiles fired from Gaza onto neighbouring Jewish settlements were stopped. However, with the starved and blockaded Gaza under the authority of Hamas, Israel and the US know quite well that the PA leadership are helpless to put an end to the firing of the mostly futile rockets. Palestinian officials see constant Israeli invocations of the rockets and Sderot as a red herring and an easy excuse to evade having to deal with the central issues of the peace process, including Jerusalem, the refugees and ending the occupation. "Israel is only seeking excuses. Israel is more interested than anybody else in the continuation of the current situation in Gaza since these rockets, which are really just firecrackers, are used as a valuable propaganda asset to continue slaughtering the Palestinians in Gaza and indulging in stalling tactics in the West Bank," said former PA security official Jebril Rajoub. The hawkish Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak says openly Israel's ultimate goal in Gaza is to destroy the Hamas government. However, a bloody and extended Israeli blitz into Gaza wouldn't be without serious, even grave, political ramifications on the entire peace process. "A bloody invasion of Gaza by Israel would turn Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups towards Al-Qaeda, and Mahmoud Abbas would be made to look like Antoin Lahd," said one Hamas lawmaker in Gaza on condition of anonymity. Lahd was the quisling commander of the Israeli-backed defunct South Lebanese Army, who was forced to flee to Israel following the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. "Without Hamas there can be no peace, and the entire area may turn into another Iraq."
