CAN any one imagine that the US would, by any means, pressurise Israel into signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), dismantling its nuclear arsenal or even allowing the international nuclear watchdog to inspect its suspected installations? Apparently the answer is a big ‘No', because the US, in this present effectively unipolar world, has failed to put any pressure on Israel, for instance, to temporarily suspend building Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and in occupied Jerusalem to pave the way for resuming peace talks with the Palestinians. So we, the Arabs, would be fooling ourselves if we believed that the US would one day work on clearing the Middle East of all weapons of mass destruction and treating the Israeli and Iranian nuclear files on an equal footing. We would be more foolish to think that Israel would give up its nuclear arsenal or even dismantle part of it after peace is established in the region as an American-Russian document forwarded to the Arab League stated. This blueprint gives the false impression that it is the Arabs who are blocking a peace deal to end more than six decades of conflicts with the Zionist entity known as Israel. The two world powers have decided to offer a bargaining card to the Arabs, saying that Israeli nuclear power would end in return for obtaining peace. All the same, much of the world seems to insist on living with the big lie that Israel is a weak victim living in an ocean of enmity from the Arab countries, which, therefore, should be supported and strengthened it by all military, political and even economic means to be able to survive and confront this Arab enmity. To attain that goal, the international community should turn a blind eye to the illegal nuclear power of Israel or its violation of international legitimacy by continuing to occupy lands belonging to others and practise all sorts of atrocities and injustice against the original inhabitants of the land. However, by escalating its brutality against the helpless Palestinians in Gaza and targeting Islamic sites in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Israel's actions have started to draw criticism from international public opinion. The Middle East crisis is now increasingly being seen not as an Arab-Israeli conflict over possession of the Holy Land, as the Zionist media has long continued to propagate, but as the crisis of a nation living under an apartheid regime perpetrated by Israel. For this reason, the Obama administration continues pressurising Israel into resuming peace talks, in order to whitewash its image as a fair peace mediator, and even the image of Israel as a peace loving country. However, Israel, under the rule of its current far-rightist government, seems not that eager to preserve this mask of the good guy; the moment it expresses readiness to attend peace talks, it takes every possible way to provoke the other party into balking at restarting such talks. At first, Israel spurned the US call to suspend building settlements on the occupied territories and risked its historic relation with Washington by embarrassing President Obama who was the first to suggest this settlement freeze. Then, when the US administration caved in to the Israeli stubbornness and turned towards the Arab side to pressure it into giving up the settlement freeze condition, Israel escalated its atrocities against the Palestinian people and assaults on Palestinian sites. This was pursued in order to prevent Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from accepting the American suggestion of resuming direct or indirect talks with Israel. The Palestinian authorities ignored the Israeli attempt to include some Muslim sites in the listed Jewish heritage, and the cruel decision to transfer some 70,000 Palestinians out of the West Bank and Jerusalem, with the excuse of not having a licence to stay there from the occupation authorities. Even then, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued provoking the Palestinians by affirming that Jerusalem would continue to be the unified capital of Israel and so would be out of any negotiations. The same day of launching indirect talks with the Palestinian Authority through mediation of the US envoy George Mitchell, Netanyahu announced the creation of some other 1,600 settlements in East Jerusalem, a decision that some Israeli observers saw as dealing a final blow to what is known as Arab Jerusalem. In the meantime, the Jewish extremists continue infringing different Muslim sites, the latest of which was burning a mosque in the West Bank village of al-Laben, south Nablus, and demolishing another in Rafah in Gaza Strip. Such Israeli crimes are not new for the Palestinians. Instead, the Palestinians hold their breath whenever there are peace talks, an occasion when Israel intensifies its attacks against the Palestinian land, as if intending to embarrass the Palestinian negotiator in the eyes of Palestinian citizens. This also recalls the cowardly attacks unleashed by some combatants on the other at the end of wars – and while debating a ceasefire – so as to gain as much as possible, such as land, to ensure greater superiority over the other party. I assume that the Arab negotiators are fully aware of these facts and so not showing too much enthusiasm about the talks that have just started nor hope they would end in settling the Middle East dilemma. Instead, they might offer Obama a practical proof of their support for his vision and to give him the chance to enforce the plan he announced on taking the helm of the White House. However, deep inside, the Arabs and Palestinians in particular do not expect much to come out of these new round of talks with such an arrogant Israeli government that thinks peace means surrender and the creation of a Palestinian state, which, if it happened, would be according to Israel's conditions and with no sovereignty or even defined borders. I wish that the Arabs, after the expected failure of the new peacemaking round, would withdraw their peace initiative adopted more than five years ago and leave it to the coming generations to liberate the occupied lands as long as they do not have the courage to do it themselves.
