Build Settlements, Be Intransigent, Get Weaponry

Op-ed by Steve Horn--On Dec. 9, 2010, Haaretz, one of Israel's top newspapers and news sources, reported that the United States would allocate some $205 million for something called an "Iron Dome anti-rocket system." As a reward, then, for the non-stop building of settlements, Israel was showered with weapons by the U.S., thanks mostly to the Pro-Israel lobby, which has remained a huge obstacle in solving the Israel-Palestine conflict from time immemorial.

The whole debacle has been nothing short of a charade.

Washington has been useless and futile for the past 43+ years of what Henry Siegman called "The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam" in his 2007 London Review of Books article. Sadly, the "peace talks" have never been serious, for during each set of "talks," Israel has chosen to build thousands upon thousands of settlements, gobbling up Palestinian land and turning the West Bank into an apartheid-like enclave of bantustans. Yet, despite it all, Israel continuously is rewarded with more and more weapons, month-after-month, year-after-year.    

There is simply no peace without justice in the Israel-Palestine conflict, for only with viable Palestinian state can a just peace be brokered, yet Israel and the United States are not serious in the slightest with making that happen. Thus, the great peace procession will proceed for years to come, with peace becoming more and more impossible and apartheid becoming more and more likely, just as University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer predicts.

Furthermore, the U.S., frankly, is not a serious mediator in this conflict. Mediators must be neutral, not heavily biased toward one of the actors. That's not how serious conflict resolution works, and one could ask any serious scholar of peace studies and conflict resolution that question, including the father of the study, Johann Galtung, and one will get the same answer.

Here's what he had to say on Democracy Now! this past September:

"Role of the United States -- the United States was never a mediator. A mediator cannot be an ally of one of the parties and having a joint concern, since United States and Israel came into being the same way, by some kind of divine mandate, that we are chosen peoples and this is our promised land. The people onboard the Mayflower took over the Jewish metaphors before they landed on the Plymouth Rock. So I think they are obsessed with the idea that if one falls, so does the other. Now, that’s an asymmetry which is unacceptable for a mediator.

A much better mediator would have been the European Commission. The European Commission should enter here not only as a mediator, but as a model, just simply revealing what happened, laying the cards on the table. How did they manage to integrate Germany, that had committed so many atrocities? That is quite some story, and that story would be inspiring for them. And out of it came something that works. Right now they have a little currency crisis, but they’re overcoming that much better than somebody else." 

Thus, let the "peace process scam" begin anew.  The future looks bleak, for certain.