It is infuriating when one spends hours reviewing all the give-and-take about the perfunctory meeting in Annapolis next week to kick-start Palestinian-Israeli negotiations for a final settlement only to realise that one does not need to reinvent the wheel.
All that needs to be done is there and has been available for more than 40 years!
A simple review of all the international and bilateral resolutions covering the conflict since the establishment of Israel in Palestine in 1948 and all the pertinent issues - Jerusalem, borders, refugees, colonies - should give any fair-minded researcher all the ammunition to come up with a clear-cut formula.
What is missing, however, is an honest commitment, as underlined beautifully and succinctly in an advertisement placed by a Jewish group - Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace bloc - in the Israeli paper Haaretz on November 16.
It is titled: "The crucial sentence." It reads: "A week to Annapolis and no sign of the solemn document to be presented there. What is missing? One simple sentence: 'I. Ehud Olmert, commit myself to ending the occupation, in practice - and not in words, in all the territories - and not in some of them, now - and not when the Messiah comes. That's the whole story in a nutshell."
The Israeli prime minister is a master of double-talk and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has also raised the bar for serious negotiations.
Olmert did indeed commit himself, in partial response to American pressure, to freeze new settlements and land confiscation in the occupied West Bank and to dismantle "wildcat" outposts, often referred to as "illegal," although all the settlements are prohibited under international law.
The Olmert position is being charitably described as a goodwill gesture to entice Arab presence at the Annapolis launching pad.
But, of course, the Israeli leader did not say anything about ongoing "growth construction" - 88 colonies are at present being expanded in violation of the "road map" agreement -which both the Americans and the Palestinians want halted immediately.
Little known
There is very little known outside Israel about these colonies, which along with the "Apartheid Wall" and the highway network that links the 149 colonies, amount to 40 per cent of the occupied West Bank.
Based on a UN report, Stephanie Koury, a research fellow at the University of London, writes in a recent paper published by The Palestine Centre, a Washington-based think tank, that "the effect of this infrastructure, along with the system of control over Palestinian movement within the West Bank, fragments and separates Palestinian communities from each other, dissects the West Bank into dozens of enclaves and denies the emergence of an economically and politically viable Palestinian state."
Following in her master's footsteps, the Israeli foreign minister has now come up with the "absurd demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state," as Haaretz put it. Tzipi Livni, daughter of the chief operations officer of the infamous Irgun terrorist organisation, believes that a two-state solution for the long-standing Palestinian-Israeli conflict would provide a solution to all Palestinians including those in Israel, arguing that the national demands of the Arabs in Israel should end the moment a Palestinian state is established.
"It must be clear to everyone that the State of Israel is a national homeland for the Jewish people," she went on, ridiculously implying that the Palestinians in Israel would be uprooted to live in the new state, overlooking the fact that one-fifth of Israel's population are Palestinian Arabs.
A colleague of the minister, the only Arab cabinet minister, Ghaleb Majadele, responded: "Anyone who raises the idea of transferring the Arab population in Israel to the territories of the state of Palestine is anti-democratic." He should have said racist.
Adding more oil to the fire is the Israeli Parliament or Knesset. A bill was passed last week requiring a two-thirds majority to approve any change in the status of Occupied Jerusalem to nip in the bud Palestinians to repossess Arab East Jerusalem, or the Old City, as was the case before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. (The bill requires three more votes before it becomes law and reflects Israeli opinion that occupied Jerusalem must remain undivided).
The sugar-coating that will take place at the Annapolis session next week will not make the event any sweeter unless there is a serious and public commitment to an all-encompassing a Palestinian-Israeli settlement within a specific time frame.
But that goal cannot be achieved unless there is a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. Otherwise, failure could have devastating consequences especially to the man in the street, particularly in isolated Gaza, and to many a leader in the region, some of whom are precariously at the top.
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