For peace to succeed

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is in the US doing his best impression of a statesman.

All it would take for peace to happen, he keeps on saying, is for the Palestinians to sit down across the table from him and talk directly.

What he fails to hint at is, then what? What will happen, if they do that? Will Israel withdraw from its illegal settlements? Will Israel finally accept the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital? Will Israel finally take responsibility for the millions of refugees that the creation of Israel spawned?

Nothing this Israeli government has said or done since it was sworn in has indicated any such thing.

Israel had to be forced to suspend building in settlements, and did so only in the West Bank, only partially and only temporarily. These are not the policies of a country seriously seeking peace.

Israel only eased its blockade on 1.5 million Gazans after it was put under sustained international pressure in the wake of its illegal and murderous raid on a boat of activists in international waters. Yet the easing is entirely cosmetic. While more goods will enter Gaza, the kind of measure, namely free access for imports, exports as well as people, that is really needed to kick-start a Gazan economy and ensure sustainability, is singularly lacking.

Israel continues to refuse being held to account by unbiased international actors. It refuses to recognise the result of the UN investigation into its actions during its brutal onslaught on Gaza last year, and refuses any similar inquiry into its raid on the flotilla of aid activists in May.

In both cases, Israel has set up entirely non-credible commissions of inquiry in a bid to divert international attention. It may well, should attention continue to focus on its illegal actions, start a war in Lebanon, a tried and tested way for Israel to escape international censure.

But Israel is bending, and if the international community gets its act together, continued and sustained pressure to abide by international law, end its occupation and accept the creation of a Palestinian state may just succeed.

Of course, the international community needs to be in it for the long term, and not try to curry favour with Israel and its propagandists, for that way lie only stagnation and conflict.