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The 2010 Palestine Peace Talks: A Sylvester Stallone Remake?

By Agustín Velloso

06 September, 2010
Countercurrents.org

A new round of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis has just
begun in the United States. The summer was one of kite-flying, on the one
hand in the form of indirect contacts between the two sides so as not to
further provoke Palestinians sick of the Israeli Occupation and the
incompetence of the Palestinian Authority. On the other hand threats came
from Mahmud Abbas saying he would not participate without a halt to
settlement building and from Benjamin Netanyahu saying he would only
participate if no preconditions were set.

So interest in this latest of the interminable round of talks resembles
the likely interest in a film of Rocky 6. The directors and leading actors
of Rocky knew they were offering entertainment barely suitable for an
infantile public and for grown-ups desperate for escape. But they still
managed to fool film goers around the world their production was, at the
very least, the film of the decade.

To convince public opinion, the US government, the leading promoter of
earlier talks and the ones under way, have presented them as the round
that is going to "resolve all final-status issues ....within one year" in
the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. One can still recall, if
one leaves aside the 1991 Madrid preview, the 1993 billboard announcing
the first film in this saga "the Washington Conversations." Also since
then we have seen remakes like the "Declaration of Principles" and the
"Oslo Process".

More than a film it is an endless series whose episodes - variations on
the same screenplay - get the subtitle of the city in which they were
staged. Annapolis, Sharm- el Sheik, Taba, Wye River, Paris, Cairo, Camp
David and so on. Today, the film show rolls on in Washington. This time,
the director is the wife of ex-President Clinton, organizer of the 1993
talks in the same city.

The locations are seductive and the special effects continue to work well,
especially on the so called Palestinian Authority, the official
designation under the Declaration of Principles. The PA , an apparently
proto-government body, lost all legitimacy for Palestinians once it turned
into a tool subsidized and managed by the owners of the political
entertainment industry. These are the Quartet, the United Nations, the
United States, the European Union and Russia.

In 1993, all smiles, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin embraced
in the White House rose garden while an ecstatic world applauded the scene
thanks to another visual effect popularized by CNN. "Take part directly in
historic events! Be part of history!" The appearances and the special
effects substituted for peace, because, without justice, peace is out of
reach. On the other hand, if justice were done the appearances and special
effects would be redundant.

The process is completed with endless conversations between political
leaders , bulky studies by analysts and experts and a plethora of NGO-run
projects. All this is paid for by the same people who organize the rest of
the show. Nobody remembers the players who refused to participate in the
Oslo Process and criticized the change of course in the Palestinian cause.

Abdel Shafi and Edward Said among others. They were lucky. Others who
dared criticize the PA shortly after its establishment in Palestine got to
know personally the prisons built with money from the Quartet in order to
oppress the Palestinian population suffering under the Israeli
Occupation. Intellectuals, activists and resisters in general have suffered repression
and punishment for opposing the Peace Process.

While it is true they have been marginalized by the international news
media, they can consider themselves fortunate, since members of Hamas or
of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and other resistance
organizations are either dead or else in Israeli jails by the thousand.
They think the conversations are a childish diversion and so continue to
struggle against the Israeli Occupation.

The public in 2010 behaves the same as in previous years. Despite being
somewhat jaded after almost two decades of Peace Process, they will pay
again to see the show for the umpteenth time. The media are trumpeting a
dazzling presentation "A Palestinian State within the year!" "Nobel Peace
Prize winner Obama set on Peace to show regional policy success!"
"Moratinos optimistic, confident talks will work out, rebuilding hopes for
Peace!"

While the world watches this newsreel of the conversations unwind, in
Palestine the deaths pile up, the number of refugees grows and the State
of Palestine promised in 1947 shrinks all the time. In any case it has
been occupied by Israel from the start.

Translated by toni solo, activist living and working in Nicaragua