Annapolis

The Annapolis meeting last Tuesday had its strengths and weaknesses. Its major strength was the restarting of peace negotiations, which hopefully will pick up right where talks in Taba, Egypt left off in January 2001, when the disastrous elections of Bush and Sharon put an end to them. At that point, negotiations were very close to a peace agreement, and Arafat begged for their continuation, but to no avail. Since then, the incrementalism of the "road map" plan has, of course, been fatally flawed. (See previous blog "The Road Map" 1/13/06.)

Before there can be any incentive to end anti-occupation resistance and violence, there must be an agreed upon final solution. Thus, the new Annapolis plan fortunately has final status talks running parallel with the so-called confidence-building measures of the road map, such as cessation of settlement expansion and violence. The second strength of the Annapolis plan is the insertion of American monitors to investigate and report on the progress or lack thereof of the confidence-building measures. Third, the inclusion of so many countries at Annapolis was a strength, but the exclusion of Iran and Hamas was a weakness.

Considering the fact that the US had encouraged Palestinian democratic elections, it was wrong to fail to recognize their fairly elected government, especially after Saudi Arabia had helped form a unity Fatah/Hamas government. It is even worse for the US to arm Fatah so as to foment civil war among Palestinians. Of course we know that fomenting Muslim vs Muslim wars is longstanding Zionist policy. (See previous blog "Muslim vs Muslim Wars" 6/4/07.)

Indeed, the major weakness of Annapolis was the fact that the Israel Lobby falsely publicized it as a gathering of the enemies of Iran and even falsely implied that current fear of Iran is the only reason Arab states are now interested in Israeli-Palestinian peace. This ignores the fact that the Arab League Peace Plan has been on the table since 2002 when it was endorsed by all Arab leaders, including Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Certainly the Fear-Of-Iran card will be used, hopefully unsuccessfully, in an attempt to bully the Arab states into downsizing their plan, whittling down the size of the Palestinian state to suit the greedy Israelis. Most important, it is chilling to think that the Annapolis meeting represented an attempt to build another "coalition of the willing," this time for an invasion of Iran.