Peace Without Justice

[Violet_Crumble]

by Robert Fisk
February 11, 2005
The Independent

So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centres. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out "targeted killings" - ie: murders - of Israeli military leaders.

The Palestinians have promised to end all "acts of violence" against Israelis while Israel has promised to end all "military activity" against Palestinians. So that's it, then. Peace in our time.

A Martian - even a well-educated Martian - would have gathered that this was the message, supposing he dropped in on the fantasy world of Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday. The Palestinians had been committing "violence", the Israelis carrying out "innocent" operations. Palestinian "violence" or "terror and violence" - the latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 11 September 2001 - was now at an end. Mahmoud Abbas - who told a close Lebanese friend this year that he wore a suit and tie so that he would look "different" to Yasser Arafat - went along with all this. Just which people were occupying the homes of which other people remained a mystery.

Silver-haired and wisdom-burdened, Mahmoud Abbas looked the part. We had to forget that it was this same Abbas who wrote the Oslo Accords, who in 1,000 pages failed to use - even once - the word "occupation", and who talked not of Israeli "withdrawal" from Palestinian territory, but of "redeployment".

At no point yesterday did anyone mention occupation. Like sex, "occupation" had to be censored out of the historical narrative. As usual - as in Oslo - the real issues were put back to a later date. Refugees, the "right of return", East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital: let's deal with them later. Never before have we been in such need of the caustic voice of the late Edward Said. Settlements - Jewish colonies for Jews, and Jews only, on Arab land - were not, of course, discussed yesterday. Nor was East Jerusalem. Nor was the "right of return" of 1948 refugees. These are the "unrealistic dreams" that were referred to by the Israelis yesterday.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=7218

[mike_c]

1. there is no peace without justice....

I suspect this is only a lull, while both sides reconsider their alternatives. It's hard to see how the Palestinians have gained anything other than some breathing space from this truce-- they've agreed to stop all direct struggle against oppression, while Israel has agreed-- conditionally-- only to change their tactics of oppression. I don't expect this to last.

[Jim Sagle]

2. Gee, what positivity.

[Rhiannon12866]

3. With Rice now the "point man" on this, it sounds to me like just more of

The same lack of commitment to make the slightest effort to truly become engaged and work to end this horrific conflict. The fact that Rice's views on everything are aligned 100% with those of Bush* does not bode well for any progress being made and this sounds like just one more symbolic visit, made to look as something is being done, while really nothing is being done at all. Like Bush*'s abandoned and forgotten "road map," and the Oslo Accords before it, no agreements have been made, no plan of action put in place, no summits scheduled.

Since Bill Clinton left office, the U.S. has refused to live up to any promises made or any commitment to move this process forward. Instead, Bush* chose to pursue his own pressing agenda to invade and "bring democracy" to Iraq. But the "hard work" that needs to be done here is put off, once again, for another day. Meanwhile, more people in this region continue to die.

"All this will be discussed "later" - as they were supposed to be in Abbas's hopeless Oslo agreement. As long as you can postpone the real causes of war, that's OK. "An end to violence," that has cost 4,000 deaths - it was all said yesterday, minus the all-important equation that two-thirds of these were Palestinian lives. Peace, peace, peace. It was like terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It was the sort of stuff you could buy off a supermarket shelf. If only."

edited for typo

[cantwealljustgetalong]

4. no justice without democracy...

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