‘Due to Israel’s intransigence’

It is no longer a secret that the United States’ Secretary of State John Kerry had managed to win a commitment from Arab foreign ministers to have their countries recognise Israel as a Jewish state when the Palestinians reach a final peace accord with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu within the framework of the US peace mediation efforts.

But the suspension of negotiations on the April 29, 2014, made Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas talk to Arab capitals out of that commitment made to Kerry.

This move by the Palestinians is a micro-indicator of how the whole region is in a no peace-no war situation due to Israel’s intransigence to its policy on settlements.

Such limbo prompted former US president Jimmy Carter to write a long article last week, condemning both Israelis and Palestinians for not moving forward to secure a comprehensive peace in their region while the only super power, the US, is fully committed, through its secretary of state, to help financially and politically to establish a new Middle East without wars or violence.

Carter, who had the political vision and ideological zeal to persuade Israel and Egypt to sign, in 1979, the first peace treaty that paved the road to more initiatives, including the Oslo accords between the Palestinians and the Israelis in 1993, and the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty in 1994, expressed his frustration last week with what happened between Palestinians and Israelis, writing: “During the previous nine months of negotiations, 14,000 new Israeli settlement units were approved, more than 3,000 Palestinians were arrested and 50 were killed, provoking troubling examples of Palestinian retaliation, including the deaths of three Israelis.”

Former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, following his participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991, challenged by a Zionist journalist that he would give concessions on Jerusalem, said that “I could drag the Palestinians into a negotiation process that would last for tens of years”.

It is the same stratagem that the Israeli negotiation team is using at the moment.

The question remains valid: What more is required of the Palestinians?

Abbas has entrusted to Washington the total security of the future Palestinian state, including airspace and land access. He abided by all the proposals suggested by Gen. John Allen, the retired US commander in Kabul.

He renounced any role for the future Palestinian state in the custodianship of Islamic holy shrines, or Christian ones, including Al Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

In case Abbas reaches that moment of infernal desperation, he might dismantle the Palestine Liberation Organisation structures and might leave to Israel the challenge of governing 2.5 million Arabs, including pro-Iran jihadists, salafist suicide professionals and many Hizbollah fighters advancing from their newly acquired bases in the Syrian Golan Heights.

In that case, “Israel as a Jewish state” will be only a hallucinatory pipe dream.