By David Singer ——Bio and Archives--March 15, 2012
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"But to this moment, that has not happened, The earliest feasible date to organize an election would be after June”A Hamas-Fatah agreement signed in Cairo last year was supposed to have led to an interim government that would govern both Gaza and the West Bank until elections took place. This has yet to materialise. Islamic Jihad's Secretary-General - Ramadan Abdullah Shallah - has lamented on the continuing differences of opinion between Hamas and Fatah that have prevented the implementation of any deal:
"Each side has its defense and pretexts, but the loser is our people because its interests are being ignored ... “Regrettably those interests have been ignored for the last 75 years since the Peel Committee first recommended the partition of Palestine into an Arab State and a Jewish State. Meanwhile American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - speaking in New York after a meeting of the impotent Quartet - America, Russia, The European Union and the United Nations - could only repeat the following tired mantra repeatedly invoked by President Obama:
“President Obama and I have been consistent in our belief that the Palestinian people – like their Arab neighbors, Israelis, and all people – deserve dignity, liberty and the right to decide their own futures. They deserve a viable,independent Palestine,alongside a secure Israel.”Clearly the idea of creating such a new Arab state between Israel and Jordan for the first time in recorded history - and the threats any such state would pose to Israel’s security - has become passé. This solution - which may have looked attractive when recycled in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords - has been fatally impacted by events in the region and in Iran during the past twelve months - not to mention the 200 rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli civilian population centres this past week. Even if Hamas and Fatah were to miraculously embrace in a genuine show of fraternal respect - how could Israel be expected to deal with any Government in which Hamas is a member - when Haniyeh openly declared on 14 December last:
“Today, we say, in a clear and unambiguous fashion: The armed resistance and armed struggle are our strategic choice and our path to liberate the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River, and to drive the usurping invaders out of the blessed land of Palestine.”This battle cry is overshadowed by Fatah and the PLO’s more strident demand - that Jordan be included in the Palestinian Arab State it seeks to create. Time waits for no man - and in the case of the Palestinian Arabs they have spurned many opportunities to gain for themselves - in the West Bank and Gaza - a second independent and exclusively Arab state in former Palestine - in addition to Jordan - in
“The Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as we have known it since the 1993 signing of the Oslo accords, essentially died more than three years ago with the demise of the final status talks between then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas”Continuing to pretend there is any life left in the Oslo Accords and President Bush’s 2002 Roadmap is the height of folly and recklessness. Believing it can ever be implemented is with respect - gross stupidity. Maybe President Obama might find it easier to adopt a new mantra based on the following remark recently made by an apparently intelligent 18-year-old girl from Ramallah - who told the person interviewing her for a scholarship to a college in America:
“... the [Jewish] “settlers” [in the West Bank] are really refugees. They, too, are returning to their ancestral homelands. It wouldn’t be fair to tell them to leave.”Maybe there is a message for President Obama in these few well chosen words - stop engaging in fiction - come back into the real world - and face the following facts:
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David Singer is an Australian Lawyer, a Foundation Member of the International Analyst Network and Convenor of Jordan is Palestine International—an organization calling for sovereignty of the West Bank and Gaza to be allocated between Israel and Jordan as the two successor States to the Mandate for Palestine. Previous articles written by him can be found at: jordanispalestine.blogspot.com