RUTHFULLY YOURS

It could be a comedy Broadway play if the consequences weren’t so serious, but it’s increasingly obvious that everybody involved in the so-called Mideast “peace process” — with the possible exception of the Obama administration — does not really want to change the status quo.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu (AP)

The comedy began in September with a laugh line by former Sen. George Mitchell, who is President Obama’s envoy to the Mideast, who told reporters that new negotiations were starting with the goal to end the Middle East conflict “for all time.”

The background to this hilarity was that Israel’s 10 month moratorium on new West Bank settlements was about to expire on September 26. So the Administration rushed together a meeting of the parties in Washington on September 2, to get the ball rolling on ending the Mideast conflict for all time.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas said that the peace talks would cease unless Israel agreed to extend the moratorium, but by mid-September Abbas was playing the straight man to groups of Jewish settlers who promised to “declare war” on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he tried to extend the moratorium, according to the Jerusalem Post. Next thing you know, Haaretz was saying that U.S. diplomats were “concerned” that the Mideast peace talks were about to collapse.

In the next scene, Abbas took center stage, as September 26 came and went, with Netanyahu saying that the moratorium would not be extended. As the Americans were frantically running around to compromise, Abbas said, “I cannot go on ruling, and I need to rest; I’m at the age where I can’t continue to lead.” On a plane trip, he said to a reporter, “This is the last time you are traveling with me,” implying that he was about to resign.

And then Abbas said that he will “make historic decisions” during the meeting of the Arab League that would come on the following Monday, a week after the moratorium ended.

Well, then Monday came, and the Arab League meeting was postponed two days until Wednesday at Egypt’s request, to give the US Administration a chance to work a compromise.

Then the Arab League meeting was postponed until Friday.

Then Friday came, and everyone waited for Abbas’ announcement of a historic decision and … nothing! There was no news of any announcement by Abbas. In fact, there was almost no news at all. There were just a few leaks that some Arab leaders wanted the peace talks to continue and others wanted the peace talks to fail.

One could barely recover from the laughter, when a whole new scene began.

Abbas warned that there would be a rise of extremism if the peace talks collapse. Then the Palestinian leadership threatened to request from the United Nations an international mandate to create a Palestinian state, based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Then the Palestinians’ lead negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said that the Palestinians had not abandoned the peace process, and would give the Obama administration time to bring about a compromise solution.

This weekend, a whole new act in this comedy began, as Obama has made what Haaretz calls an offer that Netanyahu cannot refuse.

The Administration has offered Israel a whole list of goodies, in exchange for resuming the settlement moratorium for just three months.

One set of goodies was a delight to the top officers in Israel’s military: A free squadron of 20 F-35 stealth fighter jets worth $2.75 billion, according to the Jerusalem Post.

The second set of goodies is a promise to veto anti-Israel proposals raised in the U.N. Security Council during the next year, including the above mentioned proposal to seek an international mandate for a Palestinian state.

However, the proposal may be dead already. The LA Times reports that Netanyahu presented the proposal to his cabinet on Sunday without taking a vote, for fear that the proposal would be rejected.

The objections may be even stronger on the Palestinian side. There’s a 90-day settlement moratorium included within the proposal, and the moratorium would apply to the West Bank. But it turns out that the moratorium would not apply to East Jerusalem, a particular demand of the Palestinians.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat reacted harshly to this. According to Haaretz, Erekat told Al-Jazeera tv that the moratorium must be extended to East Jerusalem, and he repeated his threat to ask the United Nations for a mandate. However, a final decision won’t be made until — wait for it! — the next Arab League meeting.

We’ll have to wait until tomorrow or the next day to see the next scene of this comedy, but it’s all quite remarkable. We live in a time where the world goes to extraordinary lengths to keep things from changing. Whether it’s a proposal for hundreds of billions of dollars in quantitative easing, or a proposal to continue meaningless peace talks, today’s politicians have a remarkable ability to “kick the can down the road,” to apply a palliative to problems that will only allow them to get worse.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, nothing has changed in the Mideast since I made my first major prediction on this subject in 2003. (See “”Mideast Roadmap – Will it bring peace?””) There is no chance of a lasting peace deal because Arabs and Jews will be re-fighting the genocidal war that they fought in 1948, after the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel.

It’s really hard to believe that there’s anyone left who thinks that a peace agreement leading to a two-state Mideast solution is conceivable at all, let alone in 90 days. What’s most likely is that all the parties to the Mideast negotiations are fully aware that the Mideast is headed inexorably for war, and each one wants to position himself so he can’t be blamed.