We now have word that Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East
Quartet  (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), and German
Chancellor Angela Merkel intend to organize yet another peace
conference, this time in Berlin in June. It is hard to believe that
after the long string of failed peace initiatives, stretching back at
least to the Madrid conference of 1991, statesmen and stateswomen are
recycling these failures without seemingly having a clue as to why the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is even more hopeless today than before
these peace exercises first got underway.{josquote}But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to the
conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and fragmentation
of Palestinian lands that even a child understands makes Palestinian
statehood impossible.{/josquote}

The scandal of the international community’s impotence in resolving one
of history’s longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is
but does not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with
it. The next peace conference in Germany (or in Moscow, where the
Russians want to hold it) will suffer from the same gutlessness that
has marked all previous efforts. It will deal with everything except
the problem primarily responsible for this conflict’s multi-generational impasse.

That problem is that for all of the sins attributable to
the Palestinians – and they are legion, including inept and corrupt
leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of
the rejectionist groups-there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign
Palestinian state primarily because Israel’s various governments, from
1967 until today, have never intended allowing such a state to come
into being.

 It is one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a
Palestinian state until certain Israeli security concerns were dealt
with. But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to
the conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and
fragmentation of Palestinian lands that even a child understands
makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

Given the overwhelming disproportion of power between the occupier
and the occupied, it is hardly surprising that Israeli governments
and their military and security establishments found it difficult to
resist the acquisition of Palestinian land. What is astounding is that
the international community, pretending to believe Israel’s claim that
it is the victim and its occupied subjects the aggressors, has
allowed this devastating dispossession to continue and the law of the
jungle to prevail.

As long as Israel knows that by delaying the peace process it buys time
to create facts on the ground that will prove irreversible, and that
the international community  will continue to indulge Israel’s pretense
that its desire for a two-state solution is being frustrated by the
Palestinians, no new peace initiative can succeed, and the
dispossession of the Palestinian people will indeed become irreversible.

There can be no greater delusion on the part of Western countries
weighed down by guilt about the Holocaust than the belief that
accommodating
such an outcome would be an act of friendship to the Jewish people. The
abandonment of the Palestinians now is surely not an atonement for the
abandonment of European Jewry seventy years ago, nor will it serve the
security of the State of Israel and its people.

 John Vinocur of the New York Times recently suggested that the
virtually unqualified declarations of support for Israel by Merkel and
French
President Nicolas Sarkozy are “at a minimum an attempt to seek Israeli
moderation by means of public assurances with this tacit subtext:
these days, the European Union is not, or is no longer, its  reflexive
antagonist.” But the expectation that uncritical Western  support
of Israel would lead to greater Israeli moderation and
greater willingness to take risks for peace is blatantly contradicted
by the conflict’s history.

Time and again, this history has shown that the less opposition
Israel encounters from its friends in the West for its dispossession of
the Palestinians,
the more uncompromising its behavior. Indeed, Olmert’s reaction to
Sarkozy’s and Merkel’s expressions of eternal solidarity and friendship
have had exactly that result: Olmert approved massive new construction
in East Jerusalem- authorizing housing projects that were frozen
for years by previous governments because of their destructive impact
on the possibility of a peace agreement-as well as continued expansion
of Israel’s settlements. And Olmert’s defense minister, Ehud Barak,
declared shortly after Merkel’s departure that he will remove only a
token number of the more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks that
Israel has repeatedly promised, and just as repeatedly failed, to
dismantle.
 
That announcement shattered whatever hope
Palestinians may have had for recovery of their economy as a
consequence of the seven billion dollars in new aid promised by the
international donor community in Paris last December. In these
circumstances, the donor countries, not to speak of the private sector,
will not pour good money after bad, as they so often have in the past.

 So what is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or
clever adjustments to previous peace formulations, but the moral and
political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the
peace process has been turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence
must
be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But
is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel’s
occupation-maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades,
helicopter gunships, jet fighter planes, targeted assassinations and
military incursions, not to speak of the  massive theft of Palestinian
lands-is not itself an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence
against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to
renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?

 Israel’s designs on the West Bank are not much different than the
designs
of the Arab forces that attacked the Jewish state in 1948 –
the nullification of the international community’s partition resolution
of 1947. Short of addressing the problem by its right
name-something that is of an entirely different order than hollow
statements that “settlements do not advance peace”-and taking effective
collective action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what
began as a noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace
conferences, no
matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one
of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of  international
diplomacy. 

* Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New
York, is research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East
Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Siegman is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress
and of the Synagogue Council of America.