After decades of subterfuge in which Israel agreed to stop building settlements, i.e., stop colonizing Palestinian lands, and then proceeded to do so, the Palestinians have just had enough.
Abbas insists on settlement freeze
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, has called on Israel to freeze all settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem so that stalled peace talks between the two sides can resume.
Speaking at the UN General Assembly on Friday in New York, Abbas insisted the move was necessary in order to “salvage” the Middle East peace process.
Abbas said that Israel’s continued building of settlements “will undermine the goal of establishing a geographically contiguous Palestinian state”.
“How is it conceivable that negotiations can be held on borders and Jerusalem when Israeli bulldozers are working to change the reality on the ground with the aim of creating a new reality and imposing borders as Israel desires?
Well after the deceptions of Oslo, Camp David/Taba, and the Bush Road Map, none of which stopped Israeli building on Palestinian land, who can blame the Palestinians.
Even the puppets wont accept it. Just imagine how any normal palestinian feels.
What is Abbas going on about a contiguos palestinian state for anyway. The Gaza concentration camp and the west bank arent even connected or is he just refering to the west bank that he and Dahlan can currently control with a bunch of death, torture and intimidation and support of the Israeli military?
The rise of Palestinian turncoats is an apparent concession to Israeli propaganda that successfully cast the Palestinians as terrorists and Israelis as the victim after the second Intifada, a complete twist of the reality. But they received considerable help in this by the Bush administration, whose Neocon State department was allowed to be run from Jerusalem. After 2006, Hamas which won the Palestinian election became the bete noire, a radical Islamic terrorist organization like Al Qaeda. Hamas was ripe to be the next victim of Israeli-American propaganda, even though only 20% of Palestinians are supporters of the organization.
Personally, I was happy to hear Obama follow Bush and talk about a ‘continguous’ Palestinian state, simply because it is a code word for settlement withdrawal. But we have not heard about borders: about whether this Palestinian state will have its own borders abut Jordan, or whether this contiguous state will lie within the Greater Israel Likud is moving toward, and thus be a large bantustan controlled by Israel.
“How is it conceivable that negotiations can be held on borders and Jerusalem when Israeli bulldozers are working to change the reality on the ground with the aim of creating a new reality and imposing borders as Israel desires?“
My goodness, what is an expansionist, increasingly fascist entity to do in the face of this kind of intransigence from the Palestinians?
Eventually, we will get the same old conclusion, and it may actually come from Obama: the Palestinians refused another “generous offer.” When will they learn, always missing opportunities?