Abbas is really in a stalemate. The US has blocked forming a unity government with Hamas that could allow elections that Abbas could lose and retire. My guess is that would be Abbas' preference. The US blocked that though by threatening to cut US payments to the Palestinians. It blocked it because the US does not want there to be a dynamic political process in Palestine preferring instead for predictable uninspired leadership from its chosen leaders.
When a new Egypt emerges, we will see how it handles Gaza and the Palestinians. It is impossible to predict specific policies yet but it can have a huge impact there.
Until then, Abbas' objective is to seem as if he is being active while not being active.
The entire purpose of the peace process is to reconcile the fact that the United States does not think of itself as a colonial power with the fact that the United States is holding over 100 million Arabs in a US/Zionist colonial structure. How it works is that as long as there is a peace process, Americans tell themselves that the colonial dictatorships of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others are a temporary situation that will be resolved as soon as Israel and the Palestinians agree to a two state solution.
Valid Arab observations that during this supposed peace process, Israel has been expanding its control of the occupied territory and making it more to build a non-laughable Palestinian territory in the rest led the US to request that Israel stop expanding its occupation.
Israel's leadership, especially the right-wing of its political system does not have to lie. Israel is perfectly comfortable with the United States paying to constrain hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims in Israel's region indefinitely. Preferably forever. Israel never had an incentive to make any concessions just so US policymakers could continue with their fantasy that a resolution is imminent that will not require the current trillion dollar expenditures on Israel's behalf.
And that's where we are. Israel's leaders have said to the US: "Oh well. I guess you're going to have to subordinate the region for us forever."
US leaders do not have a response. The region is in a stalemate that will eventually be broken by countries in the region leaving the US/Zionist colonial structure. Egypt really may exit this year. Saudi Arabia would hopefully follow afterwards. Once the US/Zionist colonial structure collapses, Israel will no longer be viable and will negotiate a relatively graceful end to Zionism as we saw in Apartheid's end.
Until that time Abbas will be pretending to make progress without anything changing. More for the US than for anyone else. I've read that Barack Obama is clever regarding topics he cares about, which do not include foreign policy. On foreign policy he is happy to take whatever advice is offered that will not interfere with his domestic priorities.
When he said "sometimes our short term interests will not perfectly align with our long term vision", he left out that his short term interests are his long term vision. But he may really not realize this.
1 comment:
Arnold, please, have NO illusions about so-called Zionist "left' believe me, they are NOT better than "right". They are all racists and colonizers.
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