By Nicola Nasser**
A surplus of mediators have been around all the time,
including the heavy weight Quartet of the UN, U.S., EU and Russia, as well as
heaps of terms of reference of UNSC resolutions, bilateral signed accords and
"roadmaps," in addition to marathon bilateral talks that have left no stone
unearthed, international as well as regional conferences were never on demand
to facilitate the "peace process," which has been lavishly financed to keep
moving.
However the Palestinian -- Israeli peace-making is still
elusive as ever as Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" has been, without a
glimpse of light at the end of the endless tunnel of Israeli military
occupation of Palestinian territory and people.
Palestinian -- Israeli peace-making has
been for all practical reasons on hold since 2000, and bilateral peace contacts
have been dormant since Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 2009
except for a failed five-round "exploratory" talks hosted by
The latest indirect exchange of letters
between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and PM Netanyahu and the joint
statement issued by their corriers pledging mutual commitment to peace are no
less misleading: "No peace No War" is still the name of the only game in town,
which is in fact the ideal prescription for the implosion or explosion of an
unsustainable status quo in the Israeli -- occupied Palestinian territories.
And the almost twenty-year old U.S.-led and EU-financed
"peace process" is still a non-starter for any feasible, credible or
sustainable peace-making in any foreseeable future.
Failure of the "peace process" to deliver is proof enough
that it is inherently infertile, but most importantly it is proof enough that
there has never been any serious mediation, or the mediators themselves were
only either managing a process instead of trying to solve a conflict, were
unqualified, or the parameters of their approach were the wrong ones.
The end result however is that all mediators have failed
and it is the time to acknowledge their failure and to make room for other
options, like sending back the file of the Palestinian -- Israeli conflict to
the United Nations, which was responsible for creating the conflict in the
first place when the UN General Assembly adopted the non-binding resolution No.
181 for partitioning Palestine in 1947, which triggered a series of Arab --
Israeli wars, thus undermining its own main mission as the organization created
for the sole purpose of maintaining world peace.
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