Entrenched power kills peace

Excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

“Future historians will no doubt argue over the precise moment when the Arab-Israeli peace process died,” writes former CIA chief Robert Grenier this week at Al Jazeera English.

They will debate “when the last glimmer of hope for a two-state solution was irrevocably extinguished.”

Some of the deeply entrenched obstructions Grenier outlines in “Endgame for the peace process.”

“The edifice [of U.S. military, intelligence, economic and diplomatic support to Israel, painstakingly constructed over many decades] is so extensive that no single entity in Washington is aware of all of it.” It includes but is not limited to —

Direct military aid
Weapons transfers
Access to U.S. emergency weapons stocks
Pre-positioning of U.S. military materiel in Israel
U.S. investments in Israeli technology development
U.S. support for Israel’s foreign weapons sales
Weapons co-production agreements
All sorts of loan guarantees
Assistance for settlement of immigrants in Israel

The annual value of all this [much more secret, classified] is incalculable — well in excess of the $3 billion per year usually cited; to say nothing of critical U.S. diplomatic support in the UN and elsewhere. The U.S. is [therefore] hard-pressed to come up with more inducements that might advance the peace process.

In a recent verbal agreement between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in New York, to be presented in writing for possible approval by the Israeli cabinet, Grenier writes, “We are told” the agreement includes —

A U.S. commitment to block any Palestinian-led effort to win unilateral UN recognition of a Palestinian state

U.S. obstruction of efforts — either to revive the Goldstone Report at the UN, or to seek formal UN condemnation of Israel for the deadly Mavi Marmara incident

An ongoing U.S. commitment to defeat any UN resolutions aimed at raising Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear weapons program before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Vigorous U.S. diplomatic efforts to counter all attempts to ‘delegitimize’ Israel in various world forums and; most importantly —

Increasing efforts to further ratchet international sanctions on both Iran and Syria concerning their respective nuclear and proliferation efforts

Added are these —

A U.S. commitment to supply Israel with 20 ultra-modern F-35 aircraft, so new they have not yet entered the U.S. inventory, worth $3 billion; and

A mysterious ‘comprehensive security agreement’ whose details have not been revealed, but which may include unilateral U.S. endorsement of Israeli troop deployments in the Jordan Valley, in the event of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

Israel in return will —

Consider agreeing to a brief, one-time-only 90-day extension of the partial settlement moratorium —excluding not only East Jerusalem, but also the cordon sanitaire of settlements Israel has carefully constructed to ring the city and deny Palestinian access to it.

The U.S. then “agrees, in writing, never again to request an Israeli settlement moratorium.…

“Both Israelis and Palestinians know that the relative calm prevailing in the West Bank and Gaza cannot last indefinitely absent some prospect for an end to Israeli occupation of the former.”

Grenier concludes, “No one can see the way to a near-term solution, and yet neither does anyone yet have the courage to suggest an alternative future. That will be the task of a new and probably distant generation of Israelis and Palestinians.”

Sources and notes
“The endgame for the peace process — Future historians will argue over the precise moment when the Arab-Israeli peace process died” by Robert Grenier, November 21, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/2010/11/20101120114435124111.html

Robert Grenier was the CIA’s chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of the CIA's counter-terrorism center.

Cordon sanitaire: cor•don sa•ni•taire \kȯr-"dōn-sä-nē-'ter\ n [F, lit., sanitary cordon (quarantine line) (1920) : a protective barrier (as of buffer states) against a potentially aggressive nation or a dangerous influence (as an ideology) [Britannica: Merriam Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus]

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