A Unionist and a Catholic…well, it takes all kinds. I’ll try not to hold your politics against you.

seriously, it really doesn’t make a rat’s ass worth of difference whether we “talk to” Hamas, or whatever. until they and the rest of the muslim world give up their goal of completely eliminating israel, nothing will improve there.

However we digress, (by the way I am one of those strange Unionist Catholics). Ireland and SA are “solved” and time moves on. They now face their own difficulties, which are just as large. Israel is more difficult and not because of Israel. It will take the support and encouragement of American politicians to deliver Israel to a negotiated settlement. The last 8 years have made the situation worse not better as the Middle East is far more unstable.

Republicans kicked up a general hatred of Arab Muslims and continued to play that during the election “We send lots of our money to Countries that do not like us very much”. There are an awful lot of Americans who think we are still at War with Iraq and if they have changed their mind on who was behind 9/11 they would now say Iran. They think Gaza s an independent State able to cause significant damage to Israel. They do not realise the Gaza Strip is nothing more than a large open prison.

With an unstable Middle East, Israel is likely to go further to the right. That will not exactly help peace efforts.

I know some might quibble, but I think he lacks a certain repsect and sensitivity to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

GAZA is a crate, a virtual concentration camp, civilains (perhaps) fired upon, deliberately, as part of strategy.

Mitchell, like most in the US government, fails to understand the impact.

In fact, settlement expansion has been the conscious policy of every Israeli government since 1967 — Labor, Likud, and Kadima alike. If you don’t believe me, just read Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar’s Lords of the Land; Gershom Gorenberg’s Accidental Empire, Neve Gordon’s Israel’s Occupation, or retired IDF general Shlomo Gazit’s Trapped Fools. Thus far, Ehud Barak is the only Israeli leader to make a serious effort to negotiate a two-state solution, and even his best offer at Camp David fell well short of a viable two-state proposal.

And when Oslo collapsed, Friedman’s columns helped spread the false claim that PLO leader Yasser Arafat had turned down a great deal and was solely responsible for the failure, a myth that undermined the peace camp in Israel and reinforced the political dynamics that Friedman now blames for the current impasse.
Friedman also fails to mention the role that the United States has played in bringing this situation about. What was the United States doing while all those settlers were moving into the West Bank? The answer: we were helping pay for it, by continuing to give Israel billions of dollars of aid each year.

Of course U.S. officials told the Israeli government that it couldn’t spend our aid in the West Bank, but money is fungible and generous U.S. support inevitably freed up resources that Israel could then spend spend on the settlements, on the land-grabbing separation fence, or on the IDF forces assigned to protect the settlers themselves.

Although it was the official policy of every President since Lyndon Johnson to oppose the construction of settlements, none of them put any serious pressure on Israel to stop. The first President Bush briefly withheld some loan guarantees in 1992 over this issue, but the guarantees were authorized a few months later and settlement construction continued apace.

The number of settlers more than doubled during the Oslo period (1993-2001), yet former U.S. negotiator Aaron David Miller recently reported that:

In 25 years of working on this issue for six secretaries of state, I can’t recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity — including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions — does to the peacemaking process.”

Israel has added another 70,000 settlers since 2001, and the Bush administration never took any serious action to stop them. The question you might ask yourself is: why not?

[Thomas] Friedman is right that Palestinian rejectionists are a big problem too. The difference is that the United States has never hesitated to turn the screws on them. Persistent U.S. pressure helped persuade Arafat and the PLO to recognize Israel, which paved the way for the Oslo Accords in 1993. Back then, Hamas had only about 15 percent support in the Palestinian community.

Unfortunately, the Oslo process failed to deliver a Palestinian state and the combination of Fatah’s corruption and Israel’s ever-expanding occupation made Hamas more and more popular over time. So when the United States insisted on elections in 2006, Hamas ended up winning.

Then Washington refused to recognize their victory and Israel imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza. The United States actively worked to destroy the Palestinian unity government and foolishly tried to sponsor a Fatah coup in Gaza, only to have Hamas move first and rout the Fatah forces, thereby solidifying its position.

The recent Israeli assault on Gaza — which the Bush administration backed and Congress voted overwhelmingly to endorse — has deepened these divisions even more.

To a considerable extent, therefore, the situation that [Thomas] Friedman now deplores is of our own making.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/01/26/its_easier_than_tom_friedman_thinks_a_realistic_middle_east_strategy

I question Obama’s commitment to a change in foreign policy because of Rahm Emmanuel and Dennis Ross–neither of whom engender confidence in any real change with regard to the Middle East. I hope that Obama will prove me wrong; I just doubt that he will. And, sadly, I do not think that even George Mitchell can create progress in the context of Netanyahu as Israeli leader. That will take some serious “tough love” and Obama’s shown himself to be quite adept at slippery expedience and avoidance of taking a stand anywhere.

I agree.

At this point, nothing will get done until the greater motivations of the Israeli neocons are recognized, and addressed.

Perhaps they’re not really interested in peace.

Sometimes, it’s my impression Israel is delibreatly creating problems, perhaps a part of a greater, misguided agenda. (I try to look at Israel military actions since it’s inception, part of determining pattern).

If that is true, it must be defined, and within the context of the ME, addressed.

THEN they can worry about Hamas.

Another problem I see with some of the American diplomats is a mistaken sense Palestine represents a type of second class peoples. This must be eradicated before any truly progressive talks can occur, bais must be accounted for to produce workable, long term policy.

Mitchell knows what conflict resolution is all about; he’s not an investigator, he’s a diplomat–and a damn good one.