By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — For much of her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been less an architect than an advocate for the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. With the resumption of direct talks last week, she now has no choice but to plunge into the rough and tumble of peacemaking.

Mrs. Clinton will be in the thick of the negotiations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, when they meet on Sept. 14 in Egypt. Her role, several officials say, will be to take over from the administration’s special envoy, George J. Mitchell, when the two sides run into serious obstacles.

It may prove the greatest test yet for Mrs. Clinton, one that could cement her legacy as a diplomat if she solves the riddle that foiled even her husband, former President Bill Clinton. But it could also pose considerable risks to any political ambitions she may harbor.

“I understand very well the disappointments of the past; I share them,” she said in convening the talks, an allusion to Mr. Clinton’s failed effort to broker a deal, most vividly at Camp David in 2000, when peace seemed tantalizingly close only to vanish amid recriminations in the Maryland mountains.

The tableau of Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas chatting amiably Thursday in front of the marble fireplace in her office, officials said, testified to her relentless phone calls in recent weeks as she wore down the reluctance of the Palestinians to come to the table and drummed up support from Arab neighbors like Jordan and Egypt.

Obama Has Signalled His Coming Complete Surrender
To Zionism And Its Lobby

By Alan Hart

04 September, 2010
Alanhart.net

He did it with seven words. “Ultimately the U.S. cannot impose a solution.”  [The infamous seven words]

Today there is a growing number of seriously well informed people of all faiths and none (including me) who believe there will only be peace if it is imposed.

Among those who have dared to say so in public is one of the most eminent Jewish gentlemen of our time, Henry Siegman. A former national director of the American Jewish Congress, he is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, which was part of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 until 2006 when it was established as an independent policy institute peace process. In a comment piece for the Financial Times on 23 February 2010, (quoted in Conflict Without End? the Epilogue to Volume 3 of the American edition of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews), he wrote this:

“The Middle East peace process and its quest for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that got under way nearly 20 years ago with the Oslo accords has undergone two fundamental transformations. It is now on the brink of a third.

“The first was the crossing of a threshold by Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank; there is no longer any prospect of its removal by this or any future Israeli government, which was the precise goal of the settlements’ relentless expansion all along. The previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who declared that a peace accord requires Israel to withdraw ‘from most, if not all’ of the occupied territories, ‘including East Jerusalem,’ was unable even to remove any of the 20 hilltop outposts Israel had solemnly promised to dismantle.

“A two-state solution could therefore come about only if Israel were compelled to withdraw to the pre-1967 border by an outside power whose wishes an Israeli government could not defy – the US. The assumption has always been that at the point where Israel’s colonial ambitions collide with critical US national interests, an American president would draw on the massive credit the US has accumulated with Israel to insist it dismantle its illegal settlements, which successive US administrations held to be the main obstacle to a peace accord.

“The second transformation resulted from the shattering of that assumption when President Barack Obama – who took a more forceful stand against Israel’s settlements than any of his predecessors, and did so at a time when the damage this unending conflict was causing American interests could not have been more obvious – backed off ignominiously in the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of his demand. This left prospects for a two-state accord dead in the water.”

On 16 August in a piece for the Huffington Post which was originally published by Ha’aretz in Hebrew, Siegman added this:

“Most Israelis, particularly the present government, have been blithely indifferent to repeated international condemnations of Israel’s systematic theft of Palestinian territory on which it has been settling its own Jewish population in blatant violation of international law. Yet their reaction to what they see as an attack on the “legitimacy” of the State of Israel, a concept foreign to international law, seems to bring them to the edge of hysteria.

“In fact, Israel’s legitimacy within its 1967 borders has never been challenged by the international community. It is its behavior on territory beyond its own borders to which the international community – including every U.S. administration – has objected. To construe the condemnation of violations of international law as anti-Semitism is absurd.”

“It was not an anti-Semite seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state, but Theodore Meron, an internationally respected jurist and the legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, who following the war of 1967 conveyed the following legal opinion to Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban: ‘Civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention,’ to which Israel is a signatory. That Convention’s ban on population transfer is ‘categorical and not conditional upon the motives for the transfer or its objectives. The Convention’s purpose is to prevent settlement in occupied territory of citizens of the occupying state.’”

So yes, Israel’s leaders knew that settlements on Arab land occupied in 1967 are illegal. They simply didn’t give (and still today don’t give) a damn about international law. But this attitude, a mixture of extreme arrogance and insufferable self-righteousness, does not make them the main villains in the story of what happened after June 1967. The main villains were (and still are) the governments of the major powers and the one in Washington DC above all.

What they should have said to Israel in the immediate aftermarth of the 1967 war is: “You are not to build any settlements on occupied Arab land. If you do, you’ll be demonstrating your contempt for international law. In this event the international community will declare Israel to be an outlaw state and subject it to sanctions.”

If something like that riot act [and it is still not too late] had been read to Israel there would have been peace many, many years ago. The pragmatic Arafat was reluctantly reconciled to the reality of Israel’s existence inside its pre-1967 borders as far back as 1968. In his gun and olive branch address to the UN General Assembly on 13 November 1974 he said so by obvious implication. Thereafter he put his credibility with his leadership colleagues and his people, and his life, on the line to get a mandate for unthinkable compromise with Israel. He got it at the end of 1979 when the Palestine National Council voted by 296 votes to 4 to endorse his two-state policy. What he needed thereafter was an Israeli partner for peace. He eventually got a probable one, Yitzhak Rabin, but he was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic. It is in the context briefly sketched above that Obama’s seven words have their real meaning.

At the time of writing it seems reasonably clear that Obama is hoping that Abbas and his equally discredited Fatah leadership colleagues can be bribed and bullied into accepting what Netanyahu will eventually offer – crumbs from Zionism’s table. (My guess is that Abbas at a point will resign rather than trigger a Palestinian civil war). THE question is what will Obama do when Israel refuses to give enough to satisfy the demands and needs of the Palestinian people for a just about acceptable measure of justice?

We already know the answer. “Ultimately the U.S. cannot impose a solution.”

Put another way, those seven words are effectively a green light for Zionism alone to determine the future of the Palestinians, a future which at some point will most likely see the final ethnic cleansing of Palestine, followed by another great turning against the Jews (provoked by the Zionist state’s behaviour) and a Clash of Civilizations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic.

The next question asks itself. Why won’t Obama be the president to call and hold the Zionist state to account for its crimes, even when doing so is necessary for the best protection of America’s own interests?  [It begs the question….Who is the World Leader?]

Part of the answer is, of course, that he is no more willing than any of his predecessors to have a showdown with the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress and the mainstream media.

I am a supporter in principle of the case and the need for the Zionist state of Israel to be totally isolated, boycotted and sanctioned as Apartheid South Africa was, eventually. But…

 [And here I find a contradiction in that, if applied to the enormous military power of the Third Reich at its peak, there would be very few Jewish organizations at all let alone a rogue and criminal illegal state.] The danger is that even the credible threat of a real boycott and sanctions could play into the hands of those Israeli leaders – [or conversely when considering their opposition to any sort of regulations or civilized behaviour – Hitler could have had similar reasons as the Zionists currently claim for their treatment of the Arabs. Could even a reasonable number of Jewish people come to the conclusion that the Zionist behaviour of obeying no laws but their own may just be the perception of the hatred of centuries?]

I think it could and should be said that Zionism succeeded, probably beyond its own best expectations, in transforming the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust from a lesson against racism and fascism and all the evils associated with them into an ideology that seeks to justify anything and everything the Zionist state does. War crimes and all.What, I wonder, will honest historians of the future make of what is happening right now? My guess is that they will conclude that when Obama launched his push for peace, the Zionist state was already a monster beyond control.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.net and tweets via http://twitter.com/alanauthor

 COMMENT:  During the years of ever-increasing cruelty in overcoming an adversary by bigger and more scientific methods, the very thought of an indisputable power would surely become the downfall of that “power” itself. Where the ultimate between the super powers was “how many nukes have you got” - we realised the stupidity of that chest thumping rhetoric.  The Zionists, in my opinion, would not have the fortitude to withstand the sanctions which the US  and its partners in crime have inflicted on Iraq and now Iran.  The latter are a very hardy people and can withstand anything the US/Zionist alliance can throw at them.

Could the ultimate implication of  the threat that Alan Hart implies from the Zionists be, WE will start a nuclear war unless we can do as we damn well please ? Then what else do they demand?  I thought that we didn’t give in to threats?

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.net and tweets via http://twitter.com/alanauthor

So many things that beggars the mind.  No nation or body of criminals may act in the following manner without being brought to justice - EXCEPT THE ZIONISTS.

The Zionists may and have already performed....

CRIME:  Of any type can be committed by the Zionists in occupied Palestine or anywhere in the world without any form of punishment or compensation.

FRAUD:  The Zionists have no boundaries regarding citizenship because they can have as many passports as their MOSSAD (read Gestapo) wish to create for the purpose of murder in foreign jurisdictions.

PRE-EMPTIVE INVASION:  They have the US permission to use any type of, drone; fighters; bombers; white phosphorus; bunker busters and radiation poisoning from weapons of depleted uranium.

PIRACY:  The Zionists can, without being brought to any form of justice, highjack ships in international waters, murder unarmed crew members, and do a "Somali pirate" act with the ship itself.  As yet no ransom.

APARTHEID: The Zionists have intentions clearly demonstrated of taking over the entire land of the Palestinians and using the allowed remains to work as slaves as happened in ancient Judah. Under the basic rules of Apartheid they would have no rights as citizens - and that is the case now.  What nest?

GENOCIDE:  Using their much denied Protocols of the Learned Elders of the Zion, the doctrine of the Zionists does not stop at genocide or, in fact continues with the outright murder of all non-Jews.

THREATS:  Much has been said, without proof by the way, that those “horrible rag heads” have said that they want Israel off the map. While this has been proven a misinterpretation of what was said, there has not been any doubt about the language of the Zionists against their next target Iran.

COMMENT:  Alan Hart has noted that perhaps Israel is too big a monster to bring into line.  Fair dinkum.

With all of my respect for that man, the suggestion that there is in this mad mad world, subsequent to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and the progression into the “best way to oblivion” by the powers that be have tried to reach the ultimate in superiority, has all been an exercise in “the ravings of frustrated war mongers and their one upmanship occupation in destruction”.

The so-called impotence of the US to chastise their irresponsible child is well within their capabilities – and right now.

Let the US repeat the arrogance and provocative Jewish declaration of war against the German people in 1933 by using trade as a major weapon, when the people of Germany had already been weakened to a point of starvation and disunity after WW I.

For some reason at that time, that I cannot understand, the Jewish Congress in the US declared Germany their No. l. enemy.  Struth. 

See comment above...

Meanwhile at the crooked table:

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas says Middle East peace talks are in crisis following Israel's refusal to stop building in settlements.

His comments come hours after the US said that it had failed to get Israel to renew its settlement curbs.

Mr Abbas suspended talks in September after a 10-month halt on Israeli building in the occupied West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, expired.

The US has vowed to find other ways to bring the two sides together.

The peace talks resumed in Washington in September after a break of almost two years, but broke down just weeks later over the settlement issue.

Settlements are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11946465

Gus: when will Abbas realize the Yanks are against him and the Palestinians no matter what? How long is a piece of rope to hang oneself with in the hope someone will come to rescue you?????

Mr Abbas you are too nice.

see toon at top...