Annapolis 'Peace' Conference.

[blackbear]

Annapolis 'Peace' Conference -
The Day After

Hesham Tillawi, PhD
11-25-7

ANNAPOLIS (CITV) November 28, 2007 -- Yesterday, Israeli and Palestinian leaders wrapped up a one day peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, the city that--besides being the locale where many treaties and agreements between adversaries over its 350 year history have been signed--was also the place of the most serious espionage ever to take place in US history, where Jonathon Pollard stole and then sold to Israel some 800,000 pages of highly-classified national defense material. The meeting was the brainchild of George Bush, a man of peace himself, and a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian who once called Ariel Sharon (war criminal for his role in the deaths of as many as 20,000 people during Lebanon's civil war) a "man of peace". The Israelis and the Palestinians agreed to a final peace, the mother of all peaces.

Terms of the peace agreement include the following---The Israelis agreed to evacuate the West Bank and Gaza Strip within one month of today's date. They decided to free Palestinian kidnappees--as many as 10,000 in number, including children as young as 12 years--held inside the many facilities in "Israel" and in occupied Palestinian land. In addition, Israel agreed to immediately start demolishing the Wall--the brainchild of the previously-mentioned 'man of peace' Ariel Sharon--built to choke the life out of the helpless Palestinian people. In a gesture aimed at building trust and confidence, the Israelis (taking to heart the hard lessons they learned from the Holocaust and their own instances of being expelled from virtually every country in which their ancestors have resided) decided to allow the return of all Palestinian refugees (as many as 750,000 in number) as well as their descendants who were forced out of their homes in 1948 and around half a million in 1967. Owing to the fact that Israel derives billions of dollars from Holocaust reparations from Western nations as a result of what took place during WWII, Israel decided to do the same for the Palestinians by offering reparations to those not wishing to return to their homes. Israel also promised to compensate every person it had kidnapped or tortured for their pain and suffering and for time lost from work and family.

Understanding that the holy city of Jerusalem is sacred not only to Jews but to Christians and Muslims as well, without even discussing the issue Israel gave the Palestinian side the promise of evacuating East Jerusalem and all the illegal settlements built on Palestinian land around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine in order to make room for the new Palestinian state. In addition, Israel offered to leave these settlements functioning for the newly arriving Palestinians from the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria, swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses and all. The Palestinian side offered the settlers the option of staying in their homes and becoming part of the new Palestinian State.

Water was the sticky issue of the whole conference, as Israel hoped the Palestinians would share some of the water located under Palestinian land. As yet another gesture of Israel's willingness to bend over backwards in the interests of attaining peace, Olmert and his negotiators promised to limit the size of swimming pools inside Israeli residential homes, the Palestinians in return promised to drink water once a day and take a shower once a month.

The Israelis agreed to allow Palestinians to go back to their old jobs in Israel and to remove all border crossings between it and its newly neighboring state of Palestine. Israel decided to bring back and re-plant the 1.5 million olive trees it illegally cut down, destroyed and more often transported to "Israel" from the Palestinians. The Israelis presented the Palestinians with a map of Israel with borders similar to the Partition Plan of 1947 by the UN. To help develop the new state, Israel agreed to give back all the monies it illegally collected from the Palestinians, and, in addition, to rebuild every home it had demolished in the last 60 years.

The Israelis rejected all calls to designate Israel as a 'Jewish' state as they felt this was not a good way to start a relationship with their Arab friends and citizens. Since they pride themselves on being the only democracy in the Middle East and are constantly lecturing other countries (particularly those that are Muslim) on the dangers of theocratic and racially-exclusive regimes and believing in the separation of church and state they concluded that making Israel a 'Jewish' state would go above and beyond the principles of democracy that the Israelis believe so much in. The Israeli team felt that nothing less than a complete undoing of the injustice that was done to the Palestinians, and the fulfillment of UN resolutions especially 194, and 242 would bring true peace to the Land Of Peace.

At the end of the conference, the Arabs, willing to turn the other cheek and let bygones be bygones, thanked and kissed their "cousins" the Jews for this important conference ending all wars and the century-old hatred between the two cousins, the sons of Abraham. At that moment however, and much to the surprise of the Arabs, all hell broke loose. The Israelis were offended. They believed the Arabs were trying to trap them into the mistaken notion that Arabs and Jews were cousins. The Israelis were offended by this association because they felt that--due to the fact that 90% of their Jewish citizens in Israel and 99% of Jews outside Israel are not true descendents of Abraham but rather are of European stock, that this move on the Arabs' part was nothing more than a sneaky attempt at 'Semitizing' the Jews of today and that this would spell the end of Zionism, because now the true Semites were identified. At that moment George Bush stepped in to save the moment. In the spirit of his naturally funny statements in which he is so famous for, he said, hey, Abraham had many sons, Ishmael, Isaac, and Bernstein. He was serious, they all laughed. He said Israel now understands that it must do what is right for its people and future generations, it must undo the injustice done to the Palestinian people in the last 100 years.

Things went so well at the meeting that the Sole Legitimate Representative of the Palestinian People did not even need to be there, the Palestine Liberation Organization that is, also known as the PLO, the forgotten one. That is a great indication of how smooth things went at the meeting. The Israelis even had the IMF and the World Bank invited to Annapolis to be there and ready with the check book to help the poor, and hungry Palestinians. What else do Palestinians want? They will be going back to their homes, they will have a state, a viable one that is, they will have Jerusalem, water, borders pushing back to 1947 Partition Plan, and everything else that was taken away from them. There is one thing though Israel could not give them back, their dignity, or is it the Arab dignity?

www.currentissues.tv

[blackbear]

The Real Two-state Solution

By Aluf Benn in Tel Aviv – Spiegel Online November 25, 2007

This week President Bush will convene an international conference in Annapolis, Md., to promote the "two-state solution" for Israelis and Palestinians. The meetings and noble proclamations toward that goal, however, will bear little relation to reality here in the Middle East. Essentially, Bush is too late. For most Israelis, the two-state solution already exists.

When I grew up near Tel Aviv in the 1970s, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were an indispensable part of the environment. Many of them worked in construction sites, laboring to turn my hometown's strawberry fields into a modern suburb. Others stood every morning in line at the town's highway intersection -- a common sight in Israeli cities then -- waiting for their chance to get a day job. Luckier Palestinians got jobs filling gas at service stations, washing dishes in restaurants and bars, or fixing cars. They served Israeli customers, and were even given Hebrew aliases by their employers. Thus, Ghazi became "Roni" and Mustafa turned into "Moti." Despite a class system problematic in its own right, many of these workers experienced at least a measure of integration. .................

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=7577..............

The ever-increasing separation measures, the economic independence from the Palestinians and above all the physical barriers have isolated Israelis like never before from the "other side." This has enabled Israel to flourish as a first-world, Western wannabe, an enclave in the heart of an otherwise largely stagnant Arab world.

But this situation comes with a price. While allowing Israelis to ignore their unfriendly neighborhood, and live under the illusion that their country exists somewhere in Europe or North America, the status quo reduces Israelis' motivation to seek compromise and peace with the Palestinians. To observers of the Palestinians' deteriorating situation in the occupied territories, that symptom of Israeli denial can appear morally repugnant. And as the destitution in those areas mounts, the status quo is not likely to be sustainable -- a deeper chaos could erupt and become a much greater problem for Israel's government and people.

Perhaps most significant, the hardened status quo hinders the Jewish state's eventual acceptance in the Middle East, already a difficult goal. When Iran and its proxies aim to undermine the legitimacy of Israel, and even actively pursue its destruction, self-imposed isolation by Israel may be one of the biggest dangers of all.
www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,519616,00.html

[Mark Gobell]

We can but dream . . .

Annapolis Peace Conference 27.11.2007

11 months and 9th day on

US Presidential Elections 4.11.2008

Probably nothing.