‘”The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president’s formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians…

The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians. There is a decision here to do the minimum possible in order to maintain our political situation. The decision is proving itself. It is making it possible for the Americans to go to the seething and simmering international community and say to them, `What do you want.’”

He was talking about the “disengagement” from Gaza, but the basic point is applicable to the phony “peace process” as well – Israel isn’t looking for peace, it is looking for a bantustan solution or,in the meantime, a maintainenance of the status quo.

And in any event, it doesn’t matter if the Palestinians get “95%” of the West Bank if the 5% that goes to Israel is positioned such as to split the Palestinian “state” into de facto non-contiguous cantons, which is all that has been offered thus far.

First someone from the government ‘leaks’ a report to Haaretz suggesting that the PM is considering offering 95% of the West Bank for a Palestinian state via a landswap. Which, as Jeff Harper points out doesn’t actually have any logic in any case.

Anyway, this is picked up by various international media, and is interpreted as another ‘reasonable’ offer by Israel which is quickly condemned by the Palestinian leadership, which goes to show who the reasonable guys are around here and who are the terrorists.

Next day, Olmert denies the Haaretz report saying that he would never consider such a proposterous idea, placating his own zionist hardliners who aren’t actually interested in peace at all. It is all over various editions of domestic Israeli media, but barely reported internationally.

Like the circus swindler, playing with cups and coins, he seems able to offer and yet at the same time not-offer the great prize of peace. Meanwhile the Palestinians yet again look like they’re missing a fantastic opportunity when that opportunity never really existed anyway.

“Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory. Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.”

dave: okeydoke. (It’s weird – my contact info usually appears on the bottom of the site, but it seems to have disappeared. I’ll go hunt it down.)