AMP denounces new round of peace talks as a ‘mere charade’

Real peace will come only when Israel’s occupation ends

(CHICAGO 08/31/2010) – The American Muslims for Palestine has dismissed upcoming Middle East peace talks as an insincere gesture toward true peace.

AMP has denounced the talks, which are not supported by the majority of the Palestinian people, because they will only serve to buy Israel more time to build more settlements and confiscate more Palestinian land in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Real peace will come only when Israel’s occupation ends

(CHICAGO 08/31/2010) – The American Muslims for Palestine has dismissed upcoming Middle East peace talks as an insincere gesture toward true peace.

AMP has denounced the talks, which are not supported by the majority of the Palestinian people, because they will only serve to buy Israel more time to build more settlements and confiscate more Palestinian land in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

“These new round of talks will fail, as all efforts in the past 20 years have failed,” predicts Dr. Hatem Bazian, AMP chairman and  professor of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “As long as Israel refuses to recognize Palestinians’ rights and claims, refuses to abide by any settlement freeze and continues to oppress the occupied people that international law stipulates it should be protecting, these talks will fail.”

But failure isn’t an option for the United States, which is acting as a broker in this latest deal. That’s because the U.S. interests around the world always come back to this country’s support for Israel. Supporting Israel with more than $5 billion per year in unconditional military aid, grants, loan guarantees and free or reduced-cost weaponry not only hurts the U.S. economy it also weakens our stance in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

“It is crucial that the United States is seen as an honest broker in this next round of negotiations,” Dr. Bazian said. “If Israel walks away without any sincere attempt at peace, the Arab and  Muslim world will continue to view the U.S. as complicit in Palestinians’ suffering and that will lead to more uncertainty as far as our own national security goes.”

AMP is skeptical about the peace talks because history has shown that prolonged talks  only benefit Israel and as such create a situation where there is no real incentive for Israel to forge peace. In fact, it is widely known now that Oslo’s real outcome was to consolidate Israel’s iron grip on the Palestinian territories and to allow it to secure more land for itself while quashing any amount of justified Palestinian resistance.

Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, settlements have increased by 300 percent; the illegal settler population in the West Bank has doubled to 300,000 and in East Jerusalem the number of settlers has grown from almost nothing to 200,000, according to Israeli human rights group Peace Now. Settlements now consume more than 40 percent of the West Bank. Jewish-only bypass roads, the Apartheid Wall – which the International Court of Justice said violated international law -- and more than 600 roadblocks and checkpoints have combined to push Palestinians into isolated Bantustans. Unemployment has skyrocketed while the per capita GDP has tumbled from $1,406 in 1994 to $1,290 in 2008, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The United States must finally step up and prove it can be an honest broker in this peace process by demanding that Israel end the occupation of Palestine. The U.S. must tie foreign aid payments to Israel’s compliance with international law and its progress on human rights. The U.S. has done this before as was the case in the Taba talks in 1993 when the U.S. State Department threatened to withhold $100 million in U.S. aid to the Palestinians unless Yasser Arafat signed the Taba treaty with the Israelis, with which he disagreed.

It is time for the United States to put its own national security interests ahead of those of a foreign country.