Over the past half-century, successive rounds of peace talks have emerged and then faded away, from the Jarring Mission and the Rogers Plan in 1969, to Camp David in 1978 and 1979, the Fahd Plan in 1981, Oslo in 1993, the Arab Peace Initiative in 2000, and the return to Camp David that same year.
All these initiatives rested on the same formula: the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. All of them failed for one simple reason: Israel did not want them to succeed.
Israel was occupied with carrying out the historic Zionist mission of seizing all of Palestine, not merely part of it. Taking 78 per cent of the land in 1948 meant that the historical project remained incomplete. Yet the objective was not limited to taking the land. The people also had to be removed, a goal decided long before the implementation of Plan Dalet.
In the 1930s, David Ben-Gurion wrote to his son: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.” Long before that, Israel Zangwill explained in 1905 what had to be done: “We must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession, as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan, accustomed for centuries to despise us.”
In reality, the Zionist settlers were the outsiders with no genuine connection to the land, and they themselves looked with contempt upon the Jews who had long lived there.
In 1940, Yosef Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund’s Land and Afforestation Department, summarised Zionist intentions: “It must be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples… Not one village must be left, not one tribe.”
This was the “transfer” to neighbouring countries advocated by Ben-Gurion, a euphemism for what he knew could only be accomplished through force.
The Death of the “Peace Process”
Today, nothing remains of the so-called peace talks. Even the names of those initiatives are rarely mentioned, except by historians sifting through the ashes in search of “what went wrong”, rather than acknowledging that Israel never wanted the negotiations to produce a genuine peace.
Nor did it wish to recognise that, as a settler-colonial state established at the height of global efforts to dismantle colonialism, it was fundamentally flawed from the outset.
The drive towards the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in the early twentieth century with the expulsion of tenant farmers from land purchased by Zionist agencies from absentee landlords.
The largest transactions involved the Sursock family, a Greek Orthodox family from Beirut that accumulated great wealth through banking, industry and trade.
The Sursocks had purchased Marj Ibn Amer, also known as the Jezreel Valley, from the Ottoman state during the 1870s. By 1925, they had sold its entire area, approximately 400,000 dunams or around 100,000 acres, to Zionist organisations.
Despite the family’s wealth, Michel Sursock monopolised grain during the Great Famine that devastated Syria in 1915 and 1916, selling it at exorbitant prices to those able to pay.
The Ottoman government had imposed restrictions on land sales to Zionists. However, after the British occupation began under the Mandate, and with Britain fully committed to the Zionist settlement project, those restrictions were lifted.
British police expelled tenant farmers, and more than 20 villages were emptied of their inhabitants. Once land had been sold to Zionist bodies, the charters of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund ensured that it could never again be owned or leased by non-Jews.
A British commission of inquiry later concluded that the removal of Palestinian land from the national domain was a central factor in the resistance that led to the 1936 uprising.
By that stage, the Zionists had become firmly entrenched in Palestine with the backing of the British government. They were permitted to establish “self-defence” units while Palestinians were simultaneously disarmed.
“One Dunam and One Goat”
Step by step, under the policy of “one dunam and one goat”, the Zionist movement advanced steadily towards its ultimate objective: emptying Palestine of Palestinians.
It concealed this objective behind a mask of goodwill. Zionist leaders lied, deceived and flattered the British until Britain had little more to offer and began placing obstacles in their path.
The Zionists then turned against the hand that had generously sustained them for two decades. They killed British soldiers and assassinated senior officials before shifting their allegiance towards the Americans, who gave the Zionist movement everything it wanted.
This pattern continued into the present day. Zionists never committed themselves to genuine peace. They moved in the opposite direction while repeatedly insisting that peace was all they desired.
At the same time, they promoted the false claim that “there is no partner for peace”, even though it was Israel that had never acted as a genuine peace partner.
What Israel wanted all along was the whole of Palestine. That objective could never be reconciled with a genuine desire for peace.
Israel certainly never accepted the partition of Palestine in principle. It merely pretended to do so when, by 1949, it had no choice but to settle temporarily for what it had already taken.
Ben-Gurion made clear that partition was only one stage on the road towards conquering all of Palestine and even territories beyond it if the opportunity arose.
In 1956, Israel occupied Sinai and withdrew only after US President Dwight Eisenhower threatened it. Israel had already begun carrying out massacres against Palestinians in Gaza, while Ben-Gurion called for the complete seizure of the Strip, describing the refugees as “a nuisance” and saying, “but we will drive them out” into the Sinai desert.
Israel’s Wars and Manufactured Threats
Israeli officials knew that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser did not want war and remained open to negotiations. The same pattern was repeated in 1967, when Israel sought the war.
Statements by Israeli military chief Moshe Dayan are worth quoting at length:
“We do not need a security treaty with the United States: such a treaty would only be an obstacle to us. In fact, we face no danger at all from Arab military power… The retaliatory operations are the lifeblood of our existence… They allow us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army… It is necessary to persuade our youth that we are in danger.”
Israel seized the opportunity in 1967 and attacked Egypt and Syria. The claim that it had launched a “pre-emptive strike” was absurd, as was the allegation that Israel feared annihilation, a narrative repeatedly invoked whenever it seeks war.
Israel wanted the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine, and it took it. It then used withdrawal from occupied Sinai as a bargaining tool to maintain its occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
This deception continued through every round of “peace” negotiations, in which the United States consistently sided with Israel.
The Camp David process was doomed from the beginning because Israel had no intention of making meaningful concessions.
Ehud Barak claimed that he had offered to return 97 per cent of the West Bank. Yet he was heading towards electoral defeat, and there was virtually no prospect that the Knesset would accept such an arrangement. The offer functioned primarily as a public relations exercise directed at Western audiences.
Barak attempted to resolve the question of returning East Jerusalem to the Palestinians by expanding the city’s municipal boundaries to include the village of Abu Dis.
Under this formula, the Palestinian “self-governing” authority would not be located anywhere near the Old City. It would instead be based in Abu Dis.
Negotiations Used to Expand Settlements
Israel never participated in negotiations intended to produce a genuine settlement based on the return of Palestinian land.
Every negotiating process collapsed under the weight of Israeli objections. Each peace initiative was instead used to seize more land and consolidate settlement across the territories occupied in 1967.
Yasser Arafat was first used as a peacemaker, then recast as a terrorist and pushed aside before being assassinated, most likely on the orders of Ariel Sharon.
He was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas, whom most Palestinians regard as a traitor.
The United States and European governments could have imposed obstacles on Israel, but they chose not to. Israel was their favoured child, one that grew into an unstable monster destroying everything standing between it and the fulfilment of the Zionist dream, a dream that had always been a nightmare for the victims of this ideology.
Israel’s supporters appear to hold the view that, so long as it does not harm them, it may harm anyone it chooses.
Israel No Longer Conceals Its Objectives
Over the past three years, the lies, evasions and deception have largely been abandoned.
Israel no longer sees any reason to hide what it wants: not only all of Palestine, but also large areas of Lebanon and Syria.
It now acts with complete brazenness, openly taking whatever it wants without any apparent fear of external intervention. Violence against Palestinians at every level has become virtually unrestricted.
Appetite grows with eating. The more Israel escapes accountability, the greater its greed becomes.
It flatters American and European leaders while privately despising them for their weakness, confident that it can manipulate them indefinitely.
Israel never possessed a genuine commitment to peace. After decades of deception, the world now sees it more clearly: primitive and brutal behind the façade of a “start-up nation”.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are merely its ugliest faces.
Behind them stand those in military uniform who kill unarmed men, women and children while being described as “soldiers”, the settler gangs that expanded across the West Bank after 1967, and a majority of the Israeli population that supports genocide while refusing to call it by its name.
Silencing Opposition Abroad
At the same time, opponents of genocide are being pursued across the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
Zionist supporters of Israel’s actions outside the country complain that they are subjected to insults, a minor price compared with the tonnes of rubble dropped by the army they support upon the bodies of Palestinians.
They are implicated in Israel’s crimes, yet few hold them accountable for fear of being accused of antisemitism.
Australia’s “Antisemitism Taskforce” is the product of cooperation between the government and pro-Israel lobbying groups.
It has one objective: to silence opposition to Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and repeated violations of international law under the guise of combating antisemitism, despite Australia already possessing the necessary anti-hatred laws to address genuine cases.
No Land Left for a Palestinian State
Israel has deliberately burned the ground behind it so that retreat is no longer possible.
There will be no peace based on returning land on which a Palestinian state could be established. In brief, there will be no peace at all, only the continuation of brutality and resistance.
There is no alternative plan. Israel has trapped itself in this position.
Either events unfold according to Israel’s terms, or they do not proceed at all. Any party that opposes it immediately finds itself in its line of fire.
East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been so heavily settled that Israel now considers their return impossible. This has been a continuous and deliberate process since 1967.
Although Palestinians have never abandoned the rights of the 1948 generation, those rights do not enter the calculations of Europe or the United States.
Israel is now closer than ever to the height of what it regards as victory.
The weakness of the United Nations, together with the success of the United States in intimidating the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, has encouraged Israel to continue.
There is now nothing left to negotiate.
The logic has become one in which the victor either takes everything or loses everything. Israel remains convinced that it will be the victor.
It believes it has terrorised the world into submission, even as the ground beneath it appears to be shifting wherever it looks.
