A Middle East View of Mackay's Mentor... Rice

Rice is ignorant of the Palestinian issue
By Adel Safty

During her recent visit to the Middle East, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used Kissingerian terms to claim that the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the war in Iraq created unique geopolitical alignment that finally made peace in Palestine possible.
To the consternation of the Palestinians, however, she only brought the same biased and incomprehensively ill-informed approach embedded in the now discredited roadmap.
A fundamental obligation of the roadmap is that Israel stop all activities to build colonies in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israeli leaders have done precisely the opposite.
In July 2004, The International Court of Justice found that "the Israeli settlements [colonies] in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international law". It also found that the separation wall was in breach of international law.

A few days before Rice arrived in Israel, the Israeli government announced the establishment of a new colony in the occupied West Bank. Washington responded with the usual slap on the wrist, albeit with unusually strong language for the Bush administration.

You would think that if Rice was seriously interested in reviving the moribund Middle East "peace process", the issue of Israel's continued violations of the roadmap ban on construction of colonies would figure prominently in her discussions with Israeli leaders.

Kidnapped
One would think that if Rice wanted to bolster the embattled Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's standing she would have pressed Israeli leaders to free the Palestinian government officials and legislators that the Israeli forces have kidnapped and illegally imprisoned.
One would think she would insist that Israeli leaders hand over the $500 million in Palestinian tax revenues they illegally withheld to punish the Palestinians for exercising their democratic right to elect a Hamas government.

Instead, Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert repeated the usual condescending platitudes about the need for the occupied, not the occupier, to meet the conditions set by the occupier: recognition of Israel, relinquishing violence and acceptance of previous agreements with Israel.

As to the fiction of the roadmap, Rice and Olmert agreed that "a Palestinian government would have to abide by the road map". This is laughable considering that Israeli leaders never hid their intention to use the roadmap as an excuse to delay and abort the peace process.
Even the Israeli press recognised that the reference to the roadmap was "Olmert's way of foiling various recent attempts by Europeans and other elements to call for an international peace summit." (Haarezt, January 16)

Abbas was aghast. Instead of being bolstered by Rice's visit, he felt weakened as Hamas's predictions were being verified by Rice's ill-informed approach.
Perhaps Abbas should have invested some effort in educating Rice, notoriously ignorant about the Middle East, by giving her a copy of the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem's 2006 annual statistics report.

Rice would have learned that during 2006, Israeli military actions killed 660 Palestninans including 141 children, as opposed to 17 Israelis, including one child, killed by Palestinian actions. She would have also learned that the Israelis maintain in the West Bank some 52 permanent checkpoints in addition to hundreds of physical obstacles such as concrete blocs to restrict access to Palestinian communities.

Rice would also have learned that former US president Jimmy Carter did not use the word apartheid gratuitously in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid - for which he was criticised by the Washington establishment and the Israeli lobby.
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has also reached the same conclusion.

Sanitised
Had Rice taken the trouble to learn any of these facts, conveniently sanitised from public debate in the United States, she might have learned the need to define the Israeli-Palestine conflict with more fairness and intellectual honesty.
She might have detected the fallacy underlying the usual Israeli strategy of confiscation, dispossession, dispersion and the systematic shattering of the Palestinian society, while blaming the victim for the absence of peace.