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02/13/2005:

"Mideast: No Peace Without Justice"

by Robert Fisk
So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centers. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out "targeted killings" -- i.e., murders -- of Israeli military leaders.

The Palestinians have promised to end all "acts of violence" against Israelis while Israel has promised to end all "military activity" against Palestinians. So that's it, then. Peace in our time.

A Martian -- even a well-educated Martian -- would have gathered that this was the message, supposing he dropped in on the fantasy world of Sharm el-Sheikh this week. Palestinians had been committing "violence," the Israelis carrying out "innocent" operations. Palestinian "violence" or "terror and violence" -- the latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 9/11 -- was now at an end.

Mahmoud Abbas, who told a close Lebanese friend this year that he wore a suit and tie so that he would look "different" from Yasser Arafat -- went along with all this. Just which people were occupying the homes of which other people remained a mystery.

Silver-haired and wisdom-burdened, Abbas looked the part. We had to forget that it was this same Abbas who wrote the Oslo Accords, who in 1,000 pages failed to use -- even once -- the word occupation and who talked not of Israeli "withdrawal" from Palestinian territory but of "redeployment."

At no point at Sharm el-Sheikh did anyone mention occupation. Like sex, occupation had to be censored out of the historical narrative. As usual -- as in Oslo -- the real issues were put back to a later date. Refugees, the "right of return," East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital: Let's deal with them later.
Full Article: commondreams.org