Peace with Israel: Not In The Best Interest of Palestinian Leaders.

It's been a LONG time since Oslo, and the Israeli Palestinian situation is no closer to resolution than it was the day Arafat launched the 2nd intifada in 2000. Some blame can always be laid at Israeli leaders feet of course, although when you consider what we now know that former PM's Olmert & Barak were prepared to offer for a solution, it's hard to understand why peace couldn't be achieved.

To this day Palestinians make plenty of noises about peace and negotiations, but always manage to find a reason to not even meet with Israel, imposing shifting conditions on participation, knowing that at best Israel will want to negotiate on those very points, not agree before reaching the table. Recent Jordanian attempts were scuppered when the Palestinian delegation simply refused to turn up. Meanwhile their propoganda machine churns out story after story creating an image of gun wielding settlers stealing land in the night, and apartheid era images from S. Africa that bare no relationship to the real situation on the ground. These stories make Israel's position weaker, and serve to encourage international aid, despite clear Palestinian Authority human rights violations occurring under the noses of the family of nations. Combine that with the high levels of corruption that means much of the aid disappears, the constant Nazi style antisemitism on aid funded PA media, and the recent clamp down on Palestinian press freedoms, and it is unlikely the PA would get these levels of international aid without the negative propaganda about Israel.

The question remains therefore, why the PA doesn't devote more energy to genuinely seeking peace with Israel? Why on earth would the Palestinians leaders not want peace? The answer is clear: it isn't in their interest! Not for the same pure hatred reasons of the Hamas led Gaza Palestinians, but because peace with Israel would probably lead to an end to their personal gravy train & perhaps their downfall! Does anyone believe that it was only Arafat who got rich off the conflict, with a personal wealth of $1.3 BILLION when he died, with at least $900,000,000 'diverted' from foreign aid according to the IMF?

The aid from the UN, the EU and the US is on shaky ground as I explain above, with the PA doing so many things that in other circumstances would cause nations to think twice in these difficult economic times, and if Palestine becomes a country and continues (as it almost certainly will) with the blatant human rights violations, anti-democratic practices & rabid corruption, then aid will dry up. Couple that to the fact that a future Palestine would be a tiny place, with few resources (thanks to the fact that the vast majority of what should have been Palestinian land under the 1947 UN plan is not The West Bank, but rather Jordan, and nobody is even suggesting they be part of a land deal for the new Palestine) and the Palestinian leaders (and defacto their people) would be in afar more difficult position than they are today. They would still be totally dependent on Israel for water, and power (as Israel is about to become a net exporter of natural gas & electricity, and the Egyptian supplies are totally unreliable thanks to Islamist sabotage). Meanwhile Israel (not to mention Jordan & other Arab states) would be unlikely to supply this new state with resources for free, and one can imagine that with the corruption levels we can expect , Palestine is unlikely to mirror Israel's success story.

This failure would probably open the door for the fall of the PA and the reunification of the Palestinian people under Hamas. A Hamas Palestine would once more look to Israel as the source of all it's problems and only a fool (like British MP George Galloway) can imagine they would honor any settlement with Israel reached with the PA. We'd be back to square one, with the real losers being once more the Palestinian people, who in all this will not have had their voices heard or their needs addressed, just as their are not addressed today by either the PA or Hamas who use the Palestinians as their ticket to power and riches.

Therefore Palestinian leaders avoid true negotiations, because for the fat cat Palestinian leadership successful negotiations would be a disaster. The status quo means they can continue to get rich on aid, and they can vilify Israel as an obvious scapegoat, while aiming crude Nazi levels of antisemitic propaganda at their people to keep them angry, as well as killing anyone who dares sell land to Jews (the first law the Palestinian Authority enacted!), and arresting Palestinian journalists who dare to criticize. It all leads to the clear conclusion that they don't want peace, not for the good of Palestinians, but because the status quo is good for them.