Not Willing to Wait

Speaking Saturday at a lecture in London, Solana said the UN Security Council should recognize a Palestinian state even if no peace accord had been reached between Israel and the Palestinians by a predetermined deadline.

Israeli officials immediately responded by calling the idea ’dangerous’ and claiming that real peace could only result from negotiations between both sides.

The declaration by Solana comes only hours within three interesting events:

1. Netanyahu’s declared willingness to ’meet Palestinians anywhere in Israel’ to discuss peace without any preconditions – except of course the precondition of recognizing Israel as a Jewish State and the renunciation of the internationally legitimized Right of Return of Refugees prior to negotiations; as well as no halting of illegal settlement growth in the occupied West Bank.

2. A partial arms embargo by the British is placed on Israel blocking the transfer of replacement parts and other equipment for the Sa’ar 4.5 gun ships because of their use in Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip earlier this year.

3. The French declare that any unilateral actions by Israel in the region would be disastrous, while President Sarkozy declares that some statements by the Israel administration are enough to make him want to ’pull his hair out’.

It seems that Europeans (and the British) have finally begun to have enough of Israel’s rogue behavior both in the occupied Palestinian Territories and the region as a whole. Furthermore, it seems that despite Netanyahu’s recent, but loaded, diplomatic overture to the Palestinian Authority, the international community has recognized that there is no real partner for peace inside of Israel.

Perhaps the most obvious clue to this came from Netanyahu’s father himself, Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who told Israel’s Channel Two that his son had placed so many conditions on his offer last month of a Palestinian state as to make it unacceptable to the Palestinians. “He told me that they would never meet even one of those conditions,” he said.

In short, Netanyahu was merely offering to negotiate for the sake of negotiations in order to alleviate international pressure, while not jeopardizing his rightwing, anti-peace coalition. A peaceful diplomatic solution is not on the table, and anything that Palestinians would recognize as justice is even further removed.

The prospect of another prolonged diplomatic stalemate, most likely followed by sever upswings in violence as we saw in Gaza following the Annapolis Process, seems to have finally moved the EU to take a bold stand. Now we can only wait to see if they are serious enough to follow through, and strong enough to bring the United Nations Security Council, including America, with them.