The Geneva Peace Accord

A UPI analyst wonders why Sharon and the more extreme Palestinians are not behind the Geneva Peace Accord:

The refugee issue -- over which previous talks stalled and fumbled -- has also been addressed. Except for a very limited number, the majority of them would not be allowed to return to their previous homes, in what is now Israel. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who previously rejected President Clinton's Camp David peace initiative because it left the Palestinian refugees hanging in eternal political limbo, has cautiously -- and with some reservation -- endorsed the new plan.

For Israel, that is a point of paramount importance, seeing that a sudden influx of Arab residents would spell demographic disaster and augur the end of the Jewish state. As it stands, Israel's current Arab population is likely to reach parity with the Jewish inhabitants within the next generation or two, at the most. Which makes Sharon's reluctance all the more incomprehensible. Instead of grabbing at the chance of peace, the Israeli prime minister seems instead to rely on walls and fences and a piece of Palestinian land.

Speaking to a select group of people gathered in a Washington hotel Friday night at a function promoting the Geneva plan, [Jim Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute] said that this initiative shatters the "myth that the conflict was unresolvable. It reinstated a peace discourse," he said. "The seeds have been planted in Geneva and will grow."

The authors of the Geneva Accords and their supporters say that the accords are not meant to replace the Road Map -- the document drawn up by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia and meant to bring about peace and a Palestinian state -- but rather, it is meant to complement it.

In truth, the road map hit a dead end long ago. The Geneva Accords is the insert in the road map that will bring it out of the impasse where it now resides.

Steven Plaut from the conservative AmericanDaily.com has an answer in an article which he titles Article options A Leftist Program For Israeli Self-Annihilation:

The "Geneva Agreement" that Israel's Far Left has cooked up with the PLO is such a long-winded and complex manuscript that very few can really work their way through all the prose and technicalities, and even fewer can understand the implications of the intentional confusions and duplicitous obfuscations in the text. I have no doubt that the endorsements of the "agreement" from people like Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell were not based on having actually read the thing.

..But digesting the endless pages in the "accord" is not necessary to understand what is wrong with it.

I wonder if that means he didn't read it either.

The Beilin "Accord" is based on the old formula by Israel's Far Left, by which Israel gives up real assets and places itself in strategic jeopardy in exchange for Palestinian oral pledges. Those pledges are meaningless. The original Oslo "deals' were based on the exact same formula and we know their results. The PLO has never and never will honor any pledges it makes in any document.

...The Beilin "Accord" is based on rewarding evil and barbarism.

Okay, you get the picture. It's a rotten deal because it's anti-Israel in effect, and Palestinians are evil. (Plaut sets out his numerous arguments point by point, all beginning with "the Beilin "Accord" - he's not even willing to call it the Geneva Accord. Beilin is the main Palestinian involved in the talks.)

But there's also this from Left I on the News:

Left I hasn't even read the accord, so I'm not in a position to say anything meaningful about it. However, the statement below, signed by a number of people whose opinions I respect greatly, like Ali Abunimah from Electronic Intifada, As'ad AbuKhalil from Angry Arab News Service, and Brian Becker from ANSWER and Workers World, among several dozen others, is certainly worth reprinting on this site to give readers their view of this "accord," a view you won't be reading about in the mainstream press.

There follows a long list of reasons why the peace accord is no good, and they're all reasons that show it to be anti-Palestinian in effect.

I guess you just can't please anybody these days.

And no, I didn't read the accord. And I'm not going to.

Here's the bottom line: people don't really want peace. Or, let me rephrase that. It's not peace that people want.

....but hey, want what you want....you will anyway.