Bibi’s Victory—All Bad?

March 18, 2015 by Graham E. Fuller • Blog • http://grahamefuller.com/bibis-victory-all-bad/
Bibi’s Victory—All Bad?
Graham E. Fuller (grahamefuller.com)
18 March 2015
I would have been more depressed about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s unexpected victory in Tuesday’s elections in Israel if I had not already long since grown cynical about the so-called “Peace Process.” Grown disillusioned by the fact that even the Israeli left never really looked like it was going to walk the long mile to a genuine and just settlement with the Palestinians in their own state within 1967 borders, give or take.
Unfortunately the farcical peace process that Washington has been conducting for decades clearly was never going anywhere. And slowly most observers came to understand that it was going nowhere. It was only parts of the Washington bureaucracy, that owned and jealously guarded the process, that maybe believed that it was going somewhere.
Worse than going nowhere, the situation was retrogressing, moving backwards to the ever greater detriment of the Palestinians and the ever greater loss of land that belonged to them. But that only seemed to be Israel’s gain in the interim.
Many observers including myself had long since concluded that Israel (at least under the right of center parties) never truly wanted a peace settlement at all. Their politicians were patently playing for time and scarfing up ever greater land and territory with each passing year—all the while talking up a good game of peaceprocessmanship with Washington. And as no one seriously stood up to Israel anywhere in the West, the prospects for a putative future Palestinian state grew ever smaller and less credible.
The good thing about Likud is what you see is what you get. At last Bibi has now dropped the mask and said what we knew all along—there will be no Palestinian state. Period.http://grahamefuller.com/bibis-victory-all-bad/