STEPHEN ZUNES
Zunes just wrote the piece “Broken Peace Process.”
He writes: “Ever since direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks began in the early 1990s, U.S. policy has been based on the assumption that both sides need to work out a solution among themselves and both sides need to accept territorial compromise. As reasonable as that may seem on the surface, it ignores the fact that … there is a grossly unequal balance of power between the occupied Palestinians and the occupying Israelis. It also avoids acknowledging the fact that the Palestinians, through the Oslo agreement, have recognized the state of Israel on a full 78 percent of [historic] Palestine, and what Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is asking for is simply the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was seized by Israel in the 1967 war and is recognized by the international community as being under belligerent occupation.”
Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
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URI AVNERY
Avnery is founder of Gush-Shalom, the Israeli “Peace Bloc.” His latest piece about the Annapolis conference is “How to Get Out?”
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NASEER ARURI
Aruri is chancellor professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and author of the book Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine. He is also the editor of the book Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return.
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ALI ABUNIMAH
Author of the book One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and co-founder of ElectronicIntifada.net, Abunimah said today: “Bush is talking about two states living side by side in peace. What we have already is a one state reality of an apartheid Israeli Jewish state … with settlements, Jewish-only roads and [Israel] taking the land, water and resources needed to make Palestinian sovereignty viable. What has been ignored is that none of these facts would change in President Bush’s ‘vision’ of two states. The two sides would simply agree to call the status quo ‘peace.’ But it would not be peace: Palestinians would still be living in walled ghettos inside the West Bank and Gaza, millions of refugees would remain in exile and Palestinian citizens inside Israel would be treated as foreigners in the country of their own birth because they do not fit into a ‘Jewish state.'”
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.
