With no fanfare, Prime Minister "Bibi" Netanyahu of Israel has come and gone. Like most of Israel's leaders, he is a Russian Jew. He was born in Tel Aviv, but grew up in the United States. He came to Washington this week to touch base with Barack Obama at the White House and then with Tel Aviv's knee-jerk cheering section on Capitol Hill. The bipartisan "Israel First" crowd in the U.S. Senate and Congress comprises roughly 90% of the honorable members and 100% of the leadership. 

Bibi's courtesy call went under-reported in the mass media. My guess is that no one in the U.S. power structure wanted to raise any expectations for his visit, and for good reason. First, the outcome of the visit might make Barack look like a dope or irrelevant, and second, Netanyahu (aka Nut&Yahoo) had made it perfectly clear beforehand that he was only interested in hyperventilating about the hyped "existential threat" posed by Iran. He pretended not to comprehend the fuss over the Palestinians.

In the event, precisely nothing was accomplished. No surprise. The status quo is alive and well. Another triumph for the "Israel Lobby" and further proof of the vacuity and ignorance of Washington when it comes to the Middle East "peace process". 

Actually, isn't it about time to let the bogus, endless "peace process" RIP? The process began in 1991 with "Oslo" in the aftermath of the first Iraq war, continued with the "road map to peace", and finally arrived at the Annapolis conference, an embarrassing afterthought in the closing months of the Neoconized Cheney Regency, the nominal presidency of G.W. Bush. If this entire, sorry subchapter of American history is not a charade, then that word has no meaning. 

In "Saving Israel from Itself" in the current (May 2009) issue of The American Conservative magazine, Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago points out, "Perhaps the best evidence of American impotence is what happened during the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. Israel confiscated 40,000 acres of Palestinian land, constructed 250 miles of connector bypass road, doubled the number of settlers, and built 30 new settlements. President Clinton did hardly anything to halt this expansion."

I just can't imagine what Clinton was expected to do, given the power of the "Israel Lobby" in America, which power and influence were politely delineated by Professor Mearsheimer and Professor Steven Walt of Harvard in their controversial book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.  

Please note that since the 1990s Tel Aviv has continued under the cover of the "peace process" to expropriate more land, to build more roads "for Jews only" on the West Bank, to expand illegal settlements populated by Zionist fanatics, to grab more water rights from the conquered native inhabitants, and to build a formidable concrete wall taller and longer than anything ever built by the East German communists. The purpose is to keep the Palestinians in the West Bank, who have lived under military occupation since 1967, under a lockdown. It has worked. Washington, especially Capitol Hill, is a fan. 

These wonderful post-Bill Clinton developments, in the era of the Trotskyite   neocons, were accomplished in consultation with G.W. Bush and his Regent, Dick Cheney, leaders of the lone surviving "Superpower". The enthusiastic endorsement of anything Tel Aviv decided to do, by the aforementioned "Israel First" crowd on Capitol Hill, goes without saying. In truth, officials in Washington have been anything but innocent, hapless observers. They were enablers and bankrollers. In the meantime, the 9/11 Arab terrorist attacks--supposedly from out of the blue--on New York City and Washington, D.C. took place. Has anyone heard of cause and effect? 

There are two quick points I want to make here. First, in retrospect it must be apparent that the much-ballyhooed "peace process" in all its convolutions was a confidence trick and a charade from start to finish. 

Second, not only was the process itself a sham, but the goal it purportedly was aiming at--the so-called "two-state" solution--was fatally flawed. There are two dates to keep in mind: 1948 and 1967. The "peace process" generated by “Oslo” addressed the results of the 1967 war. It ignored the results and the injustice of the 1948 war, which is the core of the problem. “Oslo” implicitly legitimized what the Arabs call "Nakba"--the land taken from the Palestinians in 1948 by the invading/interloping East European Jews, who had operated under the protective cover of the British Empire since 1920. This theft of Palestine by the Zionists, or the slight-of-hand which pocketed Palestine, if you will, was condoned by “Oslo”. 

What “Oslo” offered the Palestinians and their Arab allies by way of recompense was the possibility that additional territory seized by the Zionists in the 1967 war could be returned and released from military occupation, under certain conditions, and made into a rump, fake "state" for the Palestinians living there. But at the same time, Tel Aviv made it abundantly clear from the start that the refugees driven out of Palestine in the 1948 conflict would not be allowed to return to their villages and homes in what is now Israel proper. That was out of the question and off the table. These refugees and their descendants, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been living in camps all over the Middle East since 1948. Nobody gives a damn.

You might call “Oslo” the half-loaf solution. It has been pragmatically embraced by most Arab leaders, including the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan and the President for life of Egypt, and by many Americans sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. The problem, however, is that all of Palestine constitutes occupied territory, not just the West Bank. That's the way it is. Irish Labor Minister Justin Keating explained why in the November 2005 issue of The Dubliner magazine. In sum, what happened in 1948 is no more justifiable or “legal” than what the Zionists did, with Washington's assistance, in 1967. The land which the Jewish colonialists  seized and expropriated in 1948 is no different than the land occupied by the “Jewish State” in the aftermath of the 1967 war. 

Naturally, Zionists, from lite to classic, do not care to address 1948, because it poses a host of inconvenient questions, for which they have no convenient, rational answers. The subject is out of bounds in polite American society. The issue never needs to be addressed, anyway, because the "Israel Lobby" in America controls the agenda in Washington and has turned America into a virtual client state of Israel.

If you want to blame someone else besides suborned Washington politicians and the "Israel Lobby" for the present impasse, try blaming the English triumvirate of Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill. It was their refusal to negotiate a fair peace agreement with Kaiser Wilhelm II which led us to where we are today. It was these amoral English gentlemen who dragged America into the Great War, after Germany had defeated John Bull in the field and taken out Czarist Russia. And it was the Zionists in Washington and New York, acting as agents of Whitehall, who masterminded that project and brought it to fruition for said triumvirate.

Hence the Balfour Declaration of 1917, issued by a grateful British War Cabinet. Hence the American "war on terror" of today. Again I say, Rien n'arrive par hasard. There will be no peace. There is certainly no justice.