Diana Buttu: Direct Talks are Bound to Fail
September 3rd, 2010 § 1 Comment
Diana Buttu appears on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story with two other guests to discuss the newest round of “direct talks” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In a recent Electronic Intifada interview with Nora Barrows-Friedman, Buttu notes:
The major concern is that we all know that this is going to fail. It doesn’t require anyone with any particular knowledge or foresight to realize that these talks are going to fail. The real question is what is going to come afterwards, and here is where I’m most concerned. For the past 17 years, the PLO, and in particular, Fatah, has had one strategy and only one strategy: negotiations, negotiations, negotiations.
And they have had only one strategy as regards to themselves, and that is survival. We are now at a stage where we are seeing that this is going to be — and I really hope that it is — the final blow to the logic and the ideology of negotiations, that people somehow have to negotiate their freedom.
The real question is, what is this leadership going to do? Is this leadership going to continue to hold us hostage to this tired, visionless lack of strategy? Or is something different going to come?
I’m not concerned with the talks, we know they are going to fail. My bigger concern is about what is going to happen once the talks fail, and is there going to be anybody who is going to come forward with a different plan, a different strategy, a different vision? And that is my fear. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Al Jazeera – Inside Story
After months of US-sponsored indirect negotiations direct peace talks between Israel and Palestine are set to begin on Thursday after being frozen for more than 18 month.
Top level talks in search of the elusive peace deal broke off in 2008 when Israel invaded the Gaza Strip.
But with Hamas noticeably missing at the talks, can real peace be achieved? Is it time for the other players to recognise them?
Or could talks with the Palestinian Authority simply make Hamas less relevant?
Would the current Palestinian divide affect the ability of the Palestinian team headed by President Mahmoud Abbas to deliver?
Joining the programme are Michele Dunne, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ezzedine Choukri, a professor of international politics at the American University in Cairo, and Dianna Buttu, a lawyer and former spokesperson with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
It’s good to hear a Palestinian voice questioning the complicity of Abbas with the Israelis. Clearly these talks are just a smokescreen for more land grabs and settlements, which will get even less publicity than usual as the ‘talks’ monopolize the headlines.