As to the idea of democratic legitimacy for any Palestinian Arab leadership to negotiate with Israel, why start now? What legitimacy did Arafat have in 1993 or even later? Hamas in Gaza is the closest thing to a democratically legitimate government the Palis have ever had and it is resolutely hostile to any peace deals whatsoever. I take that back, Hamas might be amenable to a deal in which the Israelis all disarm themselves and line up to have their throats slit by Hamasniks, but I doubt even the Peace Now! lefties would agree to that, not if it included them among the victims at any rate.

The question is why the Obama Administration wanted to push these obviously futile negotiations? The people who ought to understand that they are doomed to failure, the diplomats at Foggy Bottom, seem to have an unquenchable thirst for futile negotiations, and an animus against Israel, from what I can gather. American support for Israel makes it sooo much harder to appease Arab/Muslim thugocracies, dontcherknow, so the diplomats can’t do their job in as easy circumstances as they would like. Are there really votes in the US to be gained by arm-twisting Israel into ceding Jerusalem and giving its enemies a base for missile attacks where Israel’s “Auschwitz Borders” (Abba Eban’s phrase) are only ten miles across? The people who approve such measures will vote for Obama anyway. The people who support Israel will be outraged by such measures, and will hardly vote for the man who endangered Israel’s security, at the same time endangering America’s as well. So the vote seeking explanation seems to me an inadequate one.

The reality here is that even if Israel WANTED to make concessions of an extreme nature, beyond anything that has been offered to this point and more than most of us could imagine that they would offer, the Palestinians are in no position to negotiate. These talks have ALREADY FAILED because they cannot progress with the current state of the Palestinian leadership. Notice, I am not saying the current leaders, though that may be true as well. However, until there is an election won by Abbas that includes Gaza and allows for all who wish to run to do so, he cannot claim to truly represent the Palestinian people, only to represent Fatah, and that not without significant opposition. I have already seen statements coming from other Palestinians, not just Islamic militants such as Hamas, suggesting that Abbas does not have the legitimacy to negotiate. That is the issue. That the US and EU are ignoring that and demanding that he do so anyway is representative of a serious problem. How can the Palestinian people trust the process or the result? If not, the process cannot bring peace. So much for a peace process.