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The Big Question: Will the Mideast peace talks succeed?

by Sydelle Moore - 09/02/10 5:06 PM ET

Peter Navarro, professor of economics and public policy at U.C. Irvine, said:

Let me think about that. Israel’s leadership enjoys negotiating with Obama about as much as it does Hamas. End of thought.

Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com, said:

I don’t think Mideast peace talks will succeed, for a number of reasons, some of which I list here:

1) The extremist ruling coalition in Israel is not interested in the establishment of a Palestinian state, under any conditions.

2) The extremist Hamas movement is not interested in the establishment of a rival state in the West Bank, since they have already established their own state in Gaza.

3) Both sides resent U.S. intervention in their internal affairs, which makes the imposition of a settlement — dictated by Washington, essentially — improbable.

There are more reasons for the failure: the rise of a political consensus in Israel well to the right of anything we have seen before, and the growing influence of a brand of Israeli fundamentalism. We see this in the settler movement, and the fulminations of prominent religious figures in Israel whose public statements have been highly inflammatory.

The big problem in Israel/Palestine is the interpenetration of peoples: self-determination for one people necessarily means the denial of the right of self-determination for the other. Short of decentralizing political authority down to the local level — and the abolition of the state of Israel AND the “Palestinian Authority” — there is no way for this issue to be peacefully resolved.