Mick Hartley

The Paris conference gets under way:

Delegates from 70 nations are expected to reaffirm support for a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict.

Palestinians have welcomed the meeting but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who is not attending – says the conference is "futile".

As we all know – as we're always being told – the Israeli-Palestine conflict is the most pressing problem of our times. A settlement will undoubtedly lead to a peaceful and prosperous Middle East. How better, then, could all those politicians, those delegates from 70 countries, spend their time? There's nothing going on elsewhere in the Middle East – Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iran - that could possibly concern them.

And, as we see, the terms in which the failure of the conference will be explained are already set up. The Israelis will be intransigent – aren't they always? – and the Palestinians will once again be the victims.

Ben Cohen, in the Tower:

Maybe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right when he says that the Paris conference is the “final gasp” of a failed strategy. He has good reason, after all, to believe that, especially having heard the condemnation of Resolution 2334 from Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson.

Yet while the change of administration in Washington may strengthen Israel’s diplomatic position for the immediate period, and while the Palestinians will have to get to the back of the line in terms of international priorities, the Palestinian question itself will not disappear. In many ways, it will find its status enhanced.

To begin with, there’s the public domain. And this brings us to something that the Europeans have never understood: The historic Palestinian strategy has never been about achieving statehood, but about preventing a negotiated solution in order to perpetuate the image of the Palestinians as the people to whom history has dealt the cruelest blow. It’s why the Palestinians make deliberately unrealistic demands, like the “right of return”—a goal the Palestine Liberation Organization originally pledged to achieve through violence—and suing the United Kingdom for the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

In terms of building up public support around the world, it’s a strategy that has worked. Hence, we can assume that if President-elect Donald Trump does a 180-degree turn on President Obama’s approach to the Israelis, the narrative of the Palestinians—ignored by America, facing 50 years of “occupation” under Israel—will become emblematic of public resistance to the foreign policies of the Trump administration. In the American context, the Democratic Party is now the most significant barometer of that process.

The Palestinians can also play power politics. They can carry on with their campaign to achieve membership in international bodies as an independent state. They can curry favor with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the next stage of his conflict with the West. And they can insert themselves into domestic issues—rising anti-Semitism, the political culture on university campuses, the legality of boycotts—in a way that few other foreign policy issues can do.

As I said, Netanyahu may well be right about the last gasp of Obama’s strategy to secure Palestinian independence. But none of us should believe that these battles are over.

Update: well, good for us…

Dramatically breaking ranks with participants from 70 other countries, the United Kingdom criticized Sunday’s Middle East peace conference in Paris, arguing that it might harden Palestinian negotiating positions and refusing to sign a joint statement issued after the summit that called for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A Foreign Office spokesman said London had “particular reservations” about the Paris meeting taking place without Israeli or Palestinian representatives, especially since a new US administration is being sworn in later this week.

Indeed, the spokesman’s statement noted that the confab took place against Israel’s expressed wishes and “just days before the transition to a new American president when the US will be the ultimate guarantor of any agreement.”

“There are risks therefore that this conference hardens positions at a time when we need to be encouraging the conditions for peace.”

Due to these concerns, Britain had attended the Paris talks as an observer only and refused to sign the joint declaration issued after the conference, the spokesman said.