Avi Shlaim on the Israel-Palestine peace process under Benjamin Netanyahu

The peace process is a charade.  It's all process and no peace.  It's worse than a charade because it gives Israel just the cover that it needs to pursue its aggressive colonial project on the West Bank.  The present government is hellbent on settlement expansion and settlement expansion is theft.  Land grabbing and peace making don't go together.  It's one or the other.  And by its actions, if not by its words, this government has opted for land grabbing.

This government has accelerated Jewish settlement in and around occupied Arab East Jerusalem in defiance of international law.  This government continues to build the wall on the West Bank.  It calls it a security barrier and it claims that its purpose security.  But a much more important purpose of the wall is land grabbing.  The wall is illegal.  Maybe good fences make good neighbors, but not when the fence is built in the middle of the neighbor's garden.

So Netanyahu is like the man who pretends to be negotiating the division of the pizza while he keeps eating it.  There is no Palestinian leader, however moderate, who is prepared to make peace on these ludicrous terms.

~ Professor Avi Shlaim, "Prof. Avi Shlaim - Hamas is Not a Greater Obstacle to Peace Than Israel," OxfordUnion, 3:30 mark, April 29, 2015