Scott Morrison has done us no favours

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I am angry. Scott Morrison has done us no favours…writes Clive Kessler.

Clive Kessler

He has probably hurt, not helped, Dave Sharma’s chances.

And, worse, his sudden pre-election lunge has hurt and damaged us, by playing into the hands of “the coalition of the evil and stupid” that we face on ever and increasingly adverse terms.

Jerusalem, Israel’s capital?

Yes, there is an argument, a good argument, for moving foreign embassies, including ours, in Israel to Jerusalem.

It is an argument that I do not merely concede, quietly and hypothetically.

It is an argument that —— unlike all the “stay-at-home armchair giborim/heroes” —— I made early this year, to considerable local consternation, at a public forum in Kuala Lumpur, in the midst of a powerfully promoted paroxysm of rage at Donald Trump over his announcement of his support for such a move.

That said, what of the widely proffered argument against doing so?

That counter-argument rests largely on the claim that it will be bad for “the peace process”.

Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s seat of government, that its capital is located in West Jerusalem, goes against and imperils —— or so we are told —— “the peace process” and its prospects for success.

What “peace process”?

There is none.

There is no peace process.  There has not been any peace process following the Palestinian rejection of all efforts to produce a mutually accepted two-state solution that was made in the decade between the Oslo Agreement and the rejection of the Taba proposals.

“Peace process”?

A peace process is what you have when you do not have peace.

It is what you keep invoking when you do not really want peace, to pursue and work for peace. When you want a screen or deceiving facade behind which you can try to manoeuvre for other things while you avoid making peace, avoid facing its requirements, avoid addressing any peace proposals that may be on offer.

To understand this, one has to understand the origins of the term and its initially intended use.

One has to go back to Kissinger’s artful coining —— for Nixon’s benefit in 1968 —— of this expression as a way of neutralizing, heading off and deflecting powerful calls for “peace” from the anti-Vietnam war peace movement. And, in that way, to serve as an artifice permitting Nixon under the name of pursuing a “peace process” to continue to bomb and make war on Vietnam for another four years and more:

Just to show USA power and to drag things out (or so they hoped) to a better position where an enduring stalemate favourable to their own side might perhaps be achieved.

This, of course, was a plan which with the sudden collapse of South Vietnam under enormous military pressure and the ignominious and decisive fall of Saigon came to naught anyway.

And similarly now in the Middle East.

Similar but worse. Nixon and Kissinger wanted just a “decent interval”, as they put it, of several years. Drawing on an old history, the Palestinian strategy looks forward a century or two beyond the present and the horizon of the immediate future.

In the Middle East today as with Nixon and Kissinger in Washington and Vietnam in 1968-1975, “peace process” is a policy, unacknowledged and disguised, of continuing, unremitting war —— of a defining commitment substantively to “anything but peace now”.

I want “peace”, not a “peace process”.

For their part, the Palestinian leadership is not interested in negotiating any “peace” so long as they can play a “long game” —— one just like seeing off the Crusaders after a couple of centuries, as they see it —— to get what they want in its entirety behind the facade of a hypocritically invoked “peace process”.

The “peace process” to which they feign allegiance is really something else entirely.

Their endless contentless bleating about “the peace process” is a way, their way, of blocking one course of action —— while claiming to believe in and uphold it —— and while pursuing, in a bloody-minded fashion, a completely different game-plan and “total victory” strategy. Over the very long haul.

The rest of the world are fools to fall in with this deceiving pretence.

Some do it out of ignorance, some from habitual prejudice or a reflex failure of thinking or sheer thoughtlessness, and some from a fine, cynical or “realistic” calculation of their imagined interests.

These days, so far as the Israel and Palestine issue is concerned, the idea of a “peace process” is a device to tie well-meaning idiots in knots, to disable and incapacitate them politically with their own consent and help.

Clive Kessler is an Emeritus Professor, Sociology & Anthropology SoSS: School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.