The group of visionary retired world leaders called The Elders has announced that three of their number– Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and former Irish President Mary Robinson– will be undertaking a peace-focused fact-finding mission in mid-April.
The announcement says the three,
- will visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia from April 13-21 to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking Middle Eastern conflicts.
The Elders will listen to all parties in the countries. They will meet with leaders from governments, civil society, and key groups that influence the conflict, in an attempt to understand their various perspectives. At the end of the mission, the Elders will prepare a report for the public to help people understand the urgency of peace and what is needed to secure it. The Elders will also meet and begin to work with groups that will reinforce the efforts by the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to negotiate a peace agreement based on a two-state solution.
I am intrigued by the way they describe their mission there. They notably make zero mention of the very disappointing “Annapolis” peace process. Indeed, it also looks as if that last sentence there was sort of tacked on as a later addendum to what otherwise looks like a very appropriately open-ended, listening-focused mission.
The very best of luck to them. If it would help them, I’d be very to send along any of my writings on the conflicts and the prospects for peace in Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine. That would include numerous posts here on JWN, or articles elsewhere, especially my longer articles in Boston Review since 2001; my 2000 book on Syrian-Israeli peace diplomacy; or the 2004 book that I worked on with 13 other Quakers that was basically the result of a three-week listening-centered mission we conducted in Israel and Palestine in 2002.
The very best of luck to them. I have great respect for all three of these leaders. I have had the honor of meeting and interviewing both Robinson (when she was at the UNHCHR in Geneva) and Carter. I certainly hope that on this mission these Elders make a point of meeting, and listening carefully to, all the relevant parties in the region including those who are currently judged to be “off-limits” to the diplomats of the US and its allies on the (highly politicized) grounds that they are terrorists. I’ll read the report they produce with huge interest.
I was fortunate to be a visitor in Mary Robinson’s birthplace, Ballina, Ireland nearly a year ago and heard about her for the first time. They love her there and spoke so affectionately of her that I feel I know her, though we’ve never met.
I too wish Mary Robinson and her two confederates good luck in their mission. Of course we know how the Zionists feel about Jimmy Carter as a result of his recent book: “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” and Kofi Annan was not a favorite of the US and its UN Ambassador John Bolton, so we should be realistic.
Carter and his friends have all been down this path before. Pres. Carter wrote a very inoffensive and low-key book some years ago, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”, which was summarily slammed by the Israel-firsters. And let’s not forget The Geneva Initiative, a very thoroughly thought out peace plan that Pres. Carter and friends put forth in 2003, and which was dismissed out of hand.
http://www.cartercenter.org/news/documents/doc1739.html for the Geneva Initiative.
Israel will only listen to a peace plan when the US stops its unilateral support, moral and financial, for the entity. And that day is fast approaching, helped ever closer by the Israel-firsters who brought you the Iraq War, or the Three Trillion Dollar War, as Prof. Stieglitz has recently called it.
As long as we have peace missions, we don’t need peace. Israel is colonizing and expending its territory all the time, which it can because the USA allows it to do so and pays for it, while the “allies” of the USA follow the American lead and aid and abet in the enslavement of the Palestinian people (including the Egyptians, who oblige by building The Unbreachable Gaza Ghetto Wall on their side of Camp Gaza).
This will continue, until Israel gets to hear from its paymasters and supporters that it must stop. It has to be feared that this won’t happen in the near future. In the meantime, we’ll have “negotiations” (secret and not-so-secret), “peace-initiatives”, “peace missions”, and tours in the region by well meaning people to “undertake a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking Middle Eastern conflicts”, which will, undoubtedly, lead to yet another report in which the urgent need for peace is stressed.
As long as we have all those beautiful initiatives, while the USA keeps sustaining and bankrolling Israeli aggression and oppression, the Israeli’s don’t need to worry and can go on killing Palestinians and stealing land.
menno,
Anything worth having is worth making an effort for. Peace won’t fall in our laps, we must work for it, and that’s what this mission will do. Please support their efforts. They’re doing this for us.
Don,
I agree. Despite my criticism, I applaud their efforts.