The negotiators in Washington did not launch their action after they discovered new opportunities allowing them to move forward toward peace and turn the page of the conflict. They are actually meeting for the absolute opposite reason: their inability to achieve peace and their despair of seeing a breakthrough opening the horizon of a solution.

What brought Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmud Abbas together was the fact that negotiations have become a pattern governing the relations between two sides, none of which is capable of imposing its facts on the other despite the known and extreme flaw affecting the balance of powers. There is nothing at the level of the preambles which led to this meeting in the White House or in the consecutive failures of the indirect talks and the American and international efforts that could justify the call to hold direct talks other than the vision of the United States and the current administration to improve its image in the region following the disaster which affected it in Iraq.

However only the naïve (or whoever exceeds the naïve in terms of “innocence” and ignorance) would believe that a resonating failure in Iraq is the right prelude for the success in Palestine. The Americans must build bridges of explanations to justify the link between the defeat in Baghdad and the call to stage direct negotiations in Washington after having relinquished the bright promises that were made in Cairo University a over a year ago. As for the official Arab cover provided for the negotiations, whether through the support of the resumption of direct talks by the Follow-up Committee at the Arab League or the attendance of the inaugural ceremony by the Egyptian president and the Jordanian king, it does not mean much at the level of securing the success of Palestinian-Israeli dialogue. Indeed, there are too many disputes to count between the two sides and the Palestinian approval to head to the direct talks after a long period of reluctance is a mere undeserved favor offered by the authority to Barack Obama’s administration.

Jerusalem, the refugees and the border are among the issues in regard to which Netanyahu will only put forward his known positions that rise up to the level of prior conditions, which he says will be absent from the dialogue table around which he will be sitting. As for the settlements, they will only be present in the context of whether the freezing of the settlement activities will be discontinued or resumed on September 26, and the places in which the building activities “will be allowed” and the ones in which the freeze should be maintained, knowing that the settlers in the West Bank have already resumed the building works under the pretext of the two attacks which were launched by Hamas elements. In the meantime, one of the components of the Israeli negotiations school is the threatening of others of the sudden collapse of the negotiating government and the arrival of “the extremists” (as every new government in Israel is “the most extremist in its history”).

In other words, the chance of peace will “not slip away” according to Obama’s warning because it simply does not exist, while the proposals to partially freeze the settlement activities are mere verbal acrobatics that have no value. The problem lies in the fact that the other side, i.e. the Palestinian and Arab side, does not enjoy the minimum level of cohesion on the political level and at the level of the negotiations, and is not about to exploit any field activity such as the one undertaken by civilian activists against the separation wall or the armed operations carried out by the Palestinian opposition factions, in the negotiations mechanism to earn some sort of weight.

It is consequently an operation that is debasing and rendering the negotiations banal based on the expression used by Hannah Arendt in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” However, while Arendt’s Nazi-totalitarian evil is carried out by ordinary people who do not have any psychological illnesses or evil impulses which might differentiate them from the others, thus producing the horrors of the totalitarian regimes as they are performing their daily and ordinary tasks, the negotiations, despite their futility, will only produce the normalization of violence, settlements and occupation or the perpetuation of absurd attributes which are pursuing our people as though their fate.