Bankstown 2014

WugulOra 2014 Cultural Ambassadors
Elie Akouri came to Australia in 1973 and founded the Cedars of Lebanon Folkloric Group soon after. He is contributing a sprig of Lebanese Cedar. Elie says that “it is not with words that nations are built but with deeds” and we thank him for his deed today.

Writes Angela Arraj

On the 7th of January, Maronite-On-Mission, MOM, a group of 21 individuals (consisting of doctors, dentists, teachers, IT specialists and volunteers) left Australia and headed to the Philippines on a mission to assist the poor medically, socially, educationally and spiritually. 

On our first stop to Manila, our eyes were open to the poverty in the streets, with some families residing in one by two-metre boxes and others living in condensed, humid, broken and derelict areas. It would be wrong to call these homes as they were more so spaces of occupation.  

After a day spent in the capital, accompanied with Bishop Antoine-Charbel Tarabay, we flew to Naga where our main work began. 

Approximately fifty brothers welcomed us to their monastery and assisted us in our humane mission. 

The remaining ten days consisted of providing food packages to the poorest of the poor (those living in rubbish dumpsters), providing medical healthcare (tooth extractions, vaccinations, diagnosis, drug treatment etc), education to the youth and visiting the disabled and sick. 

Prior to the beginning of this mission, many of MOM’s members had prepared what we were going to provide to these disadvantaged people in the Philippines. Little did we know that the Philippinos would give us more than we had given them: The love, faith and community spirit.

The experience learnt from this mission was phenomenal. Whilst having nothing, the joy and gratitude on each individual’s face was seen at all times. 

Although many of us have a list of requirements for content living, the members of MOM certainly returned to Australia with a replenished and lively soul filled with Christ and His love. 

“Al Mustaqbal” congratulates Bishop Antoine Tarabay and all the members of Maronite-On-Mission on their excellent and successful mission to the Philippines and for providing help to people in dire need.

In Florida , an atheist created a case against Easter and Passover Holy days. He hired an attorney to bring a discrimination case against Christians and Jews and observances of their holy days. The argument was that it was unfair that atheists had no such recognized days. 

The case was brought before a judge. After listening to the passionate presentation by the lawyer, the judge banged his gavel declaring, "Case dismissed!"

The lawyer immediately stood and objecting to the ruling saying, 

"Your honor, How can you possibly dismiss this case? The Christians have Christmas, Easter and others. 

The Jews have Passover, Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, yet my client and all other atheists have no such holidays..." 

The judge leaned forward in his chair saying, "But you do. Your client, counselor, is woefully ignorant." 

The lawyer said," Your Honor, we are unaware of any special observance or holiday for atheists." 

The judge said, "The calendar says April 1st is April Fool's Day. Psalm 14:1 states, 'The fool says in his heart, there is no God.' Thus, it is the opinion of this court, that, if your client says there is no God, then he is a fool. Therefore, 

April 1st is his day. 

Court is adjourned..."

As Pope Francis is doing some incredibly progressive things to lead the Catholic Church worldwide, our bishop Antoine-Charbel Tarabay has joined the Maronite-On-Mission (MOM) delegation that flew on Tuesday to the Philippines to personally feed the homeless and console the sick. He is definitely taking our Australian Maronite Catholic Church to a new dimension and definitely commemorating Jesus’ gesture of humility.

May God bless our bishop and all the members of MOM and grant them the patience and the strength to carry on this excellent mission.

Thanks to my daughter Angela, who is part of this delegation, for sending me these photos and in particular for the photo of Bishop Tarabay eating McDonald’s during a stopover in Malaysia.

Raymond Abi-Arraj

Obsessed with the “Iran threat,” which leads to its warmongering in Syria, Saudi Arabia is acting like a bull in a china shop, wreaking regional havoc in an already Arab fragile political environment and creating what George Joffe’ of Cambridge University’s Centre of International Studies, on last December 30, called the “second Arab cold war,” the first being the Saudi-led cold war with the Pan-Arab Egypt of Gamal Abdul Nasser since the 1960s.

The kingdom stands now almost isolated politically. Its “going it alone” in the Syrian conflict has cornered Saudi Arabia into a self-inflicted foreign policy no-win deadlock, to be at odds with three super powers, including its strategic U.S. ally as well as Russia and China, in addition to regional heavy weights in Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Algeria, all who advocate a political settlement of the conflict.

Within the six-member Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC), the kingdom navigates no better.

It is at loggerheads with Qatar over the latter’s sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and consequently over the two countries’ disagreement over the removal of the MB-led Mohammad Morsi’s presidency.

Saudi Arabia’s hostility to the MB and its support of their removal from power in Egypt have reflected negatively on the Saudi-Turkish relations as well and had repercussions in Syria, leading to a restructuring of the insurgent political and military competing leaders who claim the representation of the Syrian people: Qatari and Turkish-supported leading figures and organizations were replaced by Saudi loyalists and accordingly, for example, the “Free Syrian Army” has simply disappeared to be replaced by the Islamic Front.

In the last GCC summit meeting in Kuwait, the other five members of the GCC, Oman in particular, rejected the kingdom’s proposal to develop the “cooperation council” into a confederation.

Despite the Saudi bailing out of the post-Morsi interim government in Cairo with a few billions of US dollars, Egypt doesn’t see eye to eye with Riyadh neither on Syria, where it joined the political solution advocates, nor on relations with Russia, which Egypt is now reviving to balance its US ties.

According to Wall Street Journal online on this January 5, the ensuing situation “is placing the White House in a growing diplomatic quandary as its regional allies fall into competing camps.”

The fact that the United States has chosen diplomacy instead of military confrontation with Tehran and Damascus has politically isolated the kingdom, which had hedged its bets on a western military intervention led or blessed by the United States. It feels betrayed by its American strategic ally. For a long time it relied on a long mistaken understanding that the US marines will be always available as mercenary soldiers ready to fight Saudi wars as long as the wealthy kingdom would pay for it, not aware of the US understanding of the vice versa.

However, instead of maneuvering wisely to backtrack to steer in harmony with the US, the kingdom stubbornly decided to “go it alone.”

In an op-ed published by The New York Times on last December 19, Saudi Ambassador to the UK, Prince Nawaf bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, said his country “will go it alone” against Syria and Iran, because it “will not stand idly by” while the US compromises Saudi Arabia’s security and “risk[s] the region’s stability.”

However, “in spite of its great wealth, the kingdom is not able to confront significant threats in its strategic environment on its own,” former Iran Coordinator in Israel’s National Security Council, Yoel Guzansky, wrote in Haaretz on last December 25, adding that as regards the Saudi “deterrence of and protection from Iran, … no other major power is currently interested in or capable of filling the role played by the United States.”

As of late this summer, Saudi Arabia had given $400 million in arms and other equipment to Syrian Salafi Jihadists, the Wall Street Journal online reported on last December 29.

True, Saudi warmongering over Syria and Iran could abort the Geneva II conference on Syria, scheduled to convene on this January 22 in Montreux, Switzerland to wrap up a political settlement, but in the end of the day the Saudi kingdom is more likely to end up the only loser in the face of a regional and worldwide consensus on political settlement as the only possible exit out of the Syrian conflict.

Logic dictates that Iran should be in and Saudi Arabia out, but the Geneva II guest list includes warmongering Saudi Arabia, but excludes Iran, which has been calling from the start for a political solution. Such an arrangement warns of including the only “spoiler-in-chief,” in the words of the Assistant Professor of International Studies at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania, Samer N. Abboud, writing in the Qatari www.aljazeera.com on this January 5.

The US and Russian top diplomats, John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov were scheduled during a meeting ahead of Geneva II to decide on Iran’s participation, according to Martin Nesirky, spokesperson for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

There is no way the kingdom could succeed in Syria where a US-led Qatari, Turkish, French and British alliance failed. Saudi former intelligence chief, former ambassador to the US and an influential member of the royal family, Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, admitted their failure when he told CNBC on this January 7 that the United States failed in its dealing with the Syrian conflict.

Thanks to Saudis, Syrian Conflict Spills over

The three-year old conflict in Syria has somewhat been contained within its own borders, but Saudi Arabia’s ongoing warmongering threatens to perpetuate the conflict and, more importantly, to spill it over regionally without achieving the Saudi proclaimed goal of changing the regime in Damascus at any cost.

The protracted Syrian conflict is already spilling over into neighboring countries through the Saudi sectarian agitation and incitement.

In the east, Iraqi officials had already appealed to the Saudi and other GCC governments to stop their intervention in Iraq’s internal affairs by arms and political, financial and logistical support to insurgents whose terrorism claimed the lives of some ten thousand overwhelmingly civilian Iraqis in 2013.

West of Syria, “Lebanon is paralyzed right now,” Gen. Michel Aoun, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), the second largest bloc in Lebanese parliament, told www.al-monitor.com on last December 13. After a two-week power vacuum, a prime minister-designate was nominated last April, but he has yet to form his government. His efforts have reached a dead end. The country since then was administrated by a caretaker government. No breakthrough seems imminent.

Saudi Arabia is the reason. It is exploiting its historical influence with loyalists and allies to prevent any inclusive government. It insists on the exclusion of Hizbullah as a precondition. The dead end polarized the country between pro-Syria and pro-Saudi camps. Riyadh, to guarantee a no-return by its loyalists, has recently fueled this polarization with a three billion “gift” over five years to arm the Lebanese army with French weapons in the hope of creating a counterbalance to Hezbullah, thus qualifying Lebanon for a civil war.

Meanwhile the northern and eastern parts of the country have slipped out of the control of the central government in Beirut and became a bastion of a Saudi-supported training camp, safe haven, manpower reservoir and a host of foreign Jihadists, fueling the Syrian conflict with arms and fighters.

Deterred by the military successes of the official Syrian Arab Army against them and falling back on Lebanon, those “Jihadists” are retaliating with the escalation of suicide bombings inside Lebanon, which are claiming more and more Lebanese civilian lives of all sects.

In the south in Jordan, where the kingdom succeeded for three years to keep balance between its geopolitical links with Syria and its strategic alliance with the US and Saudi Arabia, warnings against a mounting Saudi pressure to change course have been voiced recently.

For example, former premier and member of the upper house, Ma’arouf al-Bakhit, quoted by www.ammonnews.net on last December 30, warned that the disparity between the US and Saudi approaches to solving the Syrian conflict is pressuring Jordan, which is now facing the “challenge” of the possibility that Saudi Arabia “might act to impose its vision on Jordan,” indicating that “Syria no longer views Jordan as neutral” and accuses the kingdom of “hosting a Saudi – Israeli operations room to run military operations in Syria.” If Syria decides to act on this accusation, al-Bakhit added, it is “possible” to “move part of war” to “the interior of the kingdom’s territory.” Al-Bakhit should have cited Lebanon and Iraq as live precedents.

Further away, in Russia, the latest terror attacks in Volgograd were interpreted as an integral part of and attributed to the same terror network and mastermind in the Middle East, thus alienating the emerging Russian world polar. Russian media reports were implicating Saudi Arabia as responsible.

Saudi Strategy Fails in Syria

Since the so-called “Arab Spring” sprang out in Tunisia three years ago, the Saudi-led GCC monarchies succeeded in defending themselves against the tidal popular protests by a preempting financial bailout (Oman, Bahrain) or by direct military intervention (Bahrain) and by financial, political and indirect, but public nonetheless, military intervention to hijack the burgeoning revolutions in the “republics,” which have become more like china shops, either stateless or failed states, breathlessly in a life or death fight against “Islamist” terror organizations, which are armed and financed by none other than this same Saudi-led petrodollar monarchies and sheikhdoms.

This Saudi-led strategy is best manifested in Syria, where it met its first failure. Internal, regional and international consensus on political settlement and anti-terror campaign is gaining momentum to put an end to this strategy. Saudi Arabia has no other option but either to backtrack or being isolated. It either changes course or changes its leadership.

Its warmongering in Syria is portraying the kingdom in public opinion as the regional mastermind of violence and instability, vindicating American accusations, fueled by Israeli incitement, in the aftermath of the terror attacks in US on September 11, 2001 that the Saudi sectarian ideology is an incubator nurturing violence and terror, despite the kingdom’s long war against its own Islamist terrorists.

This sectarian ideology is creating a sectarian clash across the Middle East between two theocracies, the “Shiite” theocracy of Iran and the Sunni theocracy of Saudi Arabia, thus blurring the real dividing line of the regional battle between the US-protected Israeli occupation of Arab lands in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon and the self-proclaimed Iran – Syria axis of resistance. The survival of a secular Syria will be the first regional step towards the containment of this destructive sectarian clash.

Within this context it is noteworthy that Saudi Arabia, the godfather of the “Arab peace initiative,” postures as a peace maker against the Israeli occupying power, but insists on military solution in Syria whose Golan Heights is occupied by Israel since 1967.

Ironically, Saudi – Israeli crossroads seem to meet as the only regional relief for the kingdom. This approach of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is creating a fait accompli of a Saudi-Israeli marriage of convenience against Syria and Iran, which places the two countries on a higher moral ground among the overwhelming majority of Arabs and Muslims.

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

Once again the Iranian-Syrian Evil Of Axis Criminals brutally assassinate a patriotic, peaceful and intellectual Lebanese dignitary.  Today, in occupied and oppressed  Lebanon, the former Lebanese minister Mohamad Chatah was murdered in a massive car bomb blast that killed also and seriously injured tens of innocent citizens in Lebanon's capital, Beirut. 

Mohamad Chatah, the courageous outspoken 62 years old moderate academic and noble political figure strongly believed in a free and sovereign Lebanon, dialogue, the language of reason, and in the right to different views and political stances. 

Sadly, this morning, Chatah joined all the other patriotic and heroic Lebanese martyrs who with faith and devotion fell while struggling to reclaim Lebanon's confiscated independence, sovereignty and freedoms.  

There is no doubt that the Assad dictatorship intelligence and the terrorist Hezbollah Iranian militia are behind this horrible crime, as they were with evilness and shame accountable for all other similar crimes that occurred since 1960 and targeted Lebanese patriotic leaders, clergymen, officials and politicians.

It is worth mentioning that Chatah's assassination took place three weeks before the long-delayed opening of a trial of five Hezbollah suspects indicted for the 2005 bombing that killed former Lebanese PM Rafik al-Hariri with 21 other individuals. 

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), trial is due to start next month in Hague. The suspects are all prominent Hezbollah military members. Meanwhile this terrorist Iranian organization has strongly refused to cooperate with the court, alleging it is politically motivated.

In my capacity as a Canadian - Lebanese Human Rights Activist and political commentator, I strongly and with the harshest terms condemn  this barbaric and terrorist crime and call on the free world countries to help the Lebanese people and its patriotic and peaceful leaders by all available means and resources to reclaim Lebanon's independence that is confiscated by Hezbollah,  the Iranian-Syrian Axis of Evil military proxy

Deepest sympathies are extended to the families and friends of those killed in today, and all wish for a speedy recovery to all the injured. 

May the souls of all those innocent victims that were killed today rest in peace.

by Dr Dennis Walker, PSI Monash University.

I am in Southern Thailand.  The Muslim shop-keeper class, and their customers, are viewing the turmoil in Bangkok with great interest live from the Bangkok TV stations.

The chaos and disorientation of "the Siam infidels" is very encouraging to the Patani Malay nationalists.  One of their slogans is "Thailand akan di-hanchurkan dan Patani akan Merdeka" (Thailand will destroy itself and Patani will become independent).

However, the majority of conscious Muslims here seem to believe that the Thai polity will survive the crisis, drawn-out though it has been, but hope that the Thai system's weakening might one day make it present for serious negotiations for the autonomy solution.   The Muslims of Southern Thailand want provincial devolution and Arabic-script Malay to be made a medium of governmental administration.

The highlight of the evening was the Bishop’s message: “As Cardinal George Pell says, ‘the Maronites are the backbone of the Catholic Church’. It is all about a revolution and hope. As Saint Aghostinos said ‘hope has two facets: Anger and Courage- Anger to stop what is not right and courage to effect change. Maronites are invited to have courage in order to change for New Horizons and cooperation is the key word.

Bishop Tarabay then proceeded to thank the members of the Maronite Catholic Society stressing on the word “LOVE” and quoted St Paul to deliver his Christmas message inviting all to practise what we preach, to take action and not mere words...and carry out an introspection and dig deep into the inner self....He wished for the MCS to open the door for new members and hoped for a significant increase of members by this time next year...and stressed that the increase should encompass both men and women...in order for the MCS to be the real force within the Maronite Church....

The Bishop took time to thank the Maronite Youth and congratulated them on the mention of their name in the NSW Parliament following an Anti-Gay Marriage letter they had written to a Member of the Upper House. 

Finally his Excellency wished all a Blessed Christmas to: Consul-General of Lebanon, Sister Josephine Wehbe, representing all the Maronite Sisters, all the clergy present and to all the members of the Maronite Catholic Society and their families- alluding to Professor Philip Salem, symbol of international success, currently visiting Australia, adding that the secret of Prof Salem’s success lies in the fact that he has loved every patient that he treated. If there is no love, there is no success.

To wrap up and before the MCS members exchanged Christmas greetings they presented Bishop Tarabay with a valuable gift: a Golden Cup bearing the following inscriptions: “Faithfulness and Openness”(Bishop Tarabay’s Motto),“Token of Loyalty” and “From the Maronite Catholic Society”.

Raymond Abi-Arraj

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to start his ninth trip of shuttle diplomacy between Palestinian and Israeli leaders on this December 11. However, the bridging “security arrangements,” which he proposed less than a week earlier on his last trip, have backfired and are now snowballing into a major crisis with Palestinian negotiators who view Kerry’s “ideas” as a coup turning the US top diplomat from a mediator into an antagonist.

Kerry’s “ideas” had provoked a “real crisis” and “will drive Kerry's efforts to an impasse and to total failure,” the secretary general of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Abed Rabbo, said on this December 9.

Resumption of the peace talks and U.S. involvement in the negotiations with Israel were both on record Palestinian demands. Disappointed by the deadlocked negotiations and more by the way Kerry decided finally to get his country involved, the Palestinian presidency expectedly stands now to regret both demands.

Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy during his current trip seems more aimed at controlling the damage his “ideas - proposal” caused than at facilitating the deadlocked Palestinian – Israeli bilateral talks.

On this December 6, Kerry said that (160) American security specialists and diplomats, headed by General John Allen, the former commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, had drafted the “proposal,” believing “that we can contribute ideas that could help both Israelis and Palestinians get to an agreement.”

According to leaks published by mainstream Israeli media, including Israeli Channel 10 news, Haaretz, Maariv, Yedioth Ahronoth and DEBKAfile, as well as by the official Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam, the U.S. “security arrangements” propose:

* Demilitarization of the future State of Palestine.

* U.S. monitoring of its demilitarization.

* To put the border crossings into Jordan under joint Israeli-Palestinian control.

* Maintaining an Israeli military presence deployed along the western side of Jordan River after the establishment of a Palestinian state.

* Installing Israeli early warning stations on the eastward slopes of the West Bank highlands.

* Postponement of arrangements for the final status of Gaza Strip, i.e. severing the strip from the status planned by Kerry’s proposal for the West Bank.

* All of the foregoing are on the background of the U.S. recognition of an understanding that the large Israeli illegal colonial settlements on the West Bank would be annexed to Israel, according to the letter sent by former U.S. President George W. Bush to the comatose former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon in April 2004, to which the incumbent administration of President Barak Obama is still committed.

Kerry and his administration have obviously coordinated a political coup by the adoption of the Israeli preconditions for recognizing a Palestinian state almost to the letter, turning the Palestinian priorities upside down and changing the terms of reference for the Palestinian – Israeli negotiations, which Kerry succeeded to resume and sponsor late last July.

When he announced the resumption of talks on last July 29, Kerry declared that his goal would be to help the Israelis and Palestinians to reach a “final status agreement’” within nine months.

Now, President Barak Obama, speaking at Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum in Washington last Saturday, says there would have to be a “transition process” and that the Palestinians wouldn’t get “everything they want on day one” under an accord, which initially may exclude Gaza, and let the “contiguous Palestinian state,” which he had previously promised, wait. The aim of the negotiations now is to reach a “framework that would not address every single detail,” he added.

And now Kerry, on the same occasion, was speaking about a “basic framework” and establishing “guidelines” for “subsequent negotiations” for a “full-on peace treaty,” i.e., in his game of words, another “road map.”

Kerry moreover hinted that the negotiations might have to extend beyond the agreed upon nine months, thus, from a Palestinian perspective, planning to buy Israel more time to create more colonial facts on the occupied Palestinian ground.

Kerry’s “ideas” alienated the Palestinian “peace camp” and negotiators led by Fatah, which rules the Palestinian Authority (PA) and leads the PLO, who have put “all their eggs in the U.S. basket” for the past two decades, let alone all the other PLO member factions who are against the resumption of the negotiations with Israel for pragmatic reasons, but first of all because they did not trust the U.S. mediator; Kerry has just vindicated their worst fears. Non-member organizations like Hamas and al-Jihad oppose the negotiations as a matter of principle.

On December 8, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, according to The Times of Israel three days later, met with the American consul general in Jerusalem, Michael Ratney, and formally rejected the proposal, saying that the Palestinian position was “unequivocal”: no Israeli presence, though the Palestinians would tolerate a third-party military presence.

On the same day on the occasion of the first 1987 Palestinian Intifada against the 1967 Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, the PLO Executive Committee in a statement said the Palestinian people will not accept Kerry’s proposed plan, which the committee’s secretary general Abed Rabbo described as “extremely vague” and “open-ended.”

On the same day in Qatar, the PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erakat, commenting on Kerry’s proposals, said that the Palestinian leadership “perhaps” committed a “strategic mistake” by agreeing to the resumption of negotiations with Israel instead of seeking first the membership of international organizations to build on the UN General Assembly’s recognition last year of Palestine as a non-member state.

The former second in command in Erakat’s negotiating team, Mohammad Shtayyeh who resigned his mission recently because there was no “serious Israeli partner,” called for replacing the U.S. sponsorship of the negotiations by an international one, on the lines of the Geneva conferences for Iran and Syria, because the U.S. sponsorship is “unbalanced.”

Former negotiator Hassan Asfour wrote that kerry’s plan, which he described as a “conspiracy,” would “liquidate the Palestine Question and end any hope for a Palestinian state,” adding that its rejection is a “necessity and national duty” because it “violates the red national lines.”

Member of the PLO executive committee and former Palestinian chief negotiator, Ahmad Qurei’, said Kerry’s plan replaces the land for peace formula by a security for peace one as the basis for Palestinian – Israeli talks.

Abed Rabbo said last week in Ramallah that if the U.S. accepts that final borders are set according to what Israel determines are its security needs “all hell with break loose.”

Kerry who on his last eighth trip warned Israelis of a Palestinian third Intifada seems himself laying the ground for one. His “ideas” clash head to head with the Palestinian repeated and plain rejection of long or short term interim or transitional arrangements based only on Israel’s security.

He seems obsessed with Israel’s security as “the top priority” for Washington, both in nuclear talks with Iran and peace talks with the Palestinians. In his press availability at Ben Gurion International Airport on December 6 he used the word “security” and “secure” twenty times in relation with Israel, but no words at all about the Israeli “occupation” and “settlements.”

U.S. commitment to Israel’s security is “ironclad,” “spans decades,” “permanent,” “paramount” and a “central issue” in the work of the United States for both final agreements with Iran and Palestinians, he said. President Obama last Saturday said that this commitment is “sacrosanct.”

George Friedman of Stratfor on December 3 reported that “Israel's current strategic position is excellent” and “faces no existential threats.” About “the possibility that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon,” Friedman wrote: “One of the reasons Israel has not attempted an air strike, and one of the reasons the United States has refused to consider it, is that Iran's prospects for developing a nuclear weapon are still remote.”

Despite objections to Kerry’s “security arrangements” by the Israeli defense and foreign cabinet ministers, Moshe Ya’alon and Avigdor Lieberman, the chief Israeli negotiator and justice minister Tzipi Livni admitted that the proposed American security framework addresses a large part of Israel’s security needs.

Obsession with “Israel’s security” could not be interpreted as simply a naïve commitment out of good faith by an old hand veteran of foreign policy like Kerry.

More likely Kerry is dictating to and pressuring the Palestinian presidency with the only option “to take” his proposal or “leave it,” to be doomed either way, by its own people or by the U.S.-led donors to the PA. With friends like Kerry, Palestinian Abbas for sure needs no enemies.

Ironically, Kerry’s “ideas” create a solid political ground for a Palestinian consensus that would be an objective basis for ending the Palestinian divide and reviving the national unity between the PLO in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a prerequisite to be able to stand up to Kerry’s “coup.”

Such a development however remains hostage to a decision by President Abbas who is still swimming against the national tide because he has made peace making through negotiations only the goal of his life and political career.

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com