And, now, who will accept responsibility for the failure?

Cartoon by Omayya Joha, the Oslo process depicted as an egg which after 10 years hatched an egg.

By Khalid Amayreh Finally, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has admitted, belatedly, of course, that 18 years of talks and negotiations with Israel have availed to nothing. In an interview with the pro-Fatah news agency, Maan, on Wednesday, 11 November, the prominent PA negotiator Sa’eb Ureikat was quoted as saying that all negotiations with Israel since the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 produced a zero result. “We have reached the decisive moment, we have to be frank with our people, we have failed to reach the two-state solution. “We have reached a conviction that Israel doesn’t want to see an independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967.” Well, Mr. Ureikat, great that you’ve waken up after 18 years of deep dormancy. This is probably the longest duration of hibernation one can imagine. But someone must be called to account for 18 years of failure, deception and lies. True, Israel is ultimately responsible for this failure, but you and your colleagues are also responsible for this monumental fiasco. Indeed, even if we were dealing with minor management failure at a small business, conclusions would have to made and those responsible would have to draw consequences. But we are talking about our national cause, about Palestine, the patrimony and future of our people, which means that failure at the leadership level amounts to criminal negligence bordering on treason. Can you Mr. Ureikat imagine the amount of suffering and losses we have incurred and are still incurring under the rubric of this hateful and barren process in which you personally were involved from the very inception? Can you imagine how much pain and tears we could have saved our people if you and your colleagues had not made these scandalous miscalculations? Someone somewhere has to show us the accountability sheet. After all, thousands of Palestinians lost their lives due to this huge illusion euphemistically and mendaciously called “peace process.” Moreover, Israel, the deceitful peace partner, exploited every minute and every hour of these 18 years to kill more Palestinian children, destroy more Palestinian homes, steal more Palestinian land and build more Jewish settlements while you and your bosses- Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas- kept fretting and babbling about a peace process that had actually more to do with political whoredom than with true efforts to achieve genuine peace. For the sake of this “peace process” Palestinians had to kill each other, our human rights had to be crushed, our civil liberties had to be violated and a police-state apparatus had to be imposed on our people. You and your colleagues thought, out of stupidity, ignorance and arrogance, that if you tormented our people on Israel’s behalf, which you have done extremely efficiently, Israel would give you our usurped legitimate rights on a silver platter and allow you to build a viable and independent state in the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Instead, Israel has treated you as worthless collaborators whose main job is to repress and pacify the Palestinians for Israel’s sake. Frankly, you deserve the humiliating treatment you have been receiving from the Zio-Nazis. You deserve it because you could have reached the same conclusion about Zionist mendacity from the first year or the second year of the hapless Oslo era. However, instead of “smelling it from afar,” you allowed yourselves to be bamboozled and duped for 18 long years, and whenever an honest-minded Palestinian advised you against further beguilement , you used all the bad epithets in the dictionary to describe these sincere people who sensed the falsehood and deception from day-1. We, the people of Palestine, need to know why it took you and your colleagues, people like Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo and ilk, 18 long years to discover that Israel is not sincere about peace. Were you intoxicated? Were you stupid? Were you gullible? Were you blind? And now after all this shameful legacy, do you still expect the Palestinian people to grant you another 18 years to further experiment with the national cause? Well, the least you should do now is really to quit with whatever semblance of dignity you may still have. Not doing so would be a scandalous expression of national irresponsibility. Yes, this is the logical conclusion that you must reach, otherwise you and your friends would be flying in the face of the Palestinian people. We cannot afford to see another 18 years of miscalculation, lies and failure? But in order to ensure that this won’t happen again, all the faces of failure would have to leave the scene, perhaps to retire and write their memoirs. Mr. Ureikat, you wrote a book recently entitled “Life is negotiation.” Perhaps this time you might have to write another book entitled “life is honor.”