Middle East Peace Talks Yawn.

I have it on very good authority that that the Fatah faction will be withdrawing from the process within the next seven days so there seems little point going into much detail.

However the latest drama in this pointless process is over the issue of Jewish settlements. This refers to Palestinian territory that was militarily occupied by Israel during the 1967 war. Since then Israel has been actively encouraging Jews to go and live on the land in order to racially purify it. This is remarkably similar to what the Nazis did when they invaded Austria. On that occasion the actions of the Nazis led to something known as the second world war so the practice of settling occupied land is strictly forbidden by international law because it only ever leads to more war. Apparently though the Geneva Conventions don't apply to Israel so they've been allowed to happily carry on with the practice for the last 40 odd years.

In order to coerce Fatah and, more importantly, the USA into this latest charade of peace talks Israel very generously placed a ten month ban on settlement building. With the latest round of peace talks in place Israel allowed that ban to expire yesterday (26/9) and waited literally seconds before restarting building work. With a straight face Israel then offered Fatah the promise that it would only allow settlement building to carry on at a slower rate provided that Fatah made the major concession of giving the peace talks even a hint of legitimacy by remaining part of them. The objective of this move and the entire process for the Israelis is simply to relieve some of the diplomatic pressure on them while continuing to expand their borders by slowly nibbling away at Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. It's the same trick the Israelis have been playing since the 1970's so I surprised Fatah are still falling for it.

In order to get the Americans to put pressure on Fatah to continue in the talks Israel has been making lots of war like noises over the last couple of weeks. Firstly they launched a cyber-attack on Iran. This involved infecting the nations computers with a virus that seizes control of the computerised control systems used in industrial plants including Iran's newly opened nuclear power plant. That move could be considered many things, including an act of war, and has been causing headaches across the intelligence community. However it most certainly raises the spectre of Israel taking unilateral military action against Iran and ruining the US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the process. Secondly Israel circulated a propaganda video which apparently showed Hamas threatening to kill Gilad Shilat, a Israeli solider Hamas have been holding as a prisoner of war since 2006. Again this could be many things but certainly raises the spectre of Israel launching another war against Gaza.

An Israeli attack on Iran, Gaza or, as is more likely, Lebanon would put a lot of people, especially the US President in a very difficult position. Therefore this war like talk sounds like nothing more then an open threat from the Israelis to President Obama; "Either let Israel do whatever it wants or Israel will kill a lot of people!"

In my experience that attitude leaves no basis for any sort of negotiation let alone peace talks. So with no possibility of these talks ending in peace the only real question I've got is how much damage is going to be done to America before this whole charade is allowed to end.