Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Annapolis for President George W. Bush’s year-long Virtual Reality roadshow as he enters the final year of his eight-year reign as the world’s leading con artist.

Looking for a ‘legacy’ to leave behind come January 2009, and with only Disaster trailing him like a shadow for seven years, George has in desperation decided to invent one. Co-starring in his year-long Middle East Peace parody are Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert, both leading con artists in their own right; one of them pretends to negotiate, the other only because his banker demands he do so. [The joke has Bush asking to which bank he should send the money, and Abbas replying, ‘West Bank’.]

The next Virtual Reality Show organized by the White House is scheduled for sometime after January 20, 2009, featuring an all-new cast. But the same old story. All talk and no resolution.

What justifies such cynicism even before the talks proper get going? It’s the realization that reaching a peaceful, secure and durable settlement with the Palestinians is not of overriding importance for the Israelis. It never was, and never will be. Israel could have had all of that 20 years ago had it conceded just 22 per cent of the occupied land vital for a viable Palestinian state. Twenty years on, being militarily stronger than ever before and with vastly more permanent Jewish settlements in the conquered areas, it simply boils down to might being right. Anybody who doesn’t like it can lump it.

Recent polls indicate that not more than 10 percent of Israeli Jews favour total withdrawal from the occupied territories, and two-thirds of the Jewish public fully support a permanent Israeli presence in the occupied territories. Not exactly the right recipe for success.

Cynicism about the negotiations stems not only from the feeling of déjà vu but also from juxtaposing what Olmert, the central character in this drama, said in the run-up to Annapolis with what he did back at home just two weeks prior to the scheduled ceremonial launch of the talkathon.

Said Olmert, "Annapolis is a landmark on the path to negotiations and of the genuine effort to achieve the realization of the vision of two nations: the State of Israel - the nation of the Jewish people; and the Palestinian state - the nation of the Palestinian people." Israel’s Haaretz newspaper quoted him as saying, "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."

Does that sound like the voice of intransigence? Hardly, except for the inevitable ‘but’ : he also said at Annapolis that he was there "not in order to settle historical accounts", thus brusquely brushing aside the suffering of the Palestinians who, he nevertheless conceded, had been "living for decades in camps, disconnected from the environment in which they grew up . . .". With that, Olmert effectively denied Israeli responsibility for the Palestinians’ plight. More importantly, it implied that Israel would not accept the refugees’ right of return to their original homes under United Nations Resolution 194.

Israel is a past master at maintaining an image as the only party in the conflict seeking peace and being the victim of continued Arab terrorism, while effectively concealing its own resort to systematic high-tech terror against Palestinians in their own land. But that has not dampened George W. Bush’s unashamedly open support for Israel’s ruthless domination of the Palestinians. To George, Israel can do no wrong.

Jeff Halper, an Israeli peace activist, recognized Olmert’s utterances for what they were, and placed on record in CounterPunch magazine a whole host of pre-conditions that Israel had laid down just two weeks prior to Annapolis. Significantly, the mainstream media in the west didn’t bother to inform readers of these new Israeli ‘roadblocks’, content to hail Annapolis with meaningless phrases such as ‘a major leap forward’ and ‘a hopeful beginning’. [The ‘hope springs eternal’ crap will always sell, won’t it?]

The ‘roadblocks’ Halper revealed:

Two weeks before the Annapolis meeting was scheduled to convene, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, passed a law that a two-thirds majority would be required to approve any change in the status of Jerusalem. [Declaring Israel the winner even before the race was run!]

The Road Map, the very basis of negotiations, required Israel to freeze its settlement construction. Having already expropriated more than 40 per cent of the West Bank and reserved it for ‘settlements’, Israel announced that it defines the areas considered "occupied" as only those areas falling outside its major settlements and "greater" Jerusalem. Thus the territory to be negotiated got unilaterally reduced from 22 per cent to a mere 15 per cent, and that, too, truncated into fragmented cantons.

As recently as 19 November, Olmert said that Israel was committed to "dismantling the illegal outposts". But according to the Road Map, there is no distinction between legal or illegal outposts because all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and the ‘freeze’ applied to all Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem.

Although the Palestinians had, as far back as 1988, formally recognized the state of Israel when they accepted the two-state solution, they were now required, as a pre-condition to any negotiations, to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. "Not only does that introduce an entirely new element that Israel knows the Palestinians will not accept," observed Halper, "but it prejudices the equal status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, a full 20 per cent of the Israeli population. This leads the way to transfer, to ethnic cleansing. Israel’s Foreign Minister recently told a press conference that the future of Israel’s Arab citizens is in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel itself."

Finally, implementation of any agreement at Annapolis must await the complete cessation of all resistance on the part of the Palestinians. Given the fact that Israel views any resistance, armed or non-violent, as a form of terrorism, this renders Annapolis an exercise in futility.

Said Halper: "The end result, towards which Israel has been progressing deliberately and systematically since 1967, can only be called apartheid, which means ‘separation’ in Afrikaner, precisely the term Israel uses to describe its policy (‘hafrada’ in Hebrew). And it is apartheid in the strict sense of the term: one population separating itself from the rest, then dominating them permanently and institutionally through a political regime like an expanded Israel locking the Palestinians into dependent and impoverished cantons." The draconian grid of checkpoints that suffocate the Palestinian population remains firmly in place.

It is necessary, even as a postscript, to focus briefly on Bush’s obsessive and uncritical support for Israel over the past seven years. Is his fondness for Jews related in some way to knowledge of the holocaust? Maybe, but not in the way most people are likely to imagine. In the light of the Bush family history, Freudian doctrine strongly suggests a subconscious attempt at atonement.

In Secret War Against the Jews, published in 1994, authors Mark Aarons and John Loftus use official US documents to establish how George’s maternal great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, and grandfather, Prescott Bush, actively helped finance a young Nazi to power, then funded Hitler’s war leading to the holocaust against the Jews.

But let’s keep that story for another time.