Though the talks have realistically been over for a month now, since Israel reneged on its last prisoner releases, today marks the official end to the current peace process, and has Israelis looking back at the roughly nine months of negotiations.
Those hoping for peace didn’t get much out of the talks, as they never really got off the ground and stalled on seemingly every point. The hawks did much better, with Israel approving nearly 14,000 settlement homes in the occupied West Bank during the negotiations.
While hawks often griped about the peace process, the government regularly unveiled grand new construction plans to try to “placate” them, and ended up expanding settlements massively, the only tangible result of talks no one expected to net a real deal.
Peace Now, which released the final figures on the settlement construction, noted that the current right-far-right government has built three times as many settlements as any other in Israeli history, and the government is expected to increase the rate of expansion even further now that the talks are over, couching it as “retaliation.”
Israel’s Defense Ministry is also continuing to demolish Palestinian homes and buildings in the West Bank as the expansion grows. Today, Israeli troops moved against the village of Krirbet al-Taweel, destroying several buildings, including a mosque.
Meanwhile John Kerry was there wanting to negotiate, not before or after.
There is NO 'peace process' – the ONLY peace that Israel wants is to steal all of the land of the West Bank; to operate Gaza as a concentration camp; to blackmail the US into continuing to provide billions of dollars to Israel.
Talk about negotiating in bad faith! The "peace talks" were never anything but a farce.