The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks beginning in Jerusalem proceed within a framework of assumptions that merit careful thought.

One prevailing assumption is that there are two options: either a two-state settlement will be reached, or there will be a "shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality -- a state 'from the sea to the river'," an outcome posing "an immediate existential threat of the erasure of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state" because of what is termed "the demographic problem," a future Palestinian majority in the single state.

This particular formulation is by former Israeli Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin, but the basic assumptions are near universal in political commentary and scholarship. They are, however, crucially incomplete. There is a third option, the most realistic one: Israel will carry forward its current policies with full U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic support, sprinkled with some mild phrases of disapproval.

The policies are quite clear. Their roots go back to the 1967 war and they have been pursued with particular dedication since the Oslo Accords of September 1993.

The Accords determined that Gaza and the West Bank are an indivisible territorial entity. Israel and the U.S. moved at once to separate them, which means that any autonomy Palestinians might gain in the West Bank will have no direct access to the outside world.

A second step was to carry forward the creation of a vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem, incorporating it within Israel, as its capital. This is in direct violation of Security Council orders and is a serious blow to any hope for a viable Palestinian entity. A corridor to the east of the new Greater Jerusalem incorporates the settler town of Ma'aleh Adumim, established in the 1970s but built primarily after the Oslo Accords, virtually bisecting the West Bank.

Corridors to the north including other settler towns divide what is to remain under some degree of Palestinian control -- "Bantustans," as they were called by one of the main architects of the policy, Ariel Sharon, in a reference to the territory set aside for black South Africans during the apartheid era.

Meanwhile Israel is incorporating the territory on the Israeli side of the "separation wall" cutting through the West Bank, taking arable land and water resources and Palestinian villages.

Included are the settlement blocs that "will remain part of Israel in any possible future peace agreement," as stated by Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev as the current negotiations were announced.

The International Court of Justice ruled that all of this is illegal, and the Security Council had already ruled that all of the settlements are illegal. The U.S. joined the world in accepting that conclusion in the early years of the occupation. But under Ronald Reagan, the position was changed to "harmful to peace," and Barack Obama has weakened it further to "not helpful to peace."

Israel has also been clearing the Jordan Valley of Palestinians while establishing Jewish settlements, sinking wells, and otherwise preparing for eventual integration of the region within Israel.

That will complete the isolation of any West Bank Palestinian entity. Meanwhile huge infrastructure projects throughout the West Bank, from which Palestinians are barred, carry forward the integration to Israel, and presumably eventual annexation.

The areas that Israel is taking over will be virtually free of Arabs. There will be no new "demographic problem" or civil rights or anti-apartheid struggle, contrary to what many advocates of Palestinian rights anticipate in a single state.

There remain open questions. Notably, pre-Obama, U.S. presidents have prevented Israel from building settlements on the E1 site -- a controversial area in the West Bank that Israel hopes to develop -- which would complete the separation of Greater Jerusalem from Palestinian-controlled area. What will happen here is uncertain.

As the negotiations opened, Israel made its intentions clear by announcing new construction in East Jerusalem and scattered settlements, while also extending its "national priority list" of settlements that receive special subsidies to encourage building and inducements for Jewish settlers.

Obama made his intentions clear by appointing as chief negotiator Martin Indyk, whose background is in the Israeli lobby, a close associate of negotiator and presidential adviser Dennis Ross, whose guiding principle has been that Israel has "needs," which plainly overcome mere Palestinian wants.

These developments bring to the fore a second common assumption: that Palestinians have been hindering the peace process by imposing preconditions. In reality, the U.S. and Israel impose crucial preconditions. One is that the process must be in the hands of the United States, which is an active participant in the conflict on Israel's side, not an "honest broker." A second is that the illegal Israel settlement activities must be allowed to continue.

There is an overwhelming international consensus in support of a two-state settlement on the internationally recognized border, perhaps with "minor and mutual adjustments" of this 1949 cease-fire line, in the wording of much earlier U.S. policy. The consensus includes the Arab states and the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran). It has been blocked by the U.S. and Israel since 1976, when the U.S. vetoed a resolution to this effect brought by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

The rejectionist record continues to the present. Washington's most recent veto of a Security Council resolution on Palestinian territory was in February 2011, a resolution calling for implementation of official U.S. policy -- an end to expansion of Israel's illegal settlements. And the rejectionist record goes far beyond the Security Council.

Also misleading is the question whether the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would accept a "Palestinian state." In fact, his administration was the first to countenance this possibility when it came into office in 1996, following Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who rejected this outcome. Netanyahu's associate David bar-Illan explained that some areas would be left to Palestinians, and if they wanted to call them "a state," Israel would not object -- or they could call them "fried chicken."

His response reflects the operative attitude of the U.S.-Israel coalition to Palestinian rights.

In the region, there is great skepticism about Washington's current revival of the "peace process." It is not hard to see why.
(c) 2013 Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice. His most recent book is Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire.

I DON'T know if the Guinness Book of World Records has a special section for Chutzpah.

If it does not, it should. That's the one competition where we might take home a few gold medals.

The first one would surely go to Binyamin Netanyahu.

THIS WEEK, on the eve of the first round of serious negotiations between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu did two interesting things: he announced plans for several large new settlement projects and he accused the Palestinians of grievous incitement against Israel.

Let's take the settlements first. As explained by Israeli diplomats to their American colleagues, and repeated by all the Israeli media, poor Netanyahu had no choice. John Kerry compelled him to release 104 Palestinian prisoners as a "confidence building measure". After such a momentous concession, he had to pacify his extremist colleagues in the Likud and in the cabinet. A thousand new housing units in the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem) was the very minimum.

The agreement to release prisoners let loose a veritable Witches' Sabbath. All the newspapers and TV news programs were awash with blood – the blood on the hands of the Palestinian murderers. "Murderers" was the de rigeur appellation. Not "fighters", not "militants", not even "terrorists". Just plain "murderers".

All the prisoners to be released were convicted before the Oslo agreement was signed, meaning that they have been in prison for at least 20 years. The probability that they would take part in future bloody activity must be minimal.

Some of the victims' families carried out staged stormy protests, with bloody hands and blood-smeared flags. The media vied with each other in publishing pictures of weeping mothers (TV loves weeping women) waving photos of their killed sons and blood-curdling descriptions of the attacks in which they died. (Some of which were indeed atrocious.)

However, not so long ago, Netanyahu had agreed to release more than a thousand prisoners in return for one captured Israeli soldier. This means that one single soldier is ten times more precious than the chances of peace.

The actual release bordered on the grotesque. In order to avoid photos in the morning papers of the rapturous reception of the prisoners by their families, the actual release of the first 26 prisoners took place after midnight, in a shroud of mystery. Which reminds one of the Biblical passage, in which David mourned for Saul, slain in battle with the Philistines: "Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon (both Philistine towns), lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph." (II Samuel 1)

Does all this testify to an atmosphere of peace on the eve of peacemaking? Wait, there is more to come.

THE DAY the new settlement projects were announced, Netanyahu fired off to John Kerry a furious protest against the ongoing Palestinian "incitement" against Israel. This missive could interest the adjudicators of the Guinness record for Chutzpah.

The main evidence for Mahmoud Abbas' perfidy, in Netanyahu's letter, is a text in which a minor Palestinian official called for a Palestinian state "from Rosh Hanikra to Eilat." Rosh Hanikra (Ras Naqura in Arabic) is on the Lebanese border, so this state would include all of Israel. Also, during a soccer event in Ramallah, anti-Israeli shouts were heard.

Awful, just awful. Kerry should spring from his seat in fury. Were it not for the fact that almost all leading Likud members proclaim that the whole of historical Palestine belongs to Israel, and Naftali Bennett, a pillar of Netanyahu's government coalition, just announced that the Palestinians "can forget about" a Palestinian state.

Not to mention a certain Daniel Seaman, the former director of the Ministry of Explaining (that's its real name. I didn't make it up. Israelis don't do propaganda, God forbid. Seaman has just been appointed to Netanyahu's own office, in charge of "explaining" on the internet. This week he posted a message on facebook addressed to Saeb Erekat, the chief of he Palestinian delegation to the peace talks, telling him to "go and f**k himself". To the theological declaration by the Church of Scotland that the Jews have no special claim to Palestine he posted the reply: "We don't give a [obscenity] for what you say."

This genius of public relations is now setting up a clandestine group of Israeli university students, who will be paid to flood the international social media with government "explaining" material.

As for soccer fans, the Betar stadium, which is linked to the Likud, resounds at every match with shouts of "Death to the Arabs!"'

So, for what the bell tolls? Nor for peace, it seems.

ONE OF the problems is that absolutely nobody knows what Netanyahu really wants. Perhaps not even he.

The Prime Minister is now the loneliest person in Israel. He has no friends. He trusts nobody, and nobody around him trusts him.

His colleagues in the Likud leadership quite openly despise him, regarding him as a man of no principles, without a backbone, giving in to every pressure. This seems to have been the opinion of his late father, who once declared that Binyamin would make a good foreign minister, but certainly not a prime minister.

In the government he is quite alone. Previous prime ministers had a close group of ministers to consult with. Golda Meir had a "kitchen cabinet". Netanyahu has no one. He does not consult with anyone. He announces his decisions, and that's that.

In his previous terms he had at least a group of confidants in his office. These officials have been driven out one by one by Sarah, his wife.

So, as one commentator this week reminded us, this lonely man, unaided by any group of trusted advisors, experts or confidants, is called upon to decide, quite by himself, the fate of Israel for generations to come.

THIS WOULD not have been so dangerous if Netanyahu had been a Charles de Gaulle. Unfortunately, he isn't.

De Gaulle was one of the towering figures of the 20th century. Cold, aloof, overbearing, intensely disliked by the rest of the world's leaders, this extreme right-wing general took the historic decision to give up the huge country of Algeria, four times as big as metropolitan France.

Algeria, it must be remembered, was officially not a colony, not an occupied territory, but a part of France proper. It had been under French rule for more than a century. More than a million settlers saw it as their homeland. Yet de Gaulle made the lonely decision to give it up, putting his own life in grave danger.

Since then, Israeli leftists have yearned for "an Israeli de Gaulle", who would do their job for them, according to the old Hebrew adage that "the work of the righteous is done by others" – others meaning, one assumes, people who are not quite so righteous.

There is, of course, one important difference. De Gaulle was supported by his conservative allies, the tycoons of the French economy. These sober-minded capitalists saw how the Germans were taking over the economy of Europe, which was in the process of uniting, while France was wasting its resources on an expensive, totally useless colonial war in North Africa. They wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible, and de Gaulle was their man.

Netanyahu is as close to the Israeli tycoons as de Gaulle was to his, but our tycoons don't give a damn about peace. This attitude may change, if ever the de-legitimization of Israel becomes a serious economic burden.

In this context; the boycott imposed by the European Union against the products of the settlements may be a harbinger of things to come.

By the way, the petition submitted by me and Gush Shalom in the Supreme Court, against the new law to penalize advocates of a boycott of the settlements, will be heard only next February. The court is obviously shrinking back from handling this hot potato. But it paid us a unique compliment: "Avnery v. the Knesset" will be heard by nine supreme judges, almost the full membership of the court.

SO IS this "peace process" serious? What does Netanyahu want?

Does he want to enter the history books as the "Israeli de Gaulle", the wise Zionist leader who put an end to 120 years of conflict?

Or is he just another smart guy who is making a tactical move to avoid a tussle with the US and stop the de-legitimization process at least for a while?

As it looks now, de Gaulle in his heaven can relax. No competitor in sight.

There is not the slightest indication of any peace orientation. Quite the contrary. Our government is using the new "peace process" as a smoke screen behind which the settlement bulldozer is working full time.

The government condemns the EU boycott resolution because it "harms the peace process". It rejects all demands for freezing the settlements because this would "obstruct the peace process". Investing hundreds of millions in settlements which under any imaginable peace agreement will have to be evacuated is, it seems, favorable for peace.

On February 4, 1999, four plainclothes New York City police officers summarily executed Amadou Diallo in a barrage of 41 bullets, setting in motion a legal battle that challenged the constitutionality of the city's stop-and-frisk policies. Last week, federal judge Shira Scheindlin ruled in favor of the Black and Latino plaintiffs in a class action suit, declaring that New York's stop-and-frisk policies amount to racially selective violations of the Constitution's prohibitions against unreasonable searches. In her 195-page decision, Scheindlin noted that more Blacks and Latinos have been accosted by police on the streets of New York since 2004 than actually live in city. Stop-and-frisk, as practiced by the NYPD, is designed to "instill fear" in the targeted groups, said the judge, and "there is a sufficient basis for inferring discriminatory intent." Scheindlin ordered that:

* an independent monitor, accountable to the courts, oversee stop-and-frisk activities;

* police supervisors cease enforcing a "quota" system that compels officers to make unwarranted stops;

* cops in selected precincts wear video cameras, to record their actual behavior in confronting citizens on the street; and,

* establishment of a Joint Remedial Process, in which community residents in high-volume-stops neighborhoods would make their opinions and proposals known.

Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, have comported themselves with such brazen racial arrogance as to welcome a grand confrontation with the court - in much the same manner as white officialdom behaved in Dixie in the Fifties and early Sixties. Back in June, amidst voluminous court testimony on wildly disproportionate police stops of young Black and brown men, the mayor told listeners to his weekly radio show: "I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they say."

The dignity of whites, who make up only nine percent of those stopped, is precious, while the rights of Blacks are of no consequence to the mayor. Commissioner Kelly has been Bloomberg's enforcer of race-based law during the whole period scrutinized by Judge Scheindlin. Kelly admitted to a Black state senator and retired police captain that the purpose of stop-and-frisk was to "instill fear" among Black and Latino men that they would be stopped and frisked whenever they left their homes - a quote cited by the judge.

Bloomberg and Kelly have good reason to relish a throw-down, since the ideological foundations of their policing positions are shared by most whites (60 percent of white New Yorkers support stop-and-frisk) and by federal law enforcement - albeit in stealth fashion, under President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Kelly, whose reputation is inextricably entwined with stop-and-frisk, was under serious consideration as the next head of Homeland Security. "I think Ray Kelly is one of the best there is," said President Obama, "so he's been an outstanding leader in New York."

Eric Holder, whose sins of mass Black incarceration are legion, claims to welcome the appointment of a federal monitor over the NYPD. Fortunately, the monitor would be answerable to the court, not Holder's office. The nation's first Black top law enforcement officer has allowed his U.S. attorney in Indianapolis to conduct selective enforcement of gun laws limited to five "hot zones" - neighborhoods that just happen to include much of the city's Black population. This goes to the actual, geographic and racial heart of stop-and-frisk, which is not directed against individual Black and brown men, but against their racial groups and, primarily, the neighborhoods they live in. Holder allows the U.S. attorney in Indianapolis to redline whole Black neighborhoods for selective federal gun law enforcement - he explicitly promised to confine the practice to the designated "hot zones" - because that is consistent with Obama administration policy. Remember that Obama, in his post-Zimmerman acquittal reminiscences of his days as a profiled Black youth, attempted to frame Trayvon Martin's killing as essentially a "gun crime." The administration wishes to convert Black rage at the summary execution of African Americans by law enforcement and various vigilantes into acceptance of racially selective "gun control" - a stance that is entirely consistent with Bloomberg and Kelly's rationale for stop-and-frisk as a gun control practice (despite the fact that only two percent of NYPD stops uncover weapons of any kind).

A key part of Judge Scheindlin's ruling deals directly with the issue of the geography of policing. In rejecting the city's argument that disproportionate stop-and-frisks are necessary because Blacks and Latinos commit disproportionate numbers of crimes, the judge applied the principles of the Constitution's 4th and 14th Amendments. Police need to provide "individualized proof" that a given person on a given street at a given time, exhibiting specific and reasonably understood behaviors, should be stopped and frisked. Arithmetic on the gross number of crimes in an area won't do.

"The administration wishes to convert Black rage at the summary execution of African Americans by law enforcement and various vigilantes into acceptance of racially selective 'gun control.'"

"There is no basis for assuming," wrote Scheindlin, "that an innocent population shares the same characteristics as the criminal suspect population in the same area. Instead, I conclude that the benchmark used by plaintiffs' expert - a combination of local population demographics and local crime rates (to account for police deployment)-is the most sensible."

That means no stops in "hot zones" or "designated drug zones" or "high crime neighborhoods" without "individualized proof" - although crime statistics can and should be used in terms of the deployment of police. There are to be no "Constitution-free zones."

Neither Bloomberg nor Obama are willing to live within the bounds of the law, as interpreted by Scheindlin. Effectively, they are allied in maintaining a hyper-surveillance regime for Blacks, the foundation of mass Black incarceration. (Obama, of course, has much larger plans in progress, for the whole nation and planet.)

The Center for Constitutional Rights must be applauded for waging such a critical legal battle all these years. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is also to be commended for its suit against horrific police abuse of public housing tenants, which goes to trial in October. However, legal strategies are highly vulnerable to determined institutional resistance, and the passage of time. The white South's massive resistance to school desegregation was, for a time, successful in holding the color line - until Blacks physically challenged American apartheid, bringing the crisis to a head. The so-called New Jim Crow (Judge Scheindlin cited the book), which has imposed its dominion of mass Black surveillance and incarceration over the course of two generations, is national in scope, bipartisan in nature, and supported by majorities of whites. It will not be defeated in a courtroom.

Carl Dix, of Stop Stop-and-Frisk, who, along with activist academic Dr. Cornel West launched a direct action campaign to confront the NYPD, asks: "Why should we expect a federal monitor to end the way Blacks and Latinos are mistreated by the NYPD, when the Department of Justice is fighting people sentenced under the 100-1 sentencing disparity for crack cocaine possession who are trying to get those sentences reduced?"

Dear President Obama:

As commander in chief, you've been responsible for the treatment of the most high-profile whistleblower in the history of the U.S. armed forces. Under your command, the United States military tried - and failed - to crush the spirit of Bradley Manning.

Your failure became evident after the sentencing on Wednesday, when a statement from Bradley Manning was read aloud to the world. The statement began:

"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We've been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we've had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life. I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country."

From the outset, your administration set out to destroy Bradley Manning. As his biographer Chase Madar wrote in The Nation, "Upon his arrest in May 2010, he was locked up in punitive isolation for two months in Iraq and Kuwait, then nine more months at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. Prohibited from lying down during the day or exercising, he was forced to respond every five of his waking minutes to a guard's question: 'Are you OK?' In his final weeks of isolation, Manning was deprived of all clothing beyond a tear-proof smock and forced to stand at attention every night in the nude."

More than nine months after Manning's arrest, at a news conference you defended this treatment - which the State Department's chief spokesman, P.J. Crowley, had just lambasted as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid." (Crowley swiftly lost his job.) Later, the UN special rapporteur on torture issued a report on the treatment of Manning: "at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading."

At a fundraiser on April 21, 2011, when asked about Manning, you flatly said: "He broke the law." His trial would not begin for two more years.

Bradley Manning's statement after sentencing on Wednesday said:

"It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability."

Public accountability is essential to democracy. We can't have meaningful "consent of the governed" without informed consent. We can't have moral responsibility without challenging official hypocrisies and atrocities.

Bradley Manning clearly understood that. He didn't just follow orders or turn his head at the sight of unconscionable policies of the U.S. government. Finding himself in a situation where he could shatter the numbed complacency that is the foundation of war, he cared - and he took action as a whistleblower.

After being sentenced to many years in prison, Manning conveyed to the American public an acute understanding of our present historic moment:

"In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

"Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission."

Clearly, Mr. President, you have sought to make an example of Bradley Manning with categorical condemnation and harsh punishment. You seem not to grasp that he has indeed become an example - an inspiring example of stellar courage and idealism, which millions of Americans now want to emulate.

From the White House, we continue to get puffed-up sugar-coated versions of history, past and present. In sharp contrast, Bradley Manning offers profound insights in his post-sentencing statement:

"Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy - the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps - to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light. As the late Howard Zinn once said, 'There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.'"

Imagine. After more than three years in prison, undergoing methodical abuse and then the ordeal of a long military trial followed by the pronouncement of a 35-year prison sentence, Bradley Manning has emerged with his solid humanistic voice not only intact, but actually stronger than ever!

He acknowledged,

"I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others."

And then Bradley Manning concluded his statement by addressing you directly as president of the United States:

"If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

You failed to break the spirit of Bradley Manning. And that spirit will continue to inspire.