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Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor at Veterans Today in Atlanta about the issue of Israel and whether its intentions are serious regarding efforts to restart talks with Palestinians amid continued illegal settlement expansions.

- When I look at what has happened here, right before going into the second round of these talks, I am wondering, I do not know if you can answer this or not, but... whether Israel alerts the United States that it is going to make this type of announcement in terms of 1200 new settler units?

And of course ultimately is the US the proper party to host and mediate these talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority?

- Well, the short answer to that is absolutely “no” based on the simple fact that they have a long track record of failure - because failure is actually hardwired into this whole process.

Just by going back and reviewing the history, there are four key points to it: typically the early settlement maneuvering has always been designed to try to force the Palestinians to pull out, which has worked very good - they said we will not sit down for talks until settlements stop, which the Israelis say we are fine for that, you can do that for 50 years.

Second: The Bush regime wanted to remove any ‘removal of funding’ for Israel by the US as a lever, so before he got out they passed a ten-year funding situation for Israel, which our treasonous Congress went along with. So that removed that lever technically from future administrations to be able to put pressure on the Israelis.

Third: Whatever is done on the West Bank with moving anybody out, the cost is going to be absolutely tremendous and the American taxpayers and the Saudis of course are going to fund every dime of it because part of the political power of Israeli leadership is showing to Israelis that they can pick American taxpayers’ pockets whenever they want.

And then lastly: if they were to come to an agreement on something, it always follows there has to be an implementation process. In the Israelis and some of the declassified intelligence we have had on past negotiations we have statements from them internally, from people like Henry Kissinger, that they knew they never intended to follow through with their agreements; that they were just going to tie things up in implementation and just basically never implement it.

- There are some camps that do not agree with the Palestinian Authority to actually enter into these talks because they think that it is not from a position of strength that they have entered it. Do you agree with that assessment? Of course then there are ones who say it is better now than never.

- It is true. You are always in damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. So they have to try.

But I think that the only thing that outside people can do is rather than just stand and watch the same old ‘scam games’ be played out, while the negotiations are going on we need to launch a really big campaign publicizing the duplicity of Israel in all of the past negotiations and how ineffective America has been as acting as a mediator. America should not have anything to do with it because they have actually emboldened Israel and basically rubber-checked them not agreeing to anything.

So it is just a horrendous situation and getting American out of it and getting somebody in there as a real independent mediator would be another big step.