President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Israel and the ‘Palestinian territories’ has proved another abject failure in an obscene show of diplomacy being flaunted by US imperialism to end the conflict in the region. The only thing this visit brought to the fore is the sheer weakness of Obama’s administration and his policy of appeasing Zionist hawks as well as the US right. During the visit, he reiterated over and over again that the US was the best ally Israel could have and Washington would continue to support Israel come what may. In short, it was a high-profile visit by yet another US president with the same old failed message. In many ways, this visit was an endorsement for the Zionist state to continue its belligerent policies of occupation and repression of the Palestinian masses. The new coalition government in Israel, which was hurriedly cobbled together ahead of Obama’s landing, consists of pro-settlements hawks. The agenda of the current Israeli regime as that of the previous ones is mass evictions, arrests, and building of concrete walls around illegal settlements to fortify the occupation of Palestine. In spite of the UN proclamations, Israel continues extending the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, endorsed by western imperialism. The Palestinian Authority functioning under Israeli tutelage has just set one condition for the resumption of the ‘peace talks’: a freeze on building of new settlements. However, President Obama instructed Mahmoud Abbas, the nominal Palestinian president, to resume the peace talks unconditionally. There are 1.6 million Palestinians in Israel, 2.6 million in the West Bank and another 1.7 million in the Gaza strip. All are virtually prisoners to the Zionist state. Day to day life for Palestinians is a relentless agony of humiliations at check posts, disruption of television channels, the concrete wall that cuts through the Palestinian areas, torture and wanton arrests. The 1960s and 1970s have witnessed a radical phase marked by an armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine. However, this failed to dislodge the Zionist state. Paradoxically, the casualties of the ordinary Israelis in the individual terrorism created fear that strengthened the brutal Zionist state. After the failure of this tactic the Palestinian leaders went to the other extreme to adopt a ‘negotiated settlement’ under the auspices of the UN and western imperialism. Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war a number of peace plans and negotiations have taken place but in vain. On November 22, 1967, the UN Security Council Resolution 242 was passed that called for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the territories occupied in the recent conflict.” After almost half a century, Israel has extended annexation as opposed to any withdrawal. After the Yom Kippur war, in October 1973, the Camp David Accord was signed between the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin under the supervision of the US president Jimmy Carter in November 1977. The Palestine question was ignored. The Madrid Conference in 1991, the Oslo Agreement of 1993, Camp David talks in 2000, ‘Quartet’ Road Map of the European Union, US and Russia, presented in 2001, the Saudi peace plan of 2002, the Geneva Accord of 2003, the Annapolis summit in 2007 and numerous other diplomatic manoeuvres besides UN initiatives have utterly failed to address the Palestinian question or make any real progress in its resolution. Obama is once again insisting on the resumption of peace talks between the Palestinians and the Zionist leaders, accentuating a two-state solution. Even if the Palestinians are granted an ‘independent’ state, this will be a truncated, fractured state with no real power. Under the shadow of a belligerent intimidation of Israel’s military and economic might with imperialist backing, Palestinians would remain economically and politically pinioned. It will be a state with the authority of limited municipal status and functions. The present right-wing prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is not enthusiastic about the two-state solution either. Ehud Olmert, his predecessor, spelt it out, “He has never made a clear cut commitment to the two states solution.” He insists that Israel must control the Jordan Valley as well as the airspace above the Palestinian territories. His party Likhud now calls for the Biblical myth of a ‘Greater Israel’. With the catastrophic economic crisis, defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq, and diplomatic failures in Latin America, etc, US imperialism is as Trotsky commented, “a monster with feet of clay”. The hawkish Israeli rulers are aware of this. Their attitude towards Obama is a manifestation of this reality. The Palestinian masses, besides the Israeli brutalities, have also been misused and abused by the reactionary Arab monarchs and despots. They have been used as an external ploy by these rulers to crush internal dissent. Even in the West Bank the leaders of the Palestinian Authority have been collaborating with the west and Israel. The Palestinian leaders have amassed wealth through corruption. There were several militant and angry protests against this regime during and after the wave of the Arab revolutions of 2011. The new rulers, emerging in the post-Arab spring, are hardly any different. If Hosni Mubarak was brutal, Morsi has proved to be crueller. The Economist reported on March 9: “Worse for the Gazans, Egypt’s government recently took unusually severe measures to stop goods being transported through tunnels under its borders; since late January Egyptian army engineers have flooded the warren of tunnels with sewage demolishing dozens of them…Some Hamas leaders are resorting to more virulent Islamist language in order to fend off the charge of truckling for Israel…Some Gazans have set fire to themselves in the hope of sparking a Tunisia-style uprising. The recent protest rally, where men and women mixed freely, was Gaza’s largest ever.” The two-state solution is a smokescreen to perpetuate the criminal occupation of Palestine. Israel, despotic Arab regimes and Sheikhdoms created, nurtured and supported by imperialism, will not allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. It is a utopian trance. The power displayed by the ordinary people of Israel on the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa with more than 10 percent of the population participating, has revealed another path to overthrow the reactionary Israeli state and the despotic regimes in the region. This movement, which was part of the 2011 upheaval in the Middle East, brought to the fore the reality that the road to national liberation of Palestine runs through the class struggle in Israel. A revolutionary victory in any major country will pave the way for a socialist federation that will ensure the social, economic and national liberation of the oppressed people of the region. The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com