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Signs are all over, and Meshaal put it clearly today when he said the Palestinian people 'will not feel bound by the outcome of these negotiations, because the Palestinian negotiators renounced their demands'.

How come ?

In 2002, the arab world coalesced around a balanced proposal, one that would respect the existence of Israel. Not only has the arab world kept the proposal on the table since then, but it also gained an ever increasing support from other countries around the world, a support that today is almost unanimous.

The reason is simple, any alternative is bound to generate tremendous suffering and, eventually, generate a cascading involvement of other countries, including major powers, in open war. The threshold point has probably been already reached, a point when hope for of a political solution disappears and the strain of the desperate situation of the palestinian people, submitted to a permanent status of second-rate human beings, combined with the visible and inevitable descent of the israelis into the demential logic of racism, raises the chances for a rapid increase in the quantity and severity of violent actions.

This situation has been predicted many times in the recent past, by members and supporters of both camps. If there is something surprising is the fact that the threshold point appears to have been reached earlier than expected, and one can speculate on the role played by the most recent electoral results in Israel and the USA.

It would be reasonable to expect important developments at this point. For several reasons, it is probably too late for the conflicting parties to reach a balanced deal by themselves, and that's why it seemed so important to have a strong consensus around the framework that would guide any negotiation, as it was clear that in the absence of that framework any negotiation would be either a fraud or a never ending talk show.

The worst scenario has now materialized, we're diving in direct talks without preconditions.

How did this happen ?... Well, ther merit goes, first, to Bibi and his external supporters, who, in a few weeks, managed to dismantle all successive strategies drawn by the USA and the other members of the string quartet, a useless band of poor soloists. Second, the merit goes also to the two main jewish groups that in the USA and in the EU supposedly should have raised an inequivocal voice supporting the saudi plan. Having failed to do so, they left western powers without a vital element to strenghten the political pressure required.

Here we are, then, at the edge of a new failed peace process. Meshaal is right, an unbalanced deal will be a pathetic exercise, and will hopefully be discarded the day it is signed, or simply made irrelevant by later events.

Everyone knows what's at stake, and so there's a lot of work to do, starting now. And for us citizens, the first thing to do would be to watch closely the talk show by sending a petition, at least to to the PA, to conduct a fully open negotiation. That is to say, all proposals on the table should be immediately made public, so the citizens of the entire planet can understand the process.

And why should it be made this way? Because if a balanced deal cannot be reached in one year, the only remaining peaceful alternative will be the UN Security Council.