Ask Khaled Barakat about the latest round of Israel-Palestine peace talks and he’ll be blunt. “The negotiations are happening between the Israelis and Americans, and we Palestinians are irrelevant to this,” he said in a telephone interview with the Straight. “The only way we can be relevant, as Palestinians, is as the Palestinian resistance.”

Barakat, editor for the Arabic Vancouver newspaper al-Shorouq, argued that the November 27 meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, was organized by the U.S. for Israel to achieve three goals: to have Israel recognized by the attending Arab delegates as a Jewish state, for relations between Israel and the oil-producing Gulf states to be normalized, and to have Palestinians forfeit demands for refugees’ right of return.

Iran and Hamas—the democratically elected majority group in the Palestinian government—were not invited to attend the conference. Palestinians were represented by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah party.

Barakat said that the conference would lead to neither a sovereign Palestinian state nor to peace. An on-line poll conducted by al-Jazeera in November reported that 83 percent of respondents did not support Arab participation in the Annapolis meeting.

Nevertheless, some members of Vancouver’s Jewish community were optimistic. Michael Elterman, western regional chair for the Canada–Israel Committee, argued that although major issues in the conflict were not discussed in Annapolis, important steps were taken.

Elterman maintained that the meeting brought the relevant parties back to the table and established a framework for future discussions. “A structure was put in place for the Israeli and the Palestinian sides to meet on an ongoing basis,” he said.

But Martha Roth, a member of the secular Jewish group Jews for a Just Peace, questioned what future the talks could bring for the Palestinians. “What is the Palestinian state? Is it bantustans? That’s not a viable alternative,” she said.

Roth refused to even call the Annapolis meeting “peace talks”.

“We’re playing into their hands if we use their language,” she argued. “What the United States government, the Canadian government, the European governments need to do is recognize that Hamas was elected, that it represents the Palestinian people, and that a single-state solution, at this point in history, is the only realistic one.”

On December 5, Straight.com reported on demonstrations in the West Bank against the talks.