Us Secretary of State John Kerry is fed up with the Israelis to the point of publicly placing the majority of the blame on the peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians that have been going nowhere and have not achieved anything of substance. The pace of the talks, which have been dragging for several months appear to have been dictated by the Israelis, who, while they speak of peace continue building colonies on illegally occupied lands.

The Palestinians, fed up with months of blatant Israeli incursion onto their lands while the peace talks were supposed to go on and the failure of the Israelis to release Palestinian prisoners as earlier agreed to, applied for application to join several UN institutions as an independent country. The Israelis cried foul and the talks have now slowed down to a snail’s pace with no hope in sight.

Kerry charged that the Israeli announcement of 700 new colony apartments in occupied East Jerusalem led to the breakdown of Israeli and Palestinian peace talks. In his admonition, Kerry said, “Both sides, whether advertently or inadvertently, wound up in positions where things happened that were unhelpful. Clearly, going to these treaties is not helpful, and we have made that crystal clear. Unfortunately, prisoners were not released on the Saturday they were supposed to be released. And so a day went by, day two went by, day three went by. And then in the afternoon, when they were about to maybe get there, 700 settlement [colony] units were announced in [occupied] Jerusalem and, poof, that was sort of the moment. We find ourselves where we are.”

The Israeli spin machine immediately reacted by claiming that the Palestinians “said ‘no’ to even discussing the recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people… and said ‘no’ to an extension of the talks,” according to one official in the Israeli prime minister’s office. What he failed to correctly elaborate was that the Palestinians did not agree to their land being called a Jewish state, and that they were not going to sit in talks while the Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was blatantly approving and building colonies on their lands.

Israelis who have been yearning for peace with their neighbours have been also disenchanted by Netanyahu’s callous approach to the talks. Zahava Gal-On, a party leader from the Israeli opposition charged that Kerry’s frank statements are “further proof that the extreme-right coalition of Netanyahu-Bennett-Lapid has no interest in reaching an agreement, but only to draw the negotiations out and jeopardise Israel’s existence. Instead of making brave decisions, even on the eve of the crisis in talks the government continued to give the Americans the finger, and approved construction beyond the Green Line.”

Despite the massive efforts of the US secretary of state, the Israelis have managed to shrink the progress of the talks to the point of insignificance. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week “ordered a halt to high-level contact with the Palestinian National Authority on non-security related issues. However, lead peace negotiator, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni as well as defence and security officials would be allowed to continue to engage with the Palestinians, and “low-level” cooperation would be permitted,” according to a senior Israeli official who added that the reaction was in response to a Palestinian bid to join 15 international conventions.

Extracting their pound of flesh

Ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet joined the chorus of diminishing the significance of the talks with highly provocative statements. Following Netanyahu’s slowdown orders, Economics Minister Naftali Bennett and Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs Eli Ben-Dahan were among those who insisted that Israel apply its sovereign rights over all lands and colonies. Said Ben-Dahan, “The answer should be clear: to apply Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria. This is our country, and we have never been ashamed of it.”

The Israelis are clearly running the show and extracting the maximum from their pound of flesh, while the US and the Palestinians are actors who follow their bidding. It has been even suggested that the success of the talks could hinge on the release of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American who was caught in 1987 giving US military and intelligence secrets to Israel. He was sentenced to life. Jewish supporters in the US and in Israel have for years continued a forceful and determined campaign for his release, portraying him as ‘a victim of anti-Semitism and of anti-Zionist politics.’

They conveniently fail to add that Pollard “copied, delivered and passed on scientific, technical and military information about US ship positions, aircraft stations, tactics and training operations; classified analyses of Soviet missile systems, three separate categories of daily message or cable traffic and intelligence on military hardware still in development at the time. The information he shared revealed the way in which the US collected intelligence, revealed the names of human sources and exposed the identities of numerous US intelligence officers and analysts,” according to internal government documents released by msnbc.com.

Is there any hope then for more talks? Not while the Israeli right-wing government is in power. They are more interested in annexing the remaining portions of Palestinian land until one day the Palestinians are all subjugated to living in tightly controlled concentration camps. The Israelis are not concerned about the outburst of a US secretary of state directed at them. They have many more people in the American government working for them.

Tariq A. Al Maeena is a Saudi socio-political commentator. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@talmaeena