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US Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest foray into Middle East negotiations should be called the Einstein peace process. Doing the same thing over and over again and still expecting different results is the great scientist’s definition of insanity. This time around, all evidence to the contrary aside, indications are that Kerry actually believes this latest iteration of the decades-old industry known as the ‘peace process’ might really accomplish something. But unfortunately for Kerry, his political calculations are about to run aground on the unforgiving shoals of political reality.

Regardless of Kerry’s beliefs, the timing of this latest version of the talks clearly has a lot to do with the crises erupting across the Middle East region. The escalating civil and regional war in Syria, the growing sectarian and religious-secular divides exploding across the region, and even the Washington-backed Egyptian military’s coup against the Muslim Brotherhood, all reflect broader US weakness and failures in the Middle East. The inability of the US to respond strategically to those challenges is certainly part of why plunging back into Israel-Palestine talks, however repetitive of earlier failures, might have seemed a useful move – for distraction, for reassurance of Israel’s backers, for reassertion of a weakened empire’s fading but still extant power.

But despite all those reasons, these talks are doomed to the same failure as the 22 years of failed diplomacy that precedes them.

A one-sided peace

Part of the problem lies squarely in Kerry’s stated US goal for the talks: ‘ending the conflict, ending the claims.’ Not ending the occupation, not ending the siege of Gaza, not ending the decades of dispossession and exile of Palestinian refugees. Not basing diplomacy on United Nations resolutions and the obligations of international law. Only ending the tension, the dispute – regardless of which version of current reality becomes the officially agreed upon final status. Then, in Kerry’s world, all Palestinian claims will disappear, and the Palestinians, even if their internationally-recognised rights remain out of reach, will smile, applaud their brave leaders, and politely agree to suck it up. (Israeli claims of course will not have to end, because Israeli claims, all about ‘security,’ are inherently legitimate and non-negotiable, while Palestinian claims – to self-determination, real sovereignty, equality, return – are always political and up for grabs.)

The appointment of Martin Indyk as US envoy to the talks is a further indication that no one intends to change the framework of the last 22 years of failed US-led diplomacy. Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, former deputy research director of AIPAC – the powerful pro-Israel lobby – and co-founder of the AIPAC-linked Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has been central to US-controlled Israel-Palestine diplomacy for years. (For years now, it has become common to see Indyk, Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller and others responsible for 22 years of failed US diplomacy in the Middle East, burnishing their ‘veteran’ status as a credential for continuing their careers.)

This round, like before, will ignore international law, and instead be based on the current disparity of power between occupied and occupier. The pro-Israel US arbiter will determine Israeli positions and Israeli-proposed ‘compromises’ to be ’reasonable’. Israel will continue to build and expand settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank based on the thousands of new permits already in place, while offering some kind of short-term partial delay in granting some number of new permits – and that will be called a major compromise. More than 600,000 Israeli settlers will continue to live in huge city-sized Jews-only settlements throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the talks will be rooted in the understanding that in any final arrangement Israel will be allowed to keep all the major settlement blocs and 80 per cent or more of the settlers right where they are.

The meaning of ‘swaps’

Secretary Kerry announced proudly that this round of talks is based on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, without mentioning that the ‘new’ US- and Israeli-imposed amendment to that plan stripped it of its potential value – the requirement that Arab normalisation with Israel could come only after ‘full’ withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a just solution to the refugee problem based on UN resolution 194 guaranteeing their right of return. Kerry’s new version ignores the refugees (at least so far) and adopts the US-Israeli language on borders (always said as one word) of 1967-borders-with-swaps. Those ‘swaps,’ of course, mean Israel gets to keep all its settlement cities, all its illegal settlers, virtually all the Palestinian water sources, while the Palestinians will be offered some undeveloped desert land abutting Gaza perhaps, or perhaps a proposal to place Palestinian-majority cities inside Israel, such as Nazareth, under the jurisdiction of the to-be-created Palestinian ‘state’. (There is likely to be no compromise on Gaza – Israel’s siege will remain, strengthened by Egypt’s new post-coup government tightening the closure of the Egypt-Gaza crossing at Rafah – and the Palestinian Authority diplomats are not likely to make Gaza a major part of their negotiating strategy.)

Palestinians, of course, will be expected to accept Israel’s ‘reasonable’ compromises as if both sides, occupied and occupier, have the same obligations under international law. (Oh right, international law doesn’t have a role here.) The price, if Palestinians reject any of those oh-so-reasonable proposals, will be US and perhaps global opprobrium for blocking peace.

Right now some developing countries (South Africa, Brazil) are hinting at somewhat more independent positions towards Israel-Palestine. The European Union’s new restrictions on funding settlement entities, made public just before Kerry’s announcement of the new talks and Israel’s acceptance of them, is particularly important, reflecting the impact of even mild sanctions on Tel Aviv. But while the civil society movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) continues to build, it remains unclear how the governments tentatively backing away from US positions would respond to the collapse of the US-controlled talks, especially if the US claim is that the failure is the Palestinians’ fault.

Israeli violations of international law, the Geneva Conventions, UN resolutions and more remain. The US does not set an end to those violations as a goal of these peace talks – let alone as a precondition. If it did, Israel would have to end its occupation of the 1967 territories and recognise the Palestinians’ right of return unilaterally – ending violations shouldn’t require negotiations. That’s why, ultimately, these talks will fail. Until negotiations are based not on US support for Israeli power but on international law, human rights, and equality for all, the ‘peace process’ will fail and will remain an example of Einstein’s insanity.

The winner will get their work published in Red Pepper, receive £100 and get a one years subscription to the magazine. We will also publish some of the runner up entires on our website. Just answer the following question:

How can we make our world fairer and more sustainable at the same time? 

Write up to 800 words about an inspiring project or policy which is tackling the environmental crisis and addressing social or economic injustice at the same time. Where has this initiative been discussed, developed or adopted? Could it be applied elsewhere?

Deadline: 22 November 2013

More information and competition rules

1. You must be 16-25 years of age.

2. Your article must be up to 800-words long and written in English.

3. Only one entry per person, which must be submitted electronically as a word document by 22 November 2013. Attach the document in an email, with the email subject line stating ‘Red Pepper young writers’ competition’ to Kitty Webster at kitty@redpepper.org.uk

4. Your entry must clearly state the following:

- Your name, age, place of education/work, and a contact number (landline or mobile)

- How you heard about the competition, e.g. through which one of the supporting organisations, or through which student society

If you have any questions then email kitty@redpepper.org.uk

*** Good luck! ***

This competition is kindly supported by the following organisations:

People&Planet – the largest student network in Britain campaigning to end world poverty, defend human rights and protect the environment.

Shake! – A project that brings together young people, artists and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice.

Woodcraft Folk – the co-operative children and young people’s movement. They run hundreds of education groups in towns and cities across the UK where young people of all ages meet to play co-operative games, make friends and learn about big ideas from social justice to climate change.

Young Greens – the youth and student branch of the Green Party. Young Greens aim to harness the energy and ideas of young people, and change the direction of our society towards a sustainable and just future.

Between the 5 and 14 of June, La Via Campesina, the global peasants union, held its 6th international conference in Jakarta, Indonesia. Alongside 500 delegates from member organisations around the world, two representatives from the recently affiliated ‘Landworkers’ Alliance’ in the UK joined the gathering.
La Via Campesina (literally ‘the peasants’ way’) is an international union of peasants and small farmers representing 188 member organisations in 88 counties. The total membership is in excess of 200 million and growing constantly as new organisations join. The international conferences are held every four years and are the highest forum for decision making within the organisation. This conference also marked the 20th birthday of the movement and was a place for the membership to celebrate as well as strategise.
The past 20 years have seen La Via Campesina grow to become the largest and most internationally respected farmers organisation in the world. Not only is it seen as the representative voice of peasant farmers in civil society and inter-governmental forums; it is also considered by many as offering the most legitimate critique of neoliberalism and the most convincing vision of alternatives. Its power in international forums is derived from its strict ‘producers only’ membership policy, and its democratic functioning which give it a grassroots and representative voice.
La Via Campesina was established in 1993 to unite the opposition of peasants movements to the World Trade Organisation’s agreement on agriculture, a free market trade agreement that has had disastrous implications for the livelihoods of small-scale producers. Since then they have been extremely successful in giving international visibility to the peasant movement. As Julia, a farmer from Germany said: ‘we have the dexterity of an organisation combined with the courage of a social movement’. They take every opportunity to remind the world that 75 per cent of our food is produced by peasants, but that rural areas are often the most deprived and exploited. La Via Campesina argues that peasants and peasant-led solutions must be seen and heard as protagonists in food and agricultural policy.
A primary aim of the conference was to build consensus in the organisation about the focus for the coming four years. Unlike the last conference, which focused on improving internal functioning, in Jakarta a lot of space was given to formulating strategy. A number of topics emerged and were passionately articulated but there was a remarkable consensus on the main challenges that peasants farmers face worldwide and the most effective ways to challenge these forces of oppression.
Land grabbing and agrarian reform emerged as a significant issue at the conference. It is clear that in the five years since the 2008 food crisis the enclosure and privatisation of land and common resources has increased significantly worldwide. Both state led and private sector land acquisitions are leading to higher and higher concentrations of ownership, taking previously common resources away from peasants and driving up the cost of land. The issue of land grabbing is set firmly in a wider critique of the corporate ‘green’ economy and the commodification of nature.
In response to the increase in land grabbing, La Via Campesina has amplified its discourse on agrarian reform. Redistribution of productive land to producers and public legislation to prevent land grabs are high on it’s agenda. This is happening at national levels through lobbying and direct actions and internationally through the UN’s Comittee on Food Security (CFS) where ‘voluntary guidelines for the responsible tenure of farms, fisheries and forests’ have recently been agreed, and ‘guidelines for responsible agricultural investment’ are being discussed. As always, these international forums have yielded vague results, with no binding mechanisms for implementation, but represent important steps in the slow path to public policy on tenure, land grabs and investment.
Closely linked to the opposition to land grabbing are increasing campaigns against public-private partnerships that use development rhetoric to open markets and create space for international investment in agriculture. The G8’s new alliance on food security and nutrition is one such example of a ‘development programme’ that seeks to facilitate access to land and markets for agribusiness at the expense of peasant livelihoods and traditions.
GM and the commodification of seed remained high on the agenda with a recent proposal from the European commission on the regulation of plant health and marketing taking up a lot of energy in the European regional meetings. The proposal seeks to streamline the European seed industry, creating better incentives for companies to invest in seeds. However the proposal would place fees and registration requirements on small scale seed breeders and growers that would threaten livelihoods and the development of peasant seeds. Internationally the anti GMO campaign has been growing in strength with large scale direct actions against GM in Spain, France, Mexico, India and Haiti. La Via Campesina’s position on GM is that it is an unnecessary technology that damages peasant livelihoods and food security by concentrating power in the food chain in the hands of a few companies and commodified crops. They argue that to end hunger we need to address the situations of those who already produce food, and those who want to. Seeking to build a diverse and resilient local food system rather than the export-focused business-led model that GM is designed for.
La Via Campesina’s struggle against agribusiness spreads far beyond the issue of GM. The conference saw the adoption of a global ‘campaign against agrotoxics’ (genres of chemical known in the UK as pesticides which includes herbicides, fungicides and insecticides) that was initiated by Latin American organisations in 2011. The campaign highlights that monopolies in the agrochemical market (just 6 control 67.9% of the market) force farmers into debt and dependence, but also that agrotoxics are dangerous to people and ecology and are responsible for a lot of death and disease among agricultural workers.
Repression of social movements was also high on the agenda and space was made in the conference to honour the hundreds of peasants who have been threatened, persecuted, imprisoned and murdered in their struggles. In a number of the regions where members are active state and paramilitary violence against peasant movements is extreme. A member of the delegation from Honduras described how many of his colleagues had been killed for speaking and organising to defend the rights of agricultural workers. The issue is linked closely to the campaign against violence against women which seeks to build the strength and solidarity in the movement by challenging prejudices. In recognition of the intense repression faced by many members, La Via Campesina works hard to build inclusion and solidarity within the movement. As practical steps towards this they set quotas on the participation of men, women and youth, ensuring equal space for different voices.
Food sovereignty and agroecology
To develop their proposals for an alternative agricultural policy framework, La Via Campesina came up with the concept of food sovereignty in 1996. Set upon the recognition that food and agriculture are a key element of struggles for social justice in both rural and urban areas, food sovereignty is the fundamental right for all peoples, nations and states to control food and agricultural systems and policies, ensuring everyone has adequate, affordable, nutritious and culturally appropriate food. This requires the right to define and control methods of production, transformation, and distribution at local, national and international levels. Most significantly it encompasses as socio-economic and political transformation. Food sovereignty was a huge part of the discourse at the conference and is used by all kinds of organisations to describe the alternatives that the La Via Campesina offers. While it sounds complicated when dressed in the language of policy, the fundamentals of food sovereignty are the basic demands of farmers around the world: fair prices for food and agricultural products, prioritisation to local and sustainable production and support for new entrants to agriculture alongside a curbing of the power of transnational corporations.
As the failures of the import dependant food security model become clearer, food sovereignty is getting a broader recognition in public policy. Some counties, including Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Senegal, Mali and Nepal have written food sovereignty into their policy frameworks, and it is gaining recognition in the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Committee on Food Security (CFS). The sharing of victories and strategies for taking food sovereignty to public policy was a big component of the conference and something that will be happening more in the coming years.
In the institutions
The work of La Via Campesina was described to me by an Italian farmer as 1 per cent institutional, 99 per cent mobilisation and mutual aid. At the institutional level, La Via Campesina have been working to create and hold a space for social movements in the UN’s intergovernmental forums for agricultural policy. They are actively lobbying in the FAO, the CFS and the European Union. The main focus here at the moment is twofold, first, following a successful attack on the World Bank’s attempts to write an ‘initiative on responsible investment’, La Via Campesina has been active in taking the issue to the more democratic forum of the CFS where it is working to build the ‘guidelines on responsible agricultural investment’ into an instrument that can be used to defend communities against land grabbing.
In addition La Via Campesina have drafted a bill for the rights of peasants that has been accepted by the UN human rights commission and is now being pushed for ratification by the general assembly.
In the institutions, La Via Campesina’s main aim is often just to give visibility to peasant issues and hold a channel open for farmers voices. As a farmer from Canada said at the conference, ‘often a victory in the institutions is just preventing a bad thing from happening’. Nevertheless, both the bill on the rights of peasants, and the guidelines for responsible agricultural investments hold huge potential for supporting la via campesinas work on the ground with internationally recognised frameworks.
Don’t forget you are a farmer
In the achievements of the organisation it is easy to forget that really this is a farmers movement, focussed on supporting the livelihoods of peasants around the world. It is in this realm that the movement is having its biggest impacts and it came through clearly in the feeling at the conference. The last 20 years have seen a huge quantity of visits and exchanges with innumerable ideas translated between producers in different contexts. The cumulative effect of all this is to build confidence and capacity among farmers organisations to take active and political roles in directing their futures.
In a time when protest seems to come and go it is inspiring to see an organisation build to this size without compromising its vision, its voice or its demographics. It is amazing that the organisation remains such a united, democratic and honest representation of the issues producers face.

Boycott Workfare counter-conference
10 July, Manchester
While workfare profiteers meet to discuss more ways to privatise and abolish welfare, come to Manchester for a creative counter-conference as part of an ongoing summer of workfare protests across the UK.

Durham Miners Gala
13 July, Durham
The 129th annual gathering. A fun day out with trade union banners, brass bands, speeches and merriment.

Tolpuddle Martyrs festival and rally
19-21 July, Tolpuddle
Music, drama, poetry and speakers make this annual celebration of trade unionism a popular fixture in the calendar. No prizes for guessing that Billy Bragg is the headliner.

Peace News summer camp
25-29 July, Norfolk
The annual Peace News summer camp is taking a lead from the global South after the regular organising committee stepped down to invite activists of colour to plan the event. Join Peace News to consider what it means to build real solidarity with activists in the global South.

Shake! and Demand the Impossible
30 July-9 August, London
Not one but two free summer schools at which 16-25 year-olds are invited to spend five days with a wide selection of activists and artists discussing and creating campaigns for change.

UK Feminista summer school
17-18 August, Birmingham
A weekend of hands-on training in taking action for gender equality. Contributors include Southall Black Sisters, UK Uncut and South Asia Solidarity Group.

Reclaim the Power
17-20 August, West Burton, Nottinghamshire
Take action on fuel poverty and climate change by joining No Dash for Gas for a four-day camp and protest at EDF’s West Burton power station.

Stop the Arms Fair
10-13 September, London
The country’s least popular trade show, the DSEi Arms Fair, is due to return to London’s Docklands this summer. Stop the Arms Fair will be there to greet the arms dealers.

Disabled People Against the Cuts’ Five days of fightback
September, everywhere
DPAC will be taking action in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England during September with five days of co-ordinated action against the coalition cuts.

Flag over the convergence centre

At Bernardos charity shop to protest against their involvement with immigration dention centres for children

Greater London Pensioners’ Association at Canary Wharf

Capitalism equals crisis banner at Canary Wharf

Banner at Canary Wharf

Tripods erected at Canary Wharf

Crowd outside Canary Wharf tube station

Workshop on debt

With special thanks to photographer Anna Forgione