The London Meeting on Supporting the Palestinian Authority was not only a re-election ploy for Tony Blair, although the British prime minister is unpopular at home at the moment – mainly over his decision to send British troops to invade and occupy Iraq. Blair also managed to get Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to come and rub shoulders with top level officials. However, Israel, the supreme military power in, around, and above the remaining Palestinian territories was conspicuously absent from the London conference. Nonetheless, Dov Weissglas, the top adviser to the Israeli prime minister, visited Blair in London last week to ‘consult’ about the meeting. So, what good, aside from photo-ops and soundbites, can the meeting bring Palestinians? The answer is: money. CNN’s World Business Today headlined: “The Price of Palestine: Donors Meet to Discuss How Much a Palestinian State Will Cost”. But is Palestine really for sale? And who’s selling? Is this the end of “land for peace” and the beginnings of “pounds for peace”?

The disappearing variable is land. For Palestinians, that is. For Israelis, on the other hand, consistent and continuous, though relatively slow, aggression and breach of international law is being rewarded with land. They are not paying for the land, but much of the rest of the world will be. The U.S. has promised unprecedented aid for the Palestinians, the bulk of it for (Israeli) security measures and some for construction projects.

Construction projects? To provide housing and jobs, but this is the real background: Shrinking Palestinian land, not population increase, is forcing Palestinians to build upwards. High-rise apartment and office buildings are already shooting up like mushrooms in Palestinian urban centres. The dust created by frantic building activities is already making breathing difficult in Ramallah. The traditional rural and village societies and cultures are rapidly being exchanged for urbanization at a literally breath-taking rate.

In the Western West Bank, between the illegal separation wall route and the Green Line, the internationally-accepted eastern boundary of Israel, factories are also beginning to sprout, forcing former expert Palestinian farmers to work in low-salaried and low-skilled jobs. In the last four-and-a-half years, Israel has uprooted well over a million Palestinian olive trees. (So, did it make the deserts bloom?)

Three of the traditional ‘red lines’ for Palestinian negotiators involve the central, yet disappearing, variable of land: a Palestinian state with the borders prior to the 1967 Israeli invasion (which would still only amount to 22 percent of Historic Palestine); a total evacuation of all Jewish settlements (which are all illegal under international law) on that territory; and Palestinian sovereignty over east Jerusalem, which is now surrounded by two concentric half-circles of illegal Jewish settlements, housing nearly 200,000 people on stolen land, as well as by the separation wall, also illegal under international law.

The Zionist militarist credo of the ‘Iron Wall’ was masterfully unveiled by the critical Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim. Each Israeli government since 1948 has been led by a former senior military commander, and each one of them has negotiated intensely and flexibly with the world powers, the USA, Russia, China, India, and the European powers. They have allied themselves with four other nuclear powers militarily, the U.S., Britain, France, and apartheid South Africa. But they have never negotiated with Arabs, except from a position of overwhelming military superiority. That’s the Iron Wall.

It was applied especially on Palestinians, with the first real negotiations taking place only in the early 1990s, after nearly half a century of conflict, at the end of the First Intifada. It is now taking place again, after the Second Intifada.

It is crucially important now not to lose sight of the red lines. All kinds of walls are being built or are already in place to hide and bury them. The financial incentives for peace – hundreds of millions of dollars – may look deceptively attractive with a short-term or interim time perspective. But investment for a nation, for a state, should be long-term. Otherwise it is likely to end up as a Bantustan scenario.

From a theoretical socio-political point of view, Israel/Palestine is still an apartheid phenomenon. There are five million Israeli Jews and a native Palestinian majority of eight and a half million, since international law (still) recognizes the four and a half million refugees scattered around the world as Palestinians. Yet another threatened red line is the right of return of these refugees. Israel seeks a fourth nullification of international law with regard to these people. It would turn the apartheid phenomenon (already a crime against humanity under international law) into something even worse: a formally and factually achieved – as well as internationally rewarded – instance of ethnic cleansing.

The real rewards still seem to lie far beyond the London Meeting. They are not the actual receipt of short-term or interim financial pledges for Palestine (how ever well-intended). They are not the gradual easing of the Israeli military stranglehold on Palestine. They are not even the strengthening possibility of a Palestinian state. They are the subsequent steps: militarily conquered land for Israel and the cancellation of the repatriation – and even compensation – of Palestinian refugees.