French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas attend the opening session of the international donors conference in Paris. (Omar Rashidi, Maan Images)

On the face of it, the one-day international donor meeting in Paris was a fantastic success.

Billions of dollars were promised in aid to the Palestinian Authority to salvage its ailing economy, and all the while political rhetoric flew about in support of Palestinian statehood.

But financial pledges, even if and when they are delivered to the Palestinians, are meaningless in the long term without the exertion of international political pressure to end the 40-year old Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

"This is not a donors' conference. This a state-building conference," declared Tony Blair, the Middle East peace quartet's envoy, in his speech at the meeting.

In his opening speech, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, called for an end of the occupation and for an independent Palestinian state to be established within a year in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

Such statements, while politically significant, sound vacuous unless the international community reaches a consensus to pressure Israel not only to stop, but also to reverse its settlement building that has rendered statehood a shattered Palestinian dream.

No 'show of will'

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This is not to underestimate the urgency of the flow of immediate aid - every single dollar is direly needed to avert an impending catastrophe that the United Nations and other humanitarian organisations have already cautioned against.

Yet in the absence of a clearly defined political plan, financial aid will amount to no more than a sticking plaster that cannot stop a profusely bleeding wound.

In Paris there was neither a show of an international political will to address the occupation itself nor any serious pressure placed on Israel to lift restrictions on the movement of people and goods.

Warnings by the World Bank that an Israeli reversal of movement restriction policies and closure of borders is a pre-requisite for the recovery of the Palestinian economy, went unheeded.

The donors' conference, as the American-sponsored Annapolis meeting a few weeks ago, was instead driven by Israeli and US security priorities, namely backing, if not, encouraging a Palestinian Authority confrontation against Hamas rather than addressing the reality of the Israeli occupation.

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