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Instead of building a
diplomatic momentum on the political breakthrough mediated by their Saudi
Arabian ally who succeeded in developing an Arab and Palestinian consensus on
going along with the U.S.-steered Quartet efforts to revive the deadlocked
peace process, the American diplomacy has turned their sponsored Palestinian-Israeli
summit meeting in Jerusalem on Monday from a promising event into a missed
opportunity, thus shaking off a burgeoning potential for a more coordinated
regional U.S.-Arab front.
The trilateral meeting,
which secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planned with President Mahmoud Abbas
and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to be a breakthrough in a six-year old
Palestinian-Israeli impasse, began without an agreed upon agenda or at least
with a last minute change of the originally perceived agenda, convened grudgingly
as a face saving event and ended nonetheless a summit void of content after two
hours of “informal” talks in a pointless “dialogue” of the deaf at the
heavily-guarded David Citadel Hotel adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City, where the
Israeli “archaeological” excavations at Islam’s third holiest site of al-Aqsa
Mosque compound are slowly but systemically bulldozing whatever national and
spiritual symbols left for Palestinians to negotiate about.
Embarrassing U.S.
friends and allies as important as Riyadh, Amman and Cairo, and further
antagonizing influential regional players like Syria, who all weighed in
heavily to conclude the Mecca deal in order to develop a unified Arab and
Palestinian stance that easily could be discerned as distancing them away from
Iranian influences, which is a key U.S.-Israeli endeavor, may not harm the U.S.
historically-tested strategic alliances with Arabs, but it would certainly put
off indefinitely whatever is left for peace-making in the region.
There was nothing new in
the five points of agreement reported by Rice after the meeting. Commitment to
the two-state vision of President George W. Bush, continued respect of the
ceasefire, working together to implement the Quartet-drafted “Road Map,” honouring
by the Palestinian government of the Quartet-adopted three conditions of
renouncing violence, recognizing Israel and honouring previously signed accords
with her, and agreeing to meet again, have all become obsolete non-starters in
view of the U.S. and Israeli determination not to follow them up with working
mechanisms and binding timetables in “formal negotiations” that end the crisis
management of the futile “informal dialogues” of the past six years.
The disappointing
outcome of the trilateral summit could be summed up in pointless open-ended
promises: “The president and prime minister agreed they would meet together again
soon” in a fourth encounter, Rice said while lonely briefing reporters without
her summiteers and without taking any questions after the meeting, which
concluded without an official statement, adding she in her turn “will be
coming back” on her tenth trip to the Middle East since
taking office, and reiterating an obsolete cliché: “All three of us
affirmed our commitment to a two-state solution” and, probably drawing
ironically on the lessons of history learned from the tragic, but successful,
experience of the birth of the Israeli state, “agreed that a Palestinian state
cannot be born of violence and terror” so as to avert similar tragedies !
Playing into the hands of
the Israeli declared policy of “lowering the expectations” of Palestinians,
Rice promoted the summit since her landing in Israel on Friday with a flow of
skeptical and discouraging remarks. The “uncertainty” of the
new Palestinian government, which her administration has ‘strong reservations”
against, will “complicate” U.S. peace efforts, she said, thus creating the
environment for conflicting Palestinian and Israeli expectations and
contradictory differences over the agenda, which the Palestinians expected to
include the final status issues and a “mechanism to move from words to deeds,”
according to chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, but the Israelis ruled out any
“deliberations” on those issues, especially Jerusalem, refugees and return to
pre-1967 borders, according to Olmert.
Israel had every
intention to derail any progress at the summit unless the Palestinian leaders
subscribe to her plan for a long-term interim arrangement during which they
should be satisfied with a transitional state without borders on 42 percent of
the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip, a plan that is rejected by a
total Palestinian consensus conveyed on Monday to Rice because in the long run
this plan will boil down to nothing more than giving Israel enough time to
create more facts on the ground to render any Palestinian state, whether temporary
or permanent, unviable, unsustainable and impossible.
Israel and her
American strategic ally promoted Abbas as a partner first as an alternative for
late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but when he ascended to the helm of the
national decision-making they qualified his partnership credentials by taking
on Hamas; when Abbas concluded that was a recipe for civil war and insisted on
dialogue with the Islamic movement he was accused of “dialogue with terror;”
when he succeeded in convincing Hamas to join the political institutions of the
Oslo accords in a democratic process they challenged his credentials because,
according to them, the ensuing two-head Palestinian Authority compromised his
representative competence and his ability to govern; after the Mecca deal they
claimed his credentials as a peace partner were neutralized by his new
partnership with Hamas and steered the Quartet to insist on their three
preconditions as the prerequisite to legitimize him as a partner, and sent Rice
to convey the message.
Evasive
Diplomacy to Avoid Negotiations
However, President
Bush, torpedoed the success of her mission when he hours ahead of her arrival
in the region ruled out, according to Olmert, any dealing by his administration
with any new Palestinian government formed on the basis of the
inter-Palestinian power-sharing deal, which the Saudis mediated and sponsored
at the highest level in Mecca two weeks ago, while the Congress pre-empted her
success by blocking a $86 million aid package promised for Abbas before
the deal, thus dispatching Rice empty handed politically
and financially and armed only with noncommittal and non-starter open-ended
promises her administration failed to honor during more than six years in
office. Rice is practically left without any initiative despite her face saving
unconvincing promises.
Amid mounting
Israeli and American threats of tightening the siege imposed on the Palestinian
people, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its offshoot, the
Palestinian Authority, Palestinian and Arab officials and observers are almost
in consensus on interpreting the U.S. policy as premeditated and not a blunder,
aimed at “aborting” the Abbas—Olmert summit, the new Palestinian unity
government and coerce the newly unified Palestinian leadership into yielding to
the Israeli-dictated preconditions by refusing the Mecca accord as the approach
to lifting the siege, according to the leader of the Fatah parliamentary bloc,
Azzam al-Ahmad.
By ruling out the
Mecca accord as a non-starter the U.S. policy was also interpreted as an
evasive diplomacy to avoid negotiations, whether bilateral or multilateral
within the framework of an international conference proposed by the
Palestinians, the League of Arab States and recently by Russian President Vladimir
Putin during a Middle East tour, and supported by the pro-Mecca deal Turkish-chaired
Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM),
because Israel is more a beneficiary of the besieged Palestinian status quo and
the current Arab status quo overburdened with several crises than from
negotiations and because the U.S. Administration sees it has more area for
maneuvering in such an unstable environment than in a politically stable one.
The Israeli and U.S. framework
condemns PLO’s partnership with Hamas, labelled by both as a
“terrorist” group and persist on sowing discord among Palestinian parties so as
not to give “legitimacy” to the Islamic movement. What’s wrong with giving
legitimacy to Hamas? Wasn’t the legitimacy given to the PLO, which was also
labelled by both strategic allies as “terrorist,” the organization’s guarantee
to involve in political struggle in pursuit of its national goals? “They want
Abbas to take actions that lead to a civil war -- to protect past agreements that
the Israelis have destroyed,” veteran peace advocate and member of the PLO
Executive Committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, told Reuters.
The U.S.-Israeli
diplomacy is also steering against world consensus. Russia, a member of the Quartet is
already saying the new Palestinian government should be dealt with, recognized,
and legitimized. Although the Europeans and the United Nations, the other two
members, are taking a cautious position, France, Germany and
the Nordics of Denmark, Norway
and Sweden
also welcomed the Palestinian unity government deal. Aside from Israel the United States is lonely not
forthcoming.
“Washington's handling of Hamas is the latest in an
impressive list of US policy mistakes in the Middle East.
Rather than strengthening democratization processes across the region, the
administration has weakened them. Rather than lessening hostility to America, the
hostility is reaching unprecedented levels. Rather than furthering a peace
process between Palestinians and Israelis, the US
has rendered negotiations, let alone an agreement, almost impossible,” Omar Karmi wrote in Lebanon’s The
Daily Star on February 12.
When Riyadh stepped in out of national interest to skilfully contain
some of the regional mess created by the U.S. blundering, not only in Iraq and
Lebanon but also and more successfully in Palestine, where a unity
government is underway thanks to the Mecca agreement, Washington still seems
ungratefully determined to miss this opportunity to improve its image and help
one of its most important regional allies avert the regional repercussions of
her foreign policy failures in the Middle East, at a time when
the United States needs Saudi Arabia for other regional efforts.
Palestinian
Unity Pre-requisite for Peace
Mecca
deal politically averted Palestinian infighting, which could have been only
averted otherwise by directing the Palestinian fire against a common enemy, a
tactic that the latest attack in Elat could have been the first salvo. Internal
Palestinian calm is a prerequisite for calm across the still un-demarcated
Israeli borders. Haim Malka, deputy director of the Middle East Program at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, wrote in
the Washington Post on February 13 urging the U.S. to support the unity government “not because it brings
peace, but because it moves us significantly further toward stabilizing the
conflict than a Palestinian civil war would … without a basic accommodation
among Palestinians there is no chance for a renewed political process between
Israelis and Palestinians.”
Similarly, Robert Malley, a senior aide to former U.S. President Bill Clinton on
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, concluded in an interview published by the
Council on Foreign Relations on February 14: “Abbas could not have concluded a
historic deal with Israel,
entailing difficult compromises, without a prior intra-Palestinian agreement.
He would have lacked the authority, legitimacy, and credibility to reach an
agreement with Israel
if he were simultaneously at war with a sizeable portion of the Palestinian
people. The only way Israeli-Palestinian negotiations can proceed and conclude
is in the context of a Fatah/Hamas national unity agreement, which brings
stability to the Palestinian arena. All the rest is wishful—and dangerous—thinking.”
Only Palestinian
national unity can sustain a viable peace process. Oslo
accords could not have been launched on a divided Palestinian house; those
accords were based on the Palestinian consensus on the two-state solution by
the PLO National Council meeting in Algiers
in 1988. That was exactly what the Mecca
agreement achieved.
At least the U.S. and
Israel should give a chance for the national unity government to prove its
political credentials and not repeat their mistaken boycott of the former
government, contrary to the repeated advice of their ostensibly trusted Palestinian
partner Mahmoud Abbas; that government is now counterproductively, from their
point of view, replaced by a stronger one supported by national unity, Arab,
Islamic and almost a world consensus.
They could at least
flash on a green light for the other Quartet three members to lift their siege
and for the international banking system to channel in the Arab and
Islamic-pledged financial aid, including the recent Saudi pledge in Mecca of
$US1 billion, to the united Palestinian Authority to ease the poverty and
deprivation caused by their imposed blockade, in a show of good will for a
mutual trial period of grace during which they could maintain their own
sanctions until their arguments prove either right or wrong.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran
Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories.
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