		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 10 - 16 December 1998 Issue No.407
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

Coming down with a bump

It is all very well for the international community to give financial aid to the Palestinians. But money, while necessary to create a viable state, is not everything. The Palestinians primarily need international political and diplomatic clout if they are to prevail on Israel to implement all the peace agreements, starting with the 1993 Oslo package and culminating in last October's Wye agreement. A donors' conference in Washington last week netted the Palestinians pledges of more than $3 billion from 43 nations over the next five years. The assistance is specifically destined to finance water projects, road-building, the construction of a second airport, the establishment of industrial zones and the creation of jobs.

President Clinton said the idea behind the aid was to overcome "bumps in the road" towards a peace settlement. But as the donors' conference ended, Binyamin Netanyahu was already busy creating new "bumps", and political tensions were rising again between the Palestinians and Israelis. In a new obstructionist move, Israel said it would not carry out two scheduled troop withdrawals in the West Bank over the next two months, stipulated by the Wye Accord, unless the Palestinians met three conditions: officially renege on their declared plan to establish a state next May; stop inciting anti-Israel violence; and drop requests for the release of Palestinian political prisoners from Israeli jails. The Palestinians promptly rejected the conditions; even the United States dismissed them as a deviation from Wye.

Israel was widely blamed at the donors' conference for the devastation of the Palestinian economy wreaked by continual Israeli closures of the borders of the West Bank and Gaza.

The world must address these problems, not just with money but with political and diplomatic action. The United States, in particular, must take the lead and relinquish its traditional complacency towards . It should see to it that US financial aid to Israel is not used to build new settlements in the Occupied Territories. It should take an even-handed approach in mediation between Israel and the Palestinians, not only for the sake of justice, but also to preserve its own interests in the Arab world.