18 - 24 January 2001
Issue No.517
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 18 - 24 January 2001 Issue No.517 |
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No tears shed
By Salama Ahmed Salama
After eight years in the White House, US President Bill Clinton departs, having failed to solve the most important issue facing him: the issue he perceived as his royal gateway into history and his ticket to the Nobel peace prize. Surrounded by astute and perceptive pro-Israeli advisers and working under the best possible circumstances, Clinton has spent his time, effort and intelligence conceiving a peace tailor-made to fit Israel, and a Palestinian state in which Israel alone rules over life and death.
Nobody can deny Clinton's persistence in seeking a resolution, nor his awareness of the Palestinian issue -- an unprecedented feat for an American president. But the deeper he delved into the issue, and the better he understood its intricacies, the more biased towards Israel, the more capable of deceiving the Palestinians and Arabs and the less faithful to his principles as a prophet of democracy and human rights he became. This led some commentators to describe him as psychologically and morally unbalanced -- more of a political joker than a statesman who upholds, to a minimal degree at least, the principles of political wisdom and the logic of disinterested justice.
His personal conduct notwithstanding, nothing establishes Clinton's shrewdness and political dishonesty more clearly than the way he used his influence as the president of the most powerful country in the world to turn the negotiations into a series of labyrinths, to dismiss Palestinian rights wholesale and to exercise the greatest possible degree of psychological pressure on the Palestinian negotiating team. Among other tools, Clinton used intelligence agencies that hold the key to every necessary piece of information, and orchestrated international endeavours featuring a battalion of bit players, from the European Middle East emissary, whose presence strictly equals his absence, to just about anybody who wanted to participate in the game.
Threats, intimidation and humiliation were deployed to pressure the Palestinian side to submit. The Israeli-American-Palestinian negotiations will turn out to be the longest and strangest saga of this kind in the history of contemporary political conflicts, and the tricks and manoeuvres used will be taught in diplomatic and strategic institutes of the future.
Last year was supposed to be the year of peaceful resolution, but Clinton's administration and advisers repeatedly postponed taking a decisive stand until the president's last few minutes in office. The eruption of the Intifada then cut short the extraction of Palestinian concessions and compromises, driving home the fact that Israeli-American suggestions fell far short of the Palestinians' minimum demand.
Clinton's final address has come as a cold shower. It does not take into account Palestinian rights, but asks Palestinians to accept conditional, partial sovereignty over East Jerusalem, and a statelet torn into three entities with no contiguous borders -- this, in return for a complete concession of the right of return of four million refugees.
The last bid to circumscribe and further restrict Palestinian space has not worked, however. The Zionist phase of American government, which reached its peak under Clinton and Gore, may be almost over, too. What is certain is that the Arab and Islamic world, having lived through the worst of times during Clinton's term in office, can no longer have confidence in American methods of negotiations.
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