14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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Comment
America's vanishing promise
It is the hawks against the doves, and the hawks are winning. This is not the Knesset -- it is Capitol Hill, Mohamed Hakki, in Washington, writes
Usually, the visit of an Israeli prime minister to Washington calls the American media to stand at attention. The competition for an interview is fierce and the comments from any interviews will flood the media. The number of friends of Israel that can be squeezed into every television news hour is astounding, particularly since the message is always the same: the prime minister is praised, Yasser Arafat has become "irrelevant."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's latest visit, however, was conspicuously different. The media coverage was about as enthusiastic as the treatment of a prime minister from a Banana Republic. Sharon came and left, and in between there was a brief story on page 27 of The Washington Post.
Granted, this story was prefaced with its own slanted views, which echo those that have prevailed throughout the last 18 months: that Sharon's visit "comes at a time when the United States has all but adopted Israel's views, the dominant problem is Palestinian violence, and peace talks can only resume if militant groups are brought to heel."
But this visit is Sharon's fourth visit to the US since he became prime minister a year ago. Current expectations are high, particularly since Washington has already declared its exasperation with Yasser Arafat. It is crucial to see what US President George W Bush will do, or say, about the conflict.
The timing is also significant because it comes before Bush dispatches Vice President Dick Cheney to Israel and eight Arab countries to reiterate the US's renewed determination to resolve the conflict. This invigorated resolve comes a few weeks ahead of the Arab summit scheduled to convene in Beirut at the end of March. There is also a new factor in the tense triangle of relations between the US, Arab nations and Israel: Saudi Arabia.
The story about Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's letter to Bush on 24 August is now well known, and was published before the events of 11 September. Since then, relations between the US and Saudi Arabia have grown complicated in ways that have not been seen in the last 75 years. For the first time, Saudi Arabia was "carpet-bombed" by the American media, to quote a high-ranking member of a Saudi delegation visiting Washington. Every aspect of Saudi Arabia -- political, social and economic -- has come under attack. Even the Wahabi form of Islam practised by the royal family has been under assault.
Crown Prince Abdullah, however, continued to press Bush about the need to project a sense of fairness to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the published account of the Abdullah's letter to Bush, he said: "I reject this extraordinary, un-American bias, whereby the blood of an Israeli child is more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian child. I reject people who say when an Israeli kills a Palestinian, it is in defence; when a Palestinian kills an Israeli it is a terrorist act." Abdullah also made a direct reference to a scene he saw on television -- a scene that would never be allowed to be seen in America -- of an Israeli soldier putting his boot on the head of a Palestinian woman.
It was also reported here that the crown prince conveyed to the US Saudi Arabia's intentions to convene an emergency summit of Arab leaders to offer full support to the Palestinians. The possibility of ending all law enforcement and intelligence cooperation with the US, of which there had been a great deal, was also alluded to. A reconsideration of the Saudi-US military relationship is also apparently under way.
What was different about Sharon's visit to Washington was a new, almost refreshing, tone of voice. Bush prodded Sharon to improve conditions for the "hard-pressed Palestinian public, whose living standards have collapsed under years of Israeli blockades." With Sharon sitting alongside him in the oval office, Bush said that he was "deeply concerned" about the plight of the average Palestinian. "I worry about stories and pictures I see of people going hungry and children not being educated and deep concerns etched on the faces of moms and dads who happen to be Palestinians." Sharon muttered a few words about "a Palestinian state at the end of the process," but, he added: "It cannot be done under terror."
Does this mean Bush has changed his mind? Maybe. Only maybe. Does it mean that he is willing to get personally involved by seeking a solution to the problem? This is doubtful. Only last week, I met an anchorman of a major television channel coming out from a meeting with Bush. He said, "Mohamed, I tried to talk to him about the Palestinians, but he simply refused to listen. He just would not listen." Shireen Hunter, of the Center for Strategic International Studies, tried to explain it this way: "There was a debate in the cabinet, and [Deputy Defence Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz and the hard-liners won. It is very sad."
Wolfowitz is famous for the media firestorm he created when he called for an end to states that sponsor terrorism. According to the British weekly the Economist, he is a "velociraptor" who left his fingerprints all over Bush's State of the Union address. Wolfowitz is known in Washington as the leader of a small group of foreign policy neo-conservatives who rose up through the Cold War years. But he is also a member of the hard-core group of pro-Israeli aides, along with Richard Perle, who heads a Pentagon committee and continues to make his mark on the administration's relations with the Arab world.
Realising that US relations in the Arab world have deteriorated to an unprecedented degree, Bush is now sending Cheney on his nine-country Middle East mission. One can imagine that Bush will try to convey to Arab leaders that what he said in his speech to the United Nations last autumn still stands. One hopes that Bush truly wants to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict on equitable grounds, and that he still endorses the idea of a viable Palestinian state. But if Cheney is being sent to the Arab world to lay the groundwork for a bombing campaign in Iraq, then he is the wrong messenger, carrying the wrong message -- at the wrong time.
Unfortunately, Cheney squandered a lot of his -- and his country's -- political capital with Arab countries from a series of ill- advised anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian remarks. This was stunning for Arab leaders, who have always considered Cheney a friend whose "meat on his shoulders," as the Arab saying goes, comes from numerous oil deals in the Arab world. The White House had to deny recent reports in the Israeli press attributed to Cheney, but in Washington, Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said that the US vice president is "more extreme than me" in his views on Arafat.
The administration might be hoping to placate Arab leaders ahead of the summit in Beirut next month, after which the US might feel free to forget about the whole issue again. No one in the Arab world is asking America for more than what it has promised. In the 1960s, when the go-between was former Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco, he asked me once, "Why don't you [meaning the Arabs] trust America?" I said, "Because we have tried you 200 times, and you failed us." He replied, "Why don't you try us for the 201st time?" Now, after 200 more tries, America's promise has not only shrunk, it has evaporated, along with the commitments and resolutions it has signed.
One wonders what Bush is afraid of? A recent public opinion survey of the American Jewish community by the Israel Policy Forum found that 58 per cent of American Jews support the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, that more than two-thirds support an international peace-keeping force in Palestine with US participation, and 85 per cent support direct US involvement in the conflict -- even if it means putting pressure on Israel. If this means anything, it means that the Israeli lobby is going against mainstream American opinion, both Jews and non-Jews.
Bush has said he would do anything to protect American interests and security. This is his chance. With Saudi Arabia jumping into the fray, it is no longer an Israeli-Palestinian problem. It is now an American-Arab problem. This is Bush's chance to help the Arabs get rid of the terrorists in their midst. Only by resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict can we regain our common values and our common heritage, and prevent Huntington's ideas about a "clash of civilisations" from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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