16 - 22 May 2002
Issue No.586
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 May 2002 Issue No.586 |
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Pressure, then more
In the face of Arab and international pressure Ariel Sharon has been forced into a U-turn over his cabinet's decision to re- occupy Gaza.President Hosni Mubarak spelled out the catastrophic consequences of such an invasion in letters to US President George W Bush and Sharon, in terms of regional stability and the damage it would inflict on US and international effort to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Similar warnings came from the Europeans and from inside Israel itself. In the end Israel ordered its reservists home, while a Sharon spokesman admitted that political and military reasons were behind the decision to "postpone" the attack.
Meanwhile Arab countries decided to go on the offensive, one corollary of their actions being to expose Sharon's tactics of avoidance, tactics designed less to prevent the resumption of peace talks than to render them redundant in terms of their ability to reach a final settlement with the Palestinians.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat accepted what many Palestinians and Arabs considered one-sided deals to end the siege of his headquarters in Ramallah and the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. And at the Sharm El-Sheikh mini-summit hosted this week by President Mubarak and attended by Syrian President Bashar Assad and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel-Aziz, the three leaders underlined their commitment to peace, condemning "all forms of violence."
The Israeli response was telling: on Monday the central committee of the Likud party, which Sharon heads, passed by a large majority a resolution saying there should never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan river. What hopes, then, for peace? There could be no clearer indication as to who is really responsible for prolonging the bloody conflict. And they are the members of the extremist party that dominates the Israeli government and that refuses to acknowledge even the possibility of a Palestinian state.
The consensus among international commentators is that moderate Arab countries have done as much as they can to calm tensions in the region. The ball, as is so often the case, is in Washington's court: it is up to the American administration to apply the necessary pressure to bring its closest regional ally to heel. And Sharon's U-turn earlier this week proves what we have always known: that when the pressure is applied he has no choice but to respond.
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