Issue No.589
Opinion
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6 - 12 June 2002 Issue No.589 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Crucial conditions
With the start of the FIFA World Cup and the escalating tensions between Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, the world has been plunged into alternate states of excitement and fear. Yet neither football nor the nuclear fear has managed to divert attention away from the Israeli forces' military operations in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Both may have contributed, perhaps, to a certain stupor on the part of the international community, an unwillingness to act that can have only one logical conclusion and that will be to promote the success of Sharon's attempts to reduce the Palestinian issue to a security problem. This in turn can lead only to a "transitory solution", which will be undertaken as a way of justifying the immense costs incurred by Sharon's military policies.
Palestinian resistance operations may be more sporadic than before, but the current prospect is very far from the quiet envisaged by Sharon. Nor do Israeli attacks and arrests help improve the situation. Continued Arab and international efforts, on the other hand, have intensified the desire for the final resolution promised by President Bush, the one crucial condition of which is the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
It is clear that while that stage of the conflict which witnessed the Oslo Agreement and Sharon's supposed crushing of the Intifada and abolishment of Arafat's influence has comprised the current phase, the next stage will be characterised by the view, held increasingly by America, Russia, the EU and the UN, that an international peace conference should be held soon.
The terms, conditions and date of the proposed conference have yet to be decided, however; and what with the conflict between moderate and Zionist elements in Washington and the EU it remains little more than a set of ambiguous and often contradictory statements.
It is within this framework that the significance of President Mubarak's upcoming meeting with President Bush, three months after his last visit to Washington, resides. After talks with the Saudi crown prince and the Jordanian king, which emphasised the Arabs' unified position on pursuing the peace initiative, it is time for a frank and decisive discussion with Bush.
The most common ideas about obstacles in the way of the Palestinian state have centred on Palestinian Authority security reforms -- an urgent Israeli demand -- and political restructuring to eliminate corruption and pave the way for the state, the latter being a Palestinian, Arab and international demand even if Sharon's only interest in it is to replace Arafat and reshape the Authority according to his conception of Israeli interests.
The third pivot of the proposed initiative concerns agreeing on a specific time frame for the implementation of the programme at hand, one that will ensure an effective solution to the problems based on UN resolutions and the land-for- peace principle. Yet here, as elsewhere, the initiative seems suspiciously optimistic. Despite Tenet's recommendations made following his last visit to the region Israel has paid no attention to UN resolutions demanding an end to the occupation and it has yet to stop attacking towns and villages at will.
Considering that the proposed programme has hardly even touched on the issue of Israel vis-à-vis Syria and Lebanon, the situation is obviously immensely complex. Time is one crucial factor ignored by Javier Solana's recent call for a conference in mid-July, since such a conference could not sensibly be held before determining a date for Israel to withdraw. The daily suffering of Palestinians, the collective punishment and systematic humiliation to which they are subjected, not only make of the determining of such a date a matter of urgency, but render Mubarak's task an immensely complicated , critical and sensitive one.
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