Al-Ahram Weekly | Editorial | Out of the vacuum

		13 - 19 June 2002 Issue No.590 Editorial	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Recommend this page

Out of the vacuum
An impressive roll call of Arab leaders has passed through the American capital in recent weeks: the arrival, yesterday, of the Saudi Arabian foreign minister being the latest, and possibly the last, before President Bush's much heralded policy statement on the Middle East, trailed for some time now and expected to be delivered in the next week or so.
Despite the heavy hints dropped in the last few days by the US media, indicating that Washington's position has inched even closer to that of the Israeli government, particularly following Bush's Oval Office meeting with Sharon, the contents of the statement remain, for the present, the subject of intense speculation. Yet amid all the uncertainty one thing remains glaringly obvious: should Bush, in his statement, fail to offer hope to the Palestinians of a viable political settlement then US policy will have pushed the Arab Israeli conflict back a generation.
There is little evidence, though, that the Bush administration has taken this self-evident truth on board. Yasser Arafat, we are told by US officials in an echo of Bush's own mantra, has not done enough to curb the activities of Palestinian extremists. It is as if they believe that suicide bombers are bred in a vacuum, that their actions have nothing to do with occupation, nothing to do with the random slaughter of Palestinians, with witnessing the annexing of ever more land to build illegal settlements for rabidly xenophobic supremacists, nothing to do with arbitrary arrests and detention, closures, curfews, the wanton destruction of property, the bulldozing of homes. Nor has any one ever bothered to make it clear precisely what, in his shelled, headquarters in occupied Ramallah Arafat should be doing.
Washington appears perfectly happy to lecture anyone and everyone on the overriding need to fight terror,except, that is, the Israeli government. The odds on Prime Minister Sharon being told, in his White House meetings, that he should stop killing Palestinians will not have made any one's fortune. Yet until Israel understands that a military solution to the Palestinian question is an oxymoron the situation will become ever bleaker.

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