Issue No. 591
Opinion
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20 - 26 June 2002 Issue No. 591 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Getting others involved
As President Bush comes forward with his new peace plan, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed discusses the prospects of widening the debate
Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs are co-sponsoring a conference to be held in London on 8 July under the title "The Israeli Palestinian Conflict, from Peace Process to Peace Settlement: What Can Others Do?" The conference, which comes at a particularly critical moment in the Palestinian problem, was scheduled to convene in the wake of the American/Egyptian summit at Camp David, the American/Israeli summit in the White House and President Bush's promise to come forward with a vision of how to overcome the present impasse in the peace process. It is a vision still in the making, an uncertain situation in which creative contributions by other parties concerned with the situation in the Middle East can be useful in determining the parameters of an equitable and acceptable settlement. Hence the timing of the London conference: its organisers hope it can play a constructive role in determining the shape of things to come.
In an interview with Al-Hayat, US Secretary of State Colin Powell coined the expression a provisional Palestinian state, by which he meant a compromise between President Mubarak's position on the need to recognise the establishment of a Palestinian state in the near future and Sharon's position that it is premature to talk of a final-status agreement, which is essentially what a Palestinian state boils down to, and his alternative proposal for a long-term interim agreement. But in dubbing the proposed entity a provisional state Powell was being overly generous. It will have none of the prerogatives of statehood: no final borders, no capital, and no say in when, or, indeed, if, Israel will pull out of Palestinian territories on which it is still building settlements that are, even in the eyes of the Americans, illegal. From the practical point of view the proposed state will not be very different from the institutions of the Palestinian Authority now recognised by Israel.
This compromise solution carries considerable risks, the most serious being its tacit acceptance that the Palestinian problem is not amenable to a solution at this point in time and that, with the hopes once pinned on the peace process now replaced by despair and mutual hatred, the best that can be hoped for is a hiatus in the confrontation, an attempt to defuse tensions and weather a crisis that threatens to explode into all-out war.
For the Palestinians, the compromise solution is totally unacceptable. With only two-fifths of the West Bank and two-thirds of Gaza in their hands, and with wide chunks of Palestinian land annexed to Jerusalem, there is absolutely no guarantee that the Palestinian state will extend in the future to include all territories which were under Arab sovereignty on 4 June 1967, though Security Council Resolution 242 stipulates the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war.
Sharon makes no secret of his disdain for the resolution and has openly declared that Israel has no intention of pulling out of the territories occupied in 1967 because, as he puts it, it has "rights" over them. In an article published in The New York Times just before his visit to Washington, Sharon reiterated that 242 "established that these were disputed territories where Israel had legitimate rights to defensible borders". In fact, Resolution 242 did no such thing, either in letter or in spirit. Sharon is also fond of citing the first President Bush's reference to a settlement based on a compromise to justify Israel's continued occupation of Arab territories. In fact, when Bush spoke of a compromise in his address to the Madrid Conference, he meant a compromise concerning the demands of the protagonists, not a compromise concerning territory acquired by war.
The term "provisional state" turns the very notion of statehood on its head. The word state, with all its rich meanings and connotations, is deprived of all content when linked with the word provisional. Moreover, this bizarre appellation indefinitely postpones any content. It refuses the Palestinian Authority's request that a timeline be specified for an end to the occupation and, therefore, for the intermediary stage, and has replaced a fixed timetable for concluding a final status agreement by a performance benchmark system. Though Bush insisted that the Americans rather than the Israelis will determine whether the benchmarks have been met, given Bush's reluctance to inconvenience Sharon in any manner the interim stage could stretch on indefinitely.
From the start, there were signs that Palestinian apprehensions were well-founded. In response to international and domestic pressure Arafat formed a new government to address specific problems, most notably to put an end to the multiple and discordant character of the security organs by regrouping them under a responsible central authority, as well as to ensure transparency in financial dealings, particularly as relates to financing the reconstruction of the West Bank. Many of its cities have been devastated by the Israeli incursions throughout the last two months and Western donors are not ready to see the $1.2 billion they allocated to reconstruction go to waste. They want to ensure that an efficient monitoring system is set in place to protect these funds from irresponsible spending and corruption. Although Arafat appointed well-respected figures in his new government, the American administration was quick to announce that it did not trust his new government, even before it began operating.
This anti-Arafat bias manifested itself most clearly on the issue of convening a Middle East conference. Sharon proposed that a regional conference be convened to launch the interim stage, while the American side spoke of an international conference. But it does not seem as though the Bush administration insisted that its formula for the conference prevail, which raises some awkward questions. For example, does this downgrade the weight of the quartet deliberations currently underway between the US, the EU, Russia and the UN over the Palestinian problem? Is the function of these deliberations only to gather information and coordinate activities, but not to set policies? That is, to guarantee that the Pax Americana is imposed without any questions by international parties aspiring to act as honest brokers?
Moreover, how can it be guaranteed that the conference will be truly regional? Will it, for example, include Syria and Lebanon, and not concentrate exclusively on the Palestinian problem? The participation of Europe, Russia and the UN is essential if Syria and Lebanon are to reacquire their legitimate rights.
It is also interesting to reflect how the sharp differences within the American administration, particularly between the State Department and the White House, will play out. Powell has more than once declared that he will go on working with Arafat, despite Israel's attempts to marginalise the Palestinian leader. On the other hand, White House spokesman Ari Fleisher has declared that some of Powell's statements do not reflect official policy. According to the BBC's Washington correspondent some of Powell's statements, and White House reactions to them, are evidence that differences still persist within the ranks of the administration. Nor are contradictory statements coming out of Washington alone. Even as American sources quoted Sharon as saying he would not object if Bush announced his plan for the creation of a provisional Palestinian state, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported that Sharon had rejected the idea.
Is it possible to leave it to the US administration and the Israeli government to monopolise the decision-making process with such disparities and confused statements? The whole world is waiting for Bush's statements after his recent round of intensive consultations with some of the main players in the region. But what we have witnessed is calls for more consultations and widening the circle of the people involved in the discussions. This is what the Chatham House conference is about: guaranteeing a wider input of ideas from a wider variety of viewpoints with the aim of better understanding and coping with the difficulties ahead.
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