Instead
of building a diplomatic momentum on the political breakthrough mediated by
their Saudi Arabian ally, who succeeded in developing an Arab and Palestinian
consensus on going along with the U.S.-steered Quartet efforts to revive the
deadlocked peace process, American diplomacy has turned its sponsored
Palestinian-Israeli summit meeting in Jerusalem on Monday from a promising
event into a missed opportunity, thus shaking off a burgeoning potential for a
more coordinated regional U.S.�Arab front.
The
trilateral meeting, which secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planned with
President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to be a breakthrough in
a six-year old Palestinian-Israeli impasse, began without an agreed upon agenda
or at least with a last minute change of the originally perceived agenda,
convened grudgingly as a face saving event and ended nonetheless a summit void
of content after two hours of �informal� talks in a pointless �dialogue� of the
deaf at the heavily-guarded David Citadel Hotel adjacent to Jerusalem�s Old
City, where the Israeli �archaeological� excavations at Islam�s third holiest
site of al-Aqsa Mosque compound are slowly but systemically bulldozing whatever
national and spiritual symbols are left for Palestinians to negotiate about.
Embarrassing U.S. friends and allies as important as
Riyadh, Amman and Cairo, and further antagonizing influential regional players
like Syria, who all weighed in heavily to conclude the Mecca deal in order to
develop a unified Arab and Palestinian stance that easily could be discerned as
distancing them away from Iranian influences, which is a key U.S.-Israeli
endeavor, may not harm the U.S. historically-tested strategic alliances with
Arabs, but it would certainly put off indefinitely whatever is left for
peace-making in the region.
There
was nothing new in the five points of agreement reported by Rice after the
meeting. Commitment to the two-state vision of President George W. Bush,
continued respect of the ceasefire, working together to implement the
Quartet-drafted �Road Map,� honouring by the Palestinian government of the
Quartet-adopted three conditions of renouncing violence, recognizing Israel and
honouring previously signed accords with her, and agreeing to meet again, have
all become obsolete non-starters in view of the U.S. and Israeli determination
not to follow them up with working mechanisms and binding timetables in �formal
negotiations� that end the crisis management of the futile �informal dialogues�
of the past six years.
The
disappointing outcome of the trilateral summit could be summed up in pointless
open-ended promises: �The president and prime minister agreed they would meet
together again soon� in a fourth encounter, Rice said while briefing reporters
without her summiteers and without taking any questions after the meeting,
which concluded without an official statement, adding she in her turn �will
be coming back� on her tenth trip to the Middle East since
taking office, and reiterating an obsolete clich�: �All three of us affirmed our commitment to a two-state
solution� and, probably drawing ironically on the lessons of history learned
from the tragic, but successful, experience of the birth of the Israeli state, �agreed
that a Palestinian state cannot be born of violence and terror� so as to avert
similar tragedies !
Playing
into the hands of the Israeli declared policy of �lowering the expectations� of
Palestinians, Rice promoted the summit since her landing in Israel on Friday
with a flow of skeptical and discouraging remarks. The �uncertainty�
of the new Palestinian government, which her administration has �strong
reservations� against, will �complicate� U.S. peace efforts, she said, thus
creating the environment for conflicting Palestinian and Israeli expectations
and contradictory differences over the agenda, which the Palestinians expected
to include the final status issues and a �mechanism to move from words to
deeds,� according to chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, but the Israelis ruled out
any �deliberations� on those issues, especially Jerusalem, refugees and return
to pre-1967 borders, according to Olmert.
Israel had every intention to derail any progress at the
summit unless the Palestinian leaders subscribe to her plan for a long-term
interim arrangement during which they should be satisfied with a transitional
state without borders on 42 percent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip; a plan
that is rejected by a total Palestinian consensus conveyed on Monday to Rice
because, in the long run, this plan will boil down to nothing more than giving
Israel enough time to create more facts on the ground to render any Palestinian
state, whether temporary or permanent, unviable, unsustainable and impossible.
Israel and her American strategic ally promoted Abbas as
a partner first as an alternative for late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat,
but when he ascended to the helm of the national decision-making, they
qualified his partnership credentials by taking on Hamas; when Abbas concluded
that was a recipe for civil war and insisted on dialogue with the Islamic
movement he was accused of �dialogue with terror;� when he succeeded in
convincing Hamas to join the political institutions of the Oslo accords in a
democratic process, they challenged his credentials because, according to them,
the ensuing two-head Palestinian Authority compromised his representative
competence and his ability to govern; after the Mecca deal they claimed his
credentials as a peace partner were neutralized by his new partnership with
Hamas and steered the Quartet to insist on their three preconditions as the
prerequisite to legitimize him as a partner, and sent Rice to convey the
message.
Evasive diplomacy to avoid negotiations
However, President Bush, torpedoed the success of her
mission when he, hours ahead of her arrival in the region, ruled out, according
to Olmert, any dealing by his administration with any new Palestinian
government formed on the basis of the inter-Palestinian power-sharing deal,
which the Saudis mediated and sponsored at the highest level in Mecca two weeks
ago, while Congress preempted her success by blocking an $86 million aid package promised
to Abbas before the deal, thus dispatching Rice
empty-handed politically and financially, and armed only with noncommittal and
non-starter open-ended promises her administration failed to honor during more
than six years in office. Rice is practically left without any initiative
despite her face-saving unconvincing promises.
Amid mounting Israeli and American threats of tightening
the siege imposed on the Palestinian people, the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) and its offshoot, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian and
Arab officials and observers are almost in consensus on interpreting the U.S.
policy as premeditated and not a blunder, aimed at �aborting� the Abbas-Olmert
summit, the new Palestinian unity government and coercing the newly unified
Palestinian leadership into yielding to the Israeli-dictated preconditions by
refusing the Mecca accord as the approach to lifting the siege, according to
the leader of the Fatah parliamentary bloc, Azzam al-Ahmad.
By ruling out the Mecca accord as a non-starter the U.S.
policy was also interpreted as evasive diplomacy to avoid negotiations, whether
bilateral or multilateral within the framework of an international conference
proposed by the Palestinians, the League of Arab States and recently by Russian
President Vladimir Putin during a Middle East tour, and supported by the
pro-Mecca deal Turkish-chaired Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and
the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), because Israel is more a beneficiary of the
besieged Palestinian status quo and the current Arab status quo overburdened
with several crises than from negotiations and because the U.S. administration
sees it has more area for maneuvering in such an unstable environment than in a
politically stable one.
The Israeli and U.S. framework condemns the PLO�s
partnership with Hamas, labelled by both as a �terrorist� group and persist on sowing
discord among Palestinian parties so as not to give �legitimacy� to the Islamic
movement. What�s wrong with giving legitimacy to Hamas? Wasn�t legitimacy given
to the PLO, which was also labelled by both strategic allies as �terrorist,� on
the organization�s guarantee to become involve in the political struggle in
pursuit of its national goals? �They want Abbas to take actions that lead to a
civil war -- to protect past agreements that the Israelis have destroyed,�
veteran peace advocate and member of the PLO Executive Committee, Yasser Abed
Rabbo, told Reuters.
The U.S.-Israeli diplomacy is also steering against world
consensus. Russia, a member of the Quartet is already saying the new
Palestinian government should be dealt with, recognized, and legitimized.
Although the Europeans and the United Nations, the other two members, are
taking a cautious position, France, Germany and the Nordics of Denmark, Norway and
Sweden also welcomed the Palestinian unity government deal. Aside from Israel,
the United States is alone in not forthcoming.
�Washington�s handling of Hamas is the latest in an impressive list
of US policy mistakes in the Middle East. Rather than strengthening
democratization processes across the region, the administration has weakened
them. Rather than lessening hostility to America, the hostility is reaching
unprecedented levels. Rather than furthering a peace process between
Palestinians and Israelis, the US has rendered negotiations, let alone an
agreement, almost impossible,� Omar Karmi wrote in Lebanon�s The Daily
Star on February 12.
When
Riyadh stepped in, out of national interest, to skillfully contain some of the
regional mess created by the U.S. blundering, not only in Iraq and Lebanon but
also and more successfully in Palestine, where a unity government is underway
thanks to the Mecca agreement, Washington still seems ungratefully determined
to miss this opportunity to improve its image and help one of its most
important regional allies avert the regional repercussions of her foreign
policy failures in the Middle East, at a time when the
United States needs Saudi Arabia for other regional efforts.
Palestinian unity prerequisite for peace
The Mecca deal politically averted Palestinian
infighting, which could have been only averted otherwise by directing the
Palestinian fire against a common enemy, a tactic that the latest attack in
Elat could have been the first salvo. Internal Palestinian calm is a
prerequisite for calm across the still undemarcated Israeli borders. Haim Malka, deputy director of
the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, DC, wrote in the Washington Post on February 13 urging the U.S. to support the unity government �not
because it brings peace, but because it moves us significantly further toward
stabilizing the conflict than a Palestinian civil war would . . . without a
basic accommodation among Palestinians there is no chance for a renewed
political process between Israelis and Palestinians.�
Similarly,
Robert Malley, a senior aide to former U.S. President Bill Clinton on
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, concluded in an interview published by the
Council on Foreign Relations on February 14: �Abbas could not have concluded a
historic deal with Israel, entailing difficult compromises, without a prior
intra-Palestinian agreement. He would have lacked the authority, legitimacy,
and credibility to reach an agreement with Israel if he were simultaneously at
war with a sizeable portion of the Palestinian people. The only way
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations can proceed and conclude is in the context of
a Fatah/Hamas national unity agreement, which brings stability to the
Palestinian arena. All the rest is wishful -- and dangerous -- thinking.�
Only Palestinian national unity can sustain a viable
peace process. The Oslo accords could not have been launched on a divided
Palestinian house; those accords were based on the Palestinian consensus on the
two-state solution by the PLO National Council meeting in Algiers in 1988. That
was exactly what the Mecca agreement achieved.
At least
the U.S. and Israel should give a chance for the national unity government to
prove its political credentials and not repeat their mistaken boycott of the
former government, contrary to the repeated advice of their ostensibly trusted
Palestinian partner, Mahmoud Abbas; that government is now counterproductively,
from their point of view, replaced by a stronger one supported by national
unity, Arab, Islamic and almost a world consensus.
They
could at least flash green light for the other Quartet three members to lift
their siege and for the international banking system to channel in the Arab and
Islamic-pledged financial aid, including the recent Saudi pledge in Mecca of
$US1 billion, to the united Palestinian Authority to ease the poverty and
deprivation caused by their imposed blockade, in a show of good will for a
mutual trial period of grace during which they could maintain their own
sanctions until their arguments prove either right or wrong.
Nicola Nasser is a
veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied
territories. He is the editor of the English Web site of the Palestine Media Centre (PMC).