This
Time, Israel Is Missing
An Historic Opportunity
By Nicola Nasser
15 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Fulfilling
a 60-year old Israeli dream and an American unwavering strategy, the
22-member League of Arab states are now in consensus on a potentially
groundbreaking Arab Peace Initiative (API), which pledges their collective
and full recognition of the Jewish state and full-fledged permanent
peace in return for withdrawing the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)
to 1967 lines, the establishment of an independent Palestine with eastern
Jerusalem as its capital, and “an agreed, just solution”
to the Palestinian refugee issue in accordance with United Nations Resolution
194, but both Washington and Tel Aviv are not forthcoming.
The API was a dramatic reversal of decades-long policy as well as a
peace offensive. It was approved in Beirut in 2002 by the Arab leaders
who reiterated their commitment thereto at their following annual summits.
A meeting of their foreign ministers in Cairo earlier this month recommended
to their upcoming summit in Riyadh on March 28-29 a renewal of their
peace offer as a “strategic option.”
The historic potentials of the API were acknowledged by the international
Quartet of Middle East mediators, comprising the U.S., the U.N., the
E.U. and Russia. In 2003 the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1515 cited
the API as one of the terms of reference for making peace between Arabs
and Israelis.
Arab leaders seemed recently to follow up on their initiative for the
first time with a diplomatic offensive that started ahead of their Riyadh
summit and is expected to resume thereafter. Their diplomatic campaign
was spearheaded by Jordan’s King Abdullah II’s visit to
Washington DC and highlighted by his impressive and eloquent message
to the U.S. Congress on March 7.
The API was for five years archived into oblivion on the shelves of
the Arab League, rejected by Israel and ignored by the US, who in 2006
swiftly vetoed an Arab League move to revive peace making on its basis
by entrusting the mission to the U.N. Security Council. A change of
heart following the negative fallout of the Israeli war on Lebanon last
summer moved Washington to perceive in the strategic Arab option a tactical
tool “to recast the (regional) political landscape from the traditional
one of Arabs versus Israelis … into a Sunni vs. Shiia alignment,”
(1) thus opening a window of opportunity for Arab leaders to follow
up on it.
Seeking to break through Israel’s rejection of their daring offer,
the U.S.-allied Arab leaders have turned to Washington appealing for
intervention and warning their offer could be the last chance to make
peace otherwise the ideologies of hate and terror would plunge the Middle
East into a wider conflict.
“Today, I must speak; I cannot be silent,” the Jordanian
monarch repeated to U.S. lawmakers: “Sixty years of Palestinian
dispossession, forty years under occupation, a stop-and-go peace process,
all this has left a bitter legacy of disappointment and despair …
It is time to create a new and different legacy.”
Indicating that thirteen years on since late King Hussein, his father,
and Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, were in Washington pursuing
the cause of peace, the “work is still not completed,” the
“ongoing crisis” has failed eleven American presidents and
thirty American congresses, and incumbent President George W. Bush’s
“vision’” of a two-state solution risks to remain
merely a vision for ever, unless the U.S. rises up to the “challenge,”
plays “an historic role,” and uses its “unrivalled”
potentials and “unprecedented power” to seize on the “indeed
historic, moment of opportunity,” made possible by the API.
“The wellspring of regional division, the source of resentment
and frustration far beyond is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine,”
the king said. “We can wait no longer,” Abdullah II warned:
“The status quo is also pulling the region and the world towards
greater danger … the cycle of crises is spinning faster, and with
greater potential for destruction … Any further erosion in the
situation would be serious for the future of moderation and coexistence,
in the region and beyond” and “we are all at risk of being
victims of further violence resulting from ideologies of terror and
hatred.” (2)
The Jordanian monarch’s message was also that of his Arab counterparts.
He met with the Saudi Arabian and Egyptian leaders, King Abdullah and
President Hosni Mubarak, ahead of his U.S. visit. What is more important
in their warning message is that it is delivered by U.S.-allied friends,
whose support is essential to bring other U.S. regional concerns to
a successful conclusion. These leaders are now in the regional driving
seat.
Their leading role as well as the U.S. paramount position in the region
could be compromised by ignoring their warnings and the rare opportunity
their initiative offers. Dealing adversely or passively with their peaceful
alternative to violent resistance to the Israeli occupation is too risky.
Especially the Saudi Arabian leader, King Abdullah, the original author
of the API, has invested a lot of his personal weight and his Kingdom’s
assets to win over Arab consensus on the initiative. He also succeeded
in securing Hamas’ indirect subscription to it. Riyadh also won
over Iran’s support, according to the Saudi official news agency,
or at least watered down the Iranian opposition.
Abdullah II’s appeal seems to have fallen on deaf ears on the
Capitol Hill; so far it has created no official forthcoming reaction,
thus providing the necessary inaction for Israel to act intransigently
and demand practically the upcoming Riyadh summit adopt an Israeli version
of the API.
Criticism of the six decade-old U.S. inaction strategy of crisis management
was recently eloquently questioned: “Is a comprehensive Middle
East peace in America’s strategic interests? Put simply, what
excuse would the US have for remaining in the region playing policeman
if all in the garden were lovely?” (3)
This strategy has all along played into Israeli hands, backed up all
Israeli expansionist wars justified by Tel Aviv as pre-emptive, preventive
and defensive, but in the end boiled down to being simply aggressive
military conquests with two major aims: to grab more Palestinian land
for the ongoing colonial Jewish settlement and to maintain Arab land
under Israeli occupation as a bargaining chip to blackmail and dictate
further Arab concessions. This is the strategy that has been fuelling
anti-Americanism among hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims because
literary it has turned the United States into a partner to the Israeli
40-year old occupation.
The latest Israeli par excellence exploitation of this strategy was
recently illustrated vis-à-vis the API.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, went this month to Brussels then
to Washington to reconfirm Israel’s rejection of the Arab offer,
citing two non-starters: First the stipulated “agreed upon, just”
solution of the Palestinian refugees problem on the basis of the UN
resolution 194, which is “contrary to the principle of two states,”
and Second what she described as the Arab “dream” of withdrawing
the IOF to their pre-1967 lines. Identifying these two points as “red
line” she told AIPAC nonetheless the Saudi plan has “positive
elements,” but the “original” Saudi plan, not the
one adopted by the Arab League!
Livni was drawing on President Bush’s letter of guarantees to
the comatose former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, on April 14,
2004, which was condemned by Arab Palestinians as a “second Balfour
Declaration” because it pledged U.S. rejection of the Palestinian
Right of Return and Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 borders as “unrealistic.”
Both strategic allies are now blackmailing Arabs to surrender further
territorial and political “concessions” accordingly.
The simple interpretation of Livni’s objections: Israel is gearing
up, backed by the U.S., towards dividing the occupied Palestinian West
Bank between the Jewish settlers whose colonies would be annexed to
Israel and the Palestinians who will be left with 42 percent of the
West Bank area to test-create a borderless transitional state as a long-term
arrangement. Palestinian and Arab consensus condemn this arrangement
as a non-starter, which will inevitably pre-empt any viable Palestinian
state as envisioned by Bush’s two-state “vision.”
Obviously Israel is seeking an Israeli version of the API, but “unilaterally
giving Israel what it wants is not a solution. It would be wrong for
the Arab summit unilaterally to change the 2002 peace plan to meet the
Israeli objections,” wrote Rami Khouri, the editor of Lebanon’s
The Daily Star, summing up a widely held official Arab rejection.
Even U.S.-allied Jordan and Egypt who signed peace treaties with Israel
on a bilateral basis are urging a comprehensive approach now and recalling
international legitimacy as the proper framework: During his meetings
in the U.S., King Abdullah II “underlined the need to solve the
Palestinian issue in accordance with the Arab peace initiative and international
legitimacy resolutions.” (4)
Changing the API would break up Arab consensus on it, which is its most
effective asset that makes the collective peace offer credible and an
historic turnabout opportunity.
Arab League Secretary-General, Amr Moussa, warned on record: “Arab
peace initiative expressed an Arab consensus and will not be redrafted
as demanded by some foreign powers. Watering down” the plan would
be “a strategic mistake” that could lead to new bloodshed.
“The Arab initiative is not open for review.” Similarly
GCC secretary-general, Abd Al-Rahman Al-'Atiya, said the Gulf countries
were opposed to changes to the API. Syria warned she “absolutely
rejected for some hostile fingers to toy, directly or through brokers,
with the agenda of the (upcoming) summit so that its decisions would
come in harmony with the Israeli and American interests.”
The Arab diplomatic campaign however has had weight enough to corner
Israel into defensive tactics. The Israeli maneuvering between the “original”
and the “adopted” API is one tactic; another was Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert’s statement on Sunday -- hours ahead of a meeting
with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Jerusalem -- that Israel
“was ready to take seriously” the Arab plan, hoping the
upcoming Arab summit would bolster its “positive elements.”
Abbas reportedly spent three quarters of their two-hour meeting trying
to convince Olmert of the official API.
The wide political spectrum components of Israel’s incumbent cabinet
of Olmert will go down into history as the government that has let its
people down by manoeuvring to blackmail Arabs into an unattainable better
deal than the best deal Israel has ever had and could ever have to realize
its sixty-year old dream of being recognized and accepted as an integral
part of the Arab and Muslim Middle East. Israeli peaceniks seem too
marginal to have any say among the main stream decision-makers where
the species of Avigdor Lieberman hold the upper hand on strategic issues.
Israeli leaders used to mock Arab leaders as the masters of missing
opportunities. This time, Israel is the party who seems determined to
miss a real historic opportunity.
*Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West
Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) Frida Ghitis, http://worldpoliticswatch.com, Oct 10, 2006. (2) The
Age Online, Oct. 10, 2006.
(2) Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Speech to U.S. Congress, March
7, 2007.
(3) Linda S. Heard, onlinejournal.com, March 7, 2007.
(4) (Petra, March 10, 2007.