U.S.
Diplomacy Misses Opportunity, Shuns Peace Prospects
By Nicola Nasser
22 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org
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, the American diplomacy has turned their 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 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
lonely 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 cliché: “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 the Congress pre-empted her success
by blocking a $86 million aid package promised for 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 coerce 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 an 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 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 the legitimacy given
to the PLO, which was also labelled by both strategic allies as “terrorist,”
the organization’s guarantee to involve in 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 lonely
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 skilfully 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 Pre-requisite
for Peace
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 un-demarcated
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. 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
on a 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
Palestinian territories.