Arab News Reacts to Sharon’s Policy Speech (usual Saudi barf)

Arutz Sheva ^ | 23 December 2003

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Arab News Reacts to Sharon’s Policy Speech
18:02 Dec 23, '03 / 28 Kislev 5764

Saudi Arabia’s English-language Arab News called Sharon’s declared policy of unilateral withdrawal a “new Israeli ruse.”

Saudi Arabia’s English-language Arab News was among the first in the Arab world to print an editorial in response to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent policy speech at the Herzliya Conference. In it, the editors call Sharon’s declared policy of unilateral withdrawal a “new Israeli ruse.”

“Ariel Sharon’s unilateral peace plan is simply not the way forward to a just settlement in Palestine, and he knows it. It is another crabwise step toward expanding Israel’s borders,” the Saudi editorial began. Unilateral Israeli withdrawal, the Arab News editors wrote, is “a deeply objectionable move,” but Sharon’s declaration of such a policy is, in their minds, “a classic maneuver of the realpolitiker. Say the unthinkable, even though you have no intention at that moment of doing it, and the unthinkable will become thinkable at some later date.”

In the metaphor of the editors, the announced Israeli policy is an example of how “[t]he Israeli leadership knows how to howl with pain while it drives its mailed fist into the face of the Palestinians.”

Indeed, according to Arab News, “[To t]his Zionist government [it] was always clear that it had to stop the peace process. It needed the co-operation of hard-liners among the Palestinians to achieve this. It needed also to destroy the moderate middle ground on both sides. By a series of calculated acts of savagery, it has humiliated and angered the Palestinians and in so doing beaten the recruiting drum for Islamic Jihad and Hamas hard-liners who send off the suicide bombers on their missions.”

However, the editors contend, “to make it easier for Washington to continue its support, every once in a while [Israel] has appeared to listen and to draw back from yet another step in its war of expulsion. It counts to ten or waits for another suicide attack, whichever comes sooner, and then resumes its steady course toward expansion.”

Published: 13:41 December 23, 2003 Last Update: 18:02 December 23, 2003