Posted on 03/29/2002 5:34:17 AM PST by knighthawk
BEIRUT In offering Israel terms for peace with Arab states Thursday, Arab leaders encouraged Palestinians to keep fighting.
It is much the same mixed message, some diplomats here maintain, that Palestinians are drawing from American policy in the region, and it suggests why Yasser Arafat will have great difficulty enforcing the cease-fire he said Thursday night he was prepared to accept.
In ratifying a Saudi peace initiative Thursday, Arab nations held out the prospect of normal relations with Israel, provided it withdraws from all the territory it occupied in the 1967 war and somehow accommodates the refugees of the 1948 war.
The implication made explicit by many of the leaders here is that at least until Israel agrees to that proposal and begins implementing it, the fight should, and will, go on.
"It's not a question of terrorism," said Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League. "It's a question of occupation of Arab land, which necessarily leads to legitimate resistance."
U.S. policy appears to be broadcasting similar signals, because of the deepening chasm between the administration's rhetorical vision of a Palestinian state and its incremental approach to ending the conflict.
Thus, George W. Bush is the first president to speak of a state of Palestine, and his administration has succeeded in embedding the idea in a United Nations resolution for the first time. Even the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has said he would like the Palestinians to have a state, eventually.
The Bush administration's evident intent was to encourage Palestinians to lay down arms by holding out notional statehood as a reward. The effect, said one diplomat observing here, has been to raise Palestinian expectations and increase their impatience by legitimizing their demands for a national home.
"If they think it's going to buy off the militancy of the Palestinians, it's mistaken," this diplomat said. "It's going to increase it, because it gives it legitimacy."
At the same time, the Bush administration is demanding that Palestinians accept and implement a cease-fire plan before embarking on substantive political negotiations. Why, Palestinian officials wonder, should they agree to a truce - which they maintain would benefit only Israel - that does not address demands for statehood that even the Bush administration has embraced?
Sharon has said that he will not negotiate over Palestinians' national grievances under fire, because to do so would be to reward terrorism. Palestinian officials argue that he is simply trying to avoid addressing their demands for an Israeli withdrawal.
Farouk Qaddoumi, Arafat's spokesman, pointed to an imbalance between American means and ends in the region in a speech Thursday at the summit meeting. "The United States still hesitates to take a strict decision to stop the Israeli aggression, though it declared its vision for a Palestinian state and reaffirmed its decision in the United Nations resolution," he said.
Calling the proposed cease-fire "deceptive," Qaddoumi said, "The United States is ignoring the Israeli actions, and claiming it is self-defense. This means that the Israeli-Arab conflict will be prolonged."
Qaddoumi's speech amounted to an appeal for increased Arab support for a continuing Palestinian uprising, which he boasted had managed to "terrify the Israeli society" and suggested would not end until the occupation did.
"The Palestinian people are launching the war of Arab destiny to end the occupation," he said.
Precisely which means are acceptable in this war is less clear. On Wednesday, speaking before a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 20 Israelis in Netanya, President Bashar Assad of Syria suggested that all Israelis were fair targets.
"The issue here is not an issue of who is civilian and who is military," he said. "In the case of Israel, everyone is armed."
Prince Saud al Faisal, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, did not exactly condemn the suicide bombing at a jammed news conference here Thursday, although he said, "Those are losses we cannot condone."
"The Israeli people have a right to live in peace," he said, adding a qualifier, "if they respond to conditions of peace." He went on to note that Palestinians had also been killed. "If I mention one death here do I mention the other death there?" he asked. "Where do you end? Blood only brings blood."
Arafat condemned the suicide bombing. He recently suggested that attacks within pre-1967 Israel were out of bounds. But many Palestinian leaders, including the top officials of Arafat's Fatah faction and even his security chiefs, have said that Palestinians should continue attacking Israelis as long as the Israelis remain in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This is perfectly legal resistance to occupation, they argue, no different than the struggle of American Minutemen against British Redcoats. They believe they are winning, and that therefore a cease-fire would serve only Israeli interests.
Qaddoumi informed the summit meeting Thursday that because of Palestinian fighting, Israel "lost stability and security; psychological problems spread, and unemployment and emigration rose."
Anthony Zinni, the U.S. envoy, has been doggedly pursuing a cease-fire, despite the collapse of trust between the antagonists and the devastating attacks. After both parties last week submitted proposals for implementing a cease-fire, Zinni gave them his proposal, meant to bridge their differences.
Palestinian officials were dismayed to discover that he would give no written assurance that the cease-fire, after a period of at most four weeks, would lead inevitably to substantive political dialogue. He would offer only verbal assurances, Palestinian officials said.
American credibility with Palestinians is at a low ebb, and it is suffering among Arab states generally. Many diplomats here said that the Bush administration promised that it would get Arafat to the summit meeting, but in the end Israel rebuffed U.S. pressure to permit the Palestinian leader to come and Arafat announced he would stay away.
C-Span had a great show on the mideast a year or so ago. A Harvard professor said the term "peace process" would be the end of Israel, that no one should pretend this is anything but war. Wish I could remember her name, she was wonderful and a real novelty for Harvard. Her writings must be on the net somewhere.
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