Posted on 06/04/2003 8:18:53 AM PDT by E Rocc
Analysis / It's now terror versus settlements
By Aluf Benn
The Gulf of Eilat has known quite a few summits in the last decade, peace talks and dashed hopes. The Jordanian king's palace in Aqaba, where the road map will be launched today, is only a few kilometers away from the Taba Hilton, where the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was cut off in January 2001. It's difficult to remember all the other conferences, the agreements that were violated, the regional development plans that evaporated.
Today, President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas will gather for a group photo on the beach to announce the end of the intifada and to relaunch the political process. The speeches and summaries were prepared before the summit and in them, the three leaders will try to display sober optimism. There won't be flights of sublime rhetoric about fulfilling the prophetic vision of peace and conciliation between the children of Abraham. Nor will there be promises of a new Middle East. The Aqaba statements will be dry and practical, like the politicians who deliver them.
The political news that comes out of Aqaba will strengthen the equation between Palestinian terror and Israeli settlements in the territories. That apparently is the main Palestinian achievement from the last 32 months of violence. The Oslo agreements required the Palestinians to put down their weapons but allowed Israel to build all it wanted in the settlements until the final agreement.
The intifada changed the balance of forces. Since the Mitchell report, which called for mutuality between an end to terror and an end to settlement activity, the American administration has adopted that formula and only added the replacement of Yasser Arafat, which can be considered the main Israeli achievement in the intifada.
Sharon, who was swept up by the winds of American diplomatic activity in the last two weeks, was forced to accept the equation between terror and settlements, and it will be at the center of his speech today. The prime minister will demand a real fight against terror and will promise the evacuation of outposts and territorial contiguity to the Palestinian state that will be established.
His associates say there's nothing new in these messages. Sharon has been proposing such territorial contiguity to the Palestinians for years, with tunnels and bridges, and has always promised to "deal with the settlements" at the end of the negotiations.
Senior American officials are convinced that Sharon simply does not understand the change in attitude in the administration. Israeli officials are still trying to decipher the mysteries of the "black box," whatever it was that made Bush suddenly get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after more than two years in which he kept a safe distance. Something took place in Washington between May 15-20, between the failed visit of the soft-spoken U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in the region and the presidential decision to make Sharon pass the road map through his government without delay, while merely filing Israeli reservations for future handling. Who influenced Bush to come to the region and speak for the first time about his ability to pressure Sharon?
The Washington Post's diplomatic correspondent, Glenn Kessler, wrote a lengthy article on Bush's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Bush's attitude to Sharon, based on conversations with administration officials who participated in closed-door sessions. Kessler's report casts a dark shadow of doubt over the conventional wisdom that the president was wrapped around the prime minister's finger.
The report strengthens the view that behind their friendship, a lot of suspicion remains. In April 2002, Bush called Sharon "a man of peace" and was hit by a lot of criticism for the statement, particularly from Arab friends.
At one of their later meetings, Sharon referred to himself as a "a man of peace," and Bush interrupted him, Kessler reports. "I know you are a man of security," Bush said. "I want you to work harder on the peace part." Then, adding a bit of colloquial language that at first seemed to baffle Sharon, Bush jabbed: "I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that." According to Kessler, Bush's favorite ruler in the Middle East is Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, and not Sharon.
But the Kessler article also makes clear that Bush prefers to leave the tough decisions to the sides, and will not be in a hurry to sink into the morass of details the way his predecessor, Bill Clinton, did.
The practical result of the summit will be the dispatch of a team of American inspectors to the territories, and that's also a Palestinian achievement. They would have preferred an international force, staffed with their European friends. But the Americans won't be anything to laugh at as they travel between the settlements to see if Sharon is making the same 100-percent effort to remove the illegal outposts that Abbas and his security minister Mohammed Dahlan have to make to uproot terror.
-Eric
Translation: Bush caved into Saudi demands after the Riyadh bombings and embarked on a course of appeasing America's biggest enemy.
Like Papa did.
Aides said the one leader in the region who has earned Bush's respect is Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, who forcefully challenged the president over his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a visit to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., in April of last year.
In a scene that one senior Bush adviser later likened to "a near-death experience," Abdullah arrived at Crawford with a book showing pictures of Palestinian suffering and a 10-minute videotape of images of children shot and crushed by Israelis that had appeared on Arab television.
The adviser said Abdullah spoke eloquently about what these images meant -- conveying a respect for life rather than a hatred of Israel -- and then laid it on the line for Bush: Was he going to do something about this or not?
Current and former officials said Abdullah put it this way: I will work with you if you are willing to deal with this issue. If you can't, let me know now. No matter what, I'll always say positive things about you in public. But I have to make certain calculations on my own if you aren't going to step up to the plate.
Bush replied that he was working on a vision and would present it soon, the current and former officials said.
"It certainly made an impact on the president," one official said.
Which Abdullah did after Sharon hosted Powell, and showed him pictures of homicide bombing victims, and Powell reeled. The Arabs never have an original idea. :)
So who was the reporter in the Post? That might be revealing, as most of their ME reporting is biased against Israel.
A "Palestinian State" was offered at Camp David. Nothing new about that.The state offered at Camp David wasn't viable. Gush Shalom (Israeli peace group) put together a nice presentation of what was wrong with it. Clinton thought he could push it through, giving him a "legacy" not involving DNA testing while not risking Jewish support for the Democratic Party. When Arafat rejected it, the Clinton spin machine extracted payback by propagandizing what a great offer it was.
-Eric
Something took place in Washington between May 15-20, between the failed visit of the soft-spoken U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in the region and the presidential decision to make Sharon pass the road map through his government without delay,...The Administration had been pushing the Road Map for a long time, mostly through Wolfowitz and Abrams. I don't think anything specific happened, I think the agenda was in place, pending the end of combat in Iraq. Powell's visit didn't work, so Plan B proceeded.Love to know what the "something" was, but perhaps Bush's greatest strength is keeping his cards close to his vest.
-Eric
The parties that are wholly committed to "We will push the other side into Jordan/the Medditeranean Sea" are not represented at these talks and apparently have no intention of halting operations. Until the governments of both sides can 1) control these elements, and 2) not let their activities halt work towards peace, there'll be no peace.Precisely. Both groups that wish to ethnically cleanse the former British Mandate of Palestine have no interest in peace. Indeed, if all one of their actions does is rile up their counterparts, they likely feel they have achieved something. That's why there was a rash of suicide bombings....because there was progress towards peace.
It's kind of like having Sharpton, Farrakhan, and the Klan all in the same town making trouble. They may hate each other but their interests coincide.
-Eric
Pathetically manipulative with a pitiful video propaganda cue that I myself can fabricate on a fast midranger.
You noticed that this isn't Bush of the Iarq war, the clever wording and ideas support seem to be missing, and now he sounds like he slid to a level of a third-rate State Department arabist duracell bunny.
Will his "vision" be the kind that'll again require two out-of-sync push-pulling "interpeters", Fleisher and Powell, for his "continuous-contiguous palestinian state" thinking process?
This has always been about two things...terroist thugs and occupied land.
The arguments to date always get sidetracked by the old question of 'Which came first? The chicken or the egg?" Which was then followed by someone wanting to know who was going to be the chicken and who was going to be the egg.
What is new about this, veronica, is that President Bush has no patience with such nonsense and now, it does not matter.
Terror must stop. Occupation must end.
If Hamas, Hezbolah and all of Arafat's other little toys don't clean up their act then there will be nothing but dust and ashes in what could have been a Palestinian nation.
That is what is new. President Bush has told the parties that if they don't settle their problem with his help then he won't help Arafat when Sharon blows him to hell.
Is that peace? Nope, but it is closure.
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