POLITICS-MIDEAST: Some Glimmers Amid the Gloom?

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 26 2002 (IPS) - Despite the resurgence of Israeli-Palestinian violence Monday after a relatively calm weekend, analysts here point to signs that a turning point in the conflict may be in sight.

Part of their assessment appears based on the realisation within the region that the carnage simply cannot continue and, in particular, that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s election campaign pledge to bring security to his fellow citizens has proven hollow.

This notion has been given added weight in recent weeks by the apparent revival of a long-dormant Israeli peace movement, spearheaded by scores of reserve officers who say they will no longer serve in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

In addition, growing speculation about an imminent peace initiative led by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, and prominently boosted by the New York Times, also has been getting quiet encouragement from at least part of the administration of President George W. Bush, which had recently been backing Sharon almost unreservedly.

Finally, the administration’s apparent determination to expand its “war against terrorism” to Iraq, probably later this year, and its preference for using the Prince Sultan Air Base, its most advanced military facility in the region, in such an effort may be forcing it to take Arab anger about Sharon’s policies more seriously than even one month ago.

Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the administration’s most fervent supporters of Sharon’s right-wing Likud Party, is scheduled to tour the region next month in part to consult U.S. allies there about Washington’s plans for Iraq.

“If Cheney’s primary purpose is to build support for an operation against Iraq, the last thing he needs is violence and chaos in the West Bank and Gaza as he visits all the Arab countries,” according to Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist at the Nixon Centre here and at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan.

“From a purely short-term strategic perspective,” he told the Public Broadcasting Service, “the United States has got to do everything it can to make sure those conditions do not pertain when he goes out in March.”

Cheney’s visit also comes on the eve of the next Arab Summit meeting in Beirut, at the end of March. That is where Prince Abdullah is expected to seek endorsement for a comprehensive Arab peace offer to Israel, including full normalisation of relations, in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the creation of a Palestinian state.

The idea, which was first publicly proposed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a way of breaking the current impasse between Israel and the Palestinians, reportedly was already being planned by Abdullah when Friedman interviewed him in Riyadh in early February.

It has since been tentatively embraced by senior State Department officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, who praised it Monday as an important step and noted that he, too, had spoken with the Crown Prince about it on Sunday.

The idea is also near the top of the agenda in talks here later this week between visiting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak – who, along with two Gulf leaders, has endorsed the idea in general terms – and President George W. Bush.

The plan has also been strongly endorsed in another Times column published last Thursday by a key U.S. Jewish leader, Henry Siegman, who also acted as an adviser to former President Bill Clinton on Middle East affairs.

Siegman added in his column, however, that senior Saudi officials had told him after Friedman’s interview that Riyadh would be prepared to recognise Israel’s sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and that it would not object to the transfer of small parts of the West Bank to Israel in exchange for comparable territory transferred to the Palestinians by Israel.

These proposals, he wrote, represented “a dramatic change in Saudi Arabia’s position toward Israel and offers a new basis for renewed diplomatic activity.” If Sharon, warned Siegman, failed to react positively to such an offer, it would make clear to Bush and his advisers that the Israeli leader was not interested in a settlement based on land for peace.

Sharon, increasingly buffeted by competing hawkish and dovish constitutencies in his government, has so far played coy about the Saudi initiative despite calls by Israel’s president, among others, for the Israeli leader to offer to meet Abdullah as soon as possible.

Analysts here who are considered close to Sharon’s views have attacked the Saudi initative in mostly guarded terms. Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank, suggested last week that Abdullah’s offer has ceased to be “relevant in today’s geopolitical context,” although he added that a public statement of the plan by Abdullah himself could spark a more far-reaching debate on normalisation with Israel in the Arab world.

Times columnist William Safire, an old friend of Sharon’s, however, accused Siegman of being gullible and argued that Abdullah’s ideas amounted to no more than posturing designed to counteract unprecedented criticism by prominent U.S. politicians (although not the administration) against the monarchy for fostering religious extremism and to “prepare the ground for a denial of our Saudi bases to support an attack on (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein’s germ factories.”

Safire, who often represents the views of civilian hawks in the Pentagon, praised Sharon for his speech last week in which he said he would set up buffer zones to protect Israeli population centers and infrastructure from Palestinian attacks, a proposal which drew near-universal derision from Israeli opinion-makers on both right and left.

According to the most recent public opinion polls, Sharon’s popularity among Israelis has plummeted, particularly in the wake of his speech last week, which was designed to reassure Israelis after the bloodiest week on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides since the intifada began in September 2000.

The same polls of Israeli public opinion have shown growing and currently majority support for international intervention in the conflict and for the resumption of peace talks and declining support for the maintenance of Israeli settlements, particularly in Gaza. A new poll on Palestinian opinion found increasing support for both peace talks and for Palestinian Authority President Yassir Arafat, who has been under a kind of house arrest by Israel in Ramallah for two months.

Some 50 Israelis and Palestinians died in just the first four days of last week. On Monday, another two Israelis and two Palestinians were killed in separate incidents on the West Bank, and ten other Israelis were injured in Jerusalem.