BEIRUT — French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner a few days ago offered a very apt, very French, comment on the real significance of the Middle East peace conference the United States hopes to convene this Fall, calling it “a very light, weak, magnificent possibility.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the matter slightly more interesting a few days ago when she announced that the United States would hope to invite the members of the Arab follow-up peace committee to participate, among whom are Syria and Lebanon. September 24, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Israel welcomed Syrian participation, as long as Syria played by the rules established by the United States and the international Quartet’s “road map” for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The Arab countries for the most part have remained coy about whether they would attend the talks, arguing that the agenda, aims and participants in the meeting have to be made clearer before any decision is made.
Meaningful progress towards a permanent, comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace is possible, and should neither be dismissed nor allowed to pass without a serious attempt to make it succeed. The fact that all the principal parties are dancing around the issue and seem eager to break through towards a credible negotiation reflects the real desire for resolution through peaceful talks, rather than perpetuating a wasteful and inconclusive conflict.
But this possibility is light and weak for two important reasons that should not be dismissed: legitimacy and motives. The legitimacy issue is about whether the United States is the right party to bring all the players to the table. The US is not formally mandated by anyone to foster permanent Arab-Israeli peace. Its past attempts to do so — except for the Egyptian-Israeli peace at Camp David under President Jimmy Carter over a quarter century ago — have never succeeded because it has never been able to play the role of a truly impartial and fair mediator, preferring to act as Israel’s guardian, arms supplier, and advocate.
Washington’s credibility also has been badly hurt by its hostility towards two key players — Syria and Hamas — and its enthusiastic support for Israel in last summer’s attacks on Lebanon. It is hardly in a position to summon the players to make peace when its own policies seem more focused on waging war and promoting conflicts throughout the region.
The US’ motives are also suspect. President George W. Bush’s sudden re-engagement in Arab-Israeli peace-making appears to many to be a desperate and insincere attempt to salvage some sort of foreign policy success in the waning months of his largely discredited presidency. We can be generous and assume that Bush, Rice & Co. have finally heard the message the rest of the world has been sending to them for years — the critical importance of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict as a priority towards making progress on other hot issues in the Middle East. Yet even if this were a newfound American motive, its good intentions are almost totally negated by the style and substance of Washington’s behavior — lecturing, boycotting and threatening some of the key parties on the Arab side, and inviting them to a gathering where the rules are written ahead of time by the United States and Israel.
The “magnificent possibility” of peacemaking, however, remains a prize to be snatched. The flaws in the United States’ legitimacy and motives are a consequence of its policies and Israel’s, and they can be corrected by adopting more reasonable policies. It would be useful, for example, for Israel and the United States to state clearly that they will freeze the expansion of Jewish colonies and settlements in occupied Arab lands, as a gesture signaling their compliance with the requirements of the road map, and an indicator of their wish to succeed in the upcoming peace talks. It is simply not realistic to expect a meaningful gathering to take place in the fall when Israel continues to colonize occupied Arab lands, refuses to speak with elected representatives of the Palestinians, and launches attacks against Syria.
Israel and the United States have the right to demand the same thing from the Arabs, who also have much to do. But the Arabs have made their peacemaking intentions clear. The Arab world has repeatedly announced its desire to negotiate a permanent, comprehensive peace with Israel, via the 2002 Arab peace plan that has been reaffirmed by several subsequent Arab summits.
None of this is new, which is why Condoleezza Rice’s sudden interest in promoting a new round of Arab-Israeli peace talks seems so lacking in credibility and seriousness. This looks like an attempt to impose American-Israeli will on Palestine in the same way that military action tried to impose a similar will on Iraq. Using foreign military might to impose a political order on the Middle East will not succeed. It seems incredible that this basic lesson has not been learned over the past half century.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 26 September 2007
Word Count: 818
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