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COMMENTARY
Israeli hurdle in US axis with UK and
Spain
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- If British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Spanish
counterpart Jose Maria Aznar believe that Washington
will make a strong push for peace between Israel and the
Palestinians after a successful invasion of Iraq, they
could be in for a disappointment.
While
President George W Bush's closest European allies on
Iraq have repeatedly stressed the strategic importance
of reviving a credible peace process between the two
sides, the president himself appears to be of a
different view.
In a major address last
Wednesday, Bush aligned US policy even more closely with
the right-wing Likud Party of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon by, for the first time, conditioning an end
to Jewish settlement activity in the occupied
territories on progress in a new peace process. Since
the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Washington had insisted -
largely ineffectively - that Israel halt all settlement
activity unilaterally and unconditionally.
"This
is a complete alignment of the president along the lines
of Likud principles," according to Rashid Khalidi, an
historian and Middle East specialist at the University
of Chicago. "It's the most important shift in US policy
since the 1967 war. It's really major."
The fact
that Bush delivered the address before the American
Enterprise Institute, the hub of a very effective
network of pro-Likud organizations in Washington, was
also significant. Members of the audience included not
only prominent neoconservatives who have argued for
years that Israel has a right to settle anywhere in the
occupied territories, but also several who had prepared
a memorandum for then Likud prime minister Binyamin
Netanyahu six years ago that called for a regional
strategy, including the removal of Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein, a "complete break" with the Oslo peace
process and steps to "secure the realm" by building a
new strategic axis in the Middle East consisting of
Israel, Turkey, Jordan and a pro-Western government in
Baghdad.
On February 28, the UK and Spain called
for the resumption of peace talks. "Britain and Spain
again share a very common position on the absolute
priority of restarting the peace process in the Middle
East," Blair said, with Aznar at his side in London. "It
is our desire that we rebegin that peace process and
reach that objective as soon as we possibly can, and
both of us will play our full part in achieving that,"
he added.
But all that Bush said on this in last
week's speech was what the president called a "personal
commitment to implement the road map and to reach that
goal", a reference to the process by the so-called
Quartet - the European Union (EU), the United Nations,
Russia and the United States - to secure an independent
and viable Palestinian state within three years.
But even his reference to the "road map" was
vague - he did not, for example, mention the three-year
deadline by which the new state was to come into being -
and everyone in the room knew already that the
administration, despite repeated urgings by Blair, had
vetoed the publication of a draft road map since
December, precisely in order to boost Sharon's chances
of winning the January 28 elections. Now, Washington is
saying that it opposes release of the road map pending
the end of the war in Iraq.
"This administration
has about as much interest in the road map seeing the
light of day as it does in holding bilateral talks with
North Korea," one official said this week. A similar
conclusion appears to have been reached in Israel
itself, where Sharon has already rejected the road map
out of hand. "The Quartet is nothing. Don't take it
seriously," he told Newsweek magazine just before the
elections. "I don't think the United States takes it
seriously."
The administration had the
opportunity to contradict him on the point but failed to
do so. At the same time, Sharon felt sufficiently
confident to put together what veteran peace activist
and former Knesset member Uri Avnery called "the most
right wing, the most nationalistic, the most extreme,
the most war-like government Israel has ever had".
Meanwhile, the Palestinian death toll resulting
from Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West
Bank has risen sharply over the past three weeks but has
failed to elicit any protest from the administration,
another illustration of the degree to which Bush has
aligned US policy behind Sharon.
The notion that
Bush would be prepared to exert any real pressure on
Sharon to move toward a serious peace process in the way
that his father did after the 1991 Gulf War - by
withholding housing guarantees until then prime minister
Yitzak Shamir agreed to halt settlement - is largely
dismissed by Mideast experts both within and outside the
administration.
Washington has already agreed in
principle to provide a US$12 billion package of military
aid and loan guarantees over and above the annual $3
billion Israel receives in other economic and military
aid.
Moreover, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
the only cabinet-level official to actively argue in
favor of pressing Israel to even reduce its operations
in the occupied territories, has been isolated on the
issue for more than a year. Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld, reflecting the views of the neoconservatives,
has even referred to the West Bank and Gaza as
"so-called" occupied territories, while vice President
Dick Cheney has talked privately about how Palestinian
Authority leader Yasser Arafat should be "hung".
For political reasons, the White House has been
especially careful not to alienate the Christian Right,
which has not only ardently supported Likud positions
for 20 years, but has become a source of tens of
millions of dollars a year in contributions designed to
expand settlements in the occupied territories.
It also bears noting that several of the senior
US officials who deal most closely with Israel and
Middle East issues broke publicly and explicitly with
Bush's father precisely over his withholding of loan
guarantees to Israel 11 years ago.
In a
full-page ad taken out in the New York Times in February
last year, "The Committee on US Interests in the Middle
East" assailed Bush's pressure on the Likud-led
government to enter into negotiations based on the
Madrid Peace Conference on the basis of "land for
peace'.
Among the signers were Elliott Abrams,
currently the top official dealing with the Middle East
on Bush's National Security Council; Douglas Feith, the
current undersecretary of defense for policy; Dov
Zakheim, another top Pentagon official; and Richard
Perle, who doubles as Rumsfeld's chairman of the Defense
Policy Board and the senior foreign policy doyen at AEI.
"These people have been totally identified with
Likud policy for years," noted one discouraged State
Department official. "Can anyone in their right mind
think for even one minute that they would lend
themselves to any administration campaign to actively
pressure Sharon to stop settlements and make serious
territorial compromises? The notion is ludicrous on its
face."
(Inter Press Service)
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