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ANALYSIS
Forks in the Middle East road
map
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Will President George W Bush follow in his father's
footsteps after a previous military victory against Iraq
and exert serious pressure on Israel to implement the
"road map" to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that
was released by the State Department on Wednesday?
That is the 64,000 dollar question in Washington
and in other world capitals one day after the
Palestinian parliament voted to confirm a new government
headed by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, fulfilling the
last condition prescribed by Washington for proceeding
with the road map.
Bush insists that he is fully
committed to the process, which was drafted by the
so-called Quartet - the United Nations, Russia, the
European Union and the United States. "I will work hard
to achieve a two-state solution," he told a television
interviewer this week. "I will push and push."
Pushing him to do precisely that will be two
powerful world figures - British Prime Minister Tony
Blair and US Secretary of State Colin Powell - who stuck
by the president through thick and thin in the runup and
conduct of the war in Iraq, continually reminding him of
the importance of following up, as his father did, with
a major initiative to end the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
State Department and Central
Intelligence Agency experts argue that Washington's
failure to move on that issue will only stoke the anger
and sense of humiliation that has reached new heights in
the Arab world as a result of the US military victory.
But despite Bush's public commitment to
implementing the road map, there remains considerable
doubt that he is prepared to suffer the potential
political consequences of a major effort if it is
opposed by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
A seven-page plan, the road map is ultimately
aimed at creating an independent and viable Palestinian
state alongside Israel by 2005. It requires both parties
to take concurrent and parallel steps over the two-year
period.
First steps in the process would require
Palestinians to halt violence against Israel and launch
economic and political reforms, which began with the
election of Abbas, whom Washington hopes will become
increasingly independent of Palestinian President Yasser
Arafat.
At the same time, Israel would be
required to begin withdrawing its forces from key West
Bank towns and ease its grip on the Occupied Territories
by, among other steps, freezing settlement activity and
dismantling the scores of illegal settlements that have
been created by Israeli settlers since the Palestinian
intifada began in September, 2000.
The
Palestinians say the plan should be implemented to the
letter, but Israel insists that it should not be
required to take any major steps before Palestinians
halt all attacks against its citizens and Abbas
consolidates his control over the Palestinian Authority.
But Quartet members say posing such
preconditions on Israel's implementation violates the
simultaneity requirements of the process. "The
simultaneity is the absolute core of the road map," M J
Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, a group that
supports the road map, told the Los Angeles Times.
So far, the administration has sided with both
its Quartet partners and the Palestinians in insisting
that the obligations are mutual and simultaneous. But
how hard Bush and key policymakers are prepared to push
Sharon remains in question.
Several senior Bush
officials and advisers - the same hawks around Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney
who led the charge for war against Iraq - are known to
sympathize strongly with Sharon's views about the road
map, as well as his hopes of retaining at least one-half
of the West Bank in any eventual settlement.
Richard Perle, the powerful former chairman of
the Defense Policy Board (DPB), has denounced the road
map's simultaneity provisions explicitly. His views are
believed to reflect those of the director for Mideast
affairs on the National Security Council, Elliott
Abrams, and the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy,
Douglas Feith.
Other neo-conservative members of
the Rumsfeld-appointed DPB, including former House of
Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is believed
to have been given the green light by senior Pentagon
officials for a savage attack on Powell last week, have
also spoken out against the plan. They have also
attacked the role of the European Union and the United
Nations in the process, arguing that they are biased
against Israel.
Significantly, Perle, Abrams and
Feith, another undersecretary of defense, Dov Zakheim,
and Michael Mobbs, a top Justice Department official who
now holds a senior post in the occupation authority in
Iraq, all signed an ad in the New York Times 11 years
ago publicly denouncing Bush's father for pressing
then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir into
negotiations with Arab states after the first Gulf War.
That pressure eventually resulted in the beginning of
the Oslo process.
"As friendly as the United
States is with many Arab states," they wrote, along with
30 other former senior government officials who called
themselves the Committee on US Interests in the Middle
East, "when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the
United States must be squarely on the side of the
Israelis".
In recent weeks, Sharon's US allies
among other neo-conservatives and in the Christian Right
- a core constituency for Bush - have also spoken out
strongly against the road map, as have their
publications, including The Weekly Standard and The Wall
Street Journal.
The powerful Republican Majority
Leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, for
example, warned that any negotiations with Palestinians
would "amount to a covenant with death". "We are
absolutely right to stand with Israel, and our opponents
are absolutely wrong," declared DeLay in a speech to a
Christian Right group earlier this month.
The
most powerful Israel lobby groups, the hawkish American
Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, have
also flexed their muscle against the road map's
simultaneity provisions.
Eight-seven of 100
senators and 297 of 435 representatives have so far
signed on to a letter backed by the two groups that
urges Bush to demand that the Palestinians stop all
violence and demonstrate Abbas' independence and control
over the Palestinian Authority before Israel is obliged
to do anything, including stop settlement activity.
Even Bush's political advisers, who see an
opportunity to make unprecedented inroads on Jewish
support for the Democratic Party in 2004, have
reportedly warned him against pressing Sharon into major
concessions, insisting that the president not only risks
reducing historically high approval ratings for his
performance among traditionally liberal US Jews, but he
may also disappoint his core supporters among Christian
Right activists.
In the wake of such a
mobilization against the road map, some Jewish activists
who support the plan have called on Bush to follow
through with it. Earlier this week, 14 major Jewish
philanthropists, led by World Jewish Congress President
Edgar Bronfman, sent a letter to congressional leaders
urging them to support it.
(Inter Press
Service)
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