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Geneva Accord bolsters its
backing
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Three days after the administration
of US President George W Bush shrugged off the
unofficial Israeli-Palestinian peace plan released last
week in Geneva, a bipartisan group of eight former top
US national-security officials said they supported the
so-called "Geneva Accord".
The endorsement of
the group, which includes four former national-security
advisers, comes amid a growing controversy within the US
Jewish community about the plan, as well as indications
that Israel's ruling Likud coalition is deeply divided
about how to react to it.
The plan, a 50-page
draft treaty based largely on tentative agreements
reached between official Israeli and Palestinian
delegations at Taba, Egypt, in January 2001, proposes
the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state with
predominantly Arab parts of East Jerusalem as its
capital.
It provides for the absorption by
Israel of a number of Jewish settlements in the West
Bank close to the "green line" that defined Israel's
border before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in exchange for
a comparable amount of Israeli territory contiguous with
Palestinian territory.
The plan was worked out
by teams led by Israel's former justice minister, Yossi
Beilin, and former Palestinian information minister
Yasser Abed Rabbo, and signed in the presence of former
US president Jimmy Carter, who negotiated the
Israel-Egypt Camp David Accord 25 years ago, among other
international statesmen and women.
However,
despite the backing it received from Carter and European
leaders in particular, most analysts believe its
prospects rest primarily on the attitude taken by the
Bush administration, which, as Israel's strongest ally,
also enjoys the most leverage over Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon.
Sharon and his mainly neo-conservative
allies in Washington have been remarkably successful in
securing US support for his more-aggressive stance
against the Palestinians and particularly Palestinian
Authority President Yasser Arafat in the context of the
US "war on terrorism".
It was thus considered
remarkable that the Geneva Accord - and a similar,
shorter one drawn up by former Israeli intelligence
chief Ami Ayalon and a leading Palestinian, Sari
Nusseibeh - drew favorable comments last month from both
Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, even after the Sharon
government denounced it as subversive.
Indeed,
both Powell and Wolfowitz scheduled meetings with Beilin
and Nusseibeh, who traveled to the United States to
mobilize support for the effort after the signing in
Geneva.
The Israeli government, however, and its
right-wing Jewish and Christian allies in Washington
also mobilized to try to prevent the meetings from
taking place. Sharon's deputy prime minister, Ehud
Olmert, for example, publicly warned that Powell would
be making a mistake if he went ahead with the meeting.
"I think he is not helping the process," warned
Olmert, who is considered close to Sharon, repeating the
government's arguments that the US-backed "roadmap" was
the only peace plan on the table.
As pressure
increased, the Bush administration began to succumb.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice rejected a
request for a meeting, while Bush himself, when asked
about the accord at a White House photo opportunity with
King Abdullah of Jordan on Thursday, struck a
deliberately ambiguous note. A meeting between Powell
and the accord's two authors would be "productive so
long as they adhere to the principles I've ...
outlined", Bush stated, an allusion to Washington's
adherence to the roadmap.
Meanwhile, Wolfowitz
canceled his meeting at the last moment. While his
office offered no explanation, Washington Post columnist
Robert Novak, who is close to the Pentagon, reported on
Sunday that the cancellation was due to pressure from
the White House.
It was in that context that
Monday's statement by the former senior officials was
released by the International Crisis Group (ICG), which
last week released a similar statement of support signed
by 60 foreign leaders.
"We believe that the best
way to move forward is to address at the outset, not at
the end of an incremental process, all the basic
principles of a fair and lasting solution," wrote the
officials in an implicit critique of both the Oslo peace
process and the roadmap. "Postponing the final outcome
makes any progress hostage to extremists on both sides.
A process must be devised to give practical and
political expression to the heartfelt desire of clear
majorities on both sides to end this conflict once and
for all," the statement said.
Signers included
the national-security adviser to Carter, Zbigniew
Brzezinski; former president Ronald Reagan's
national-security advisers Richard Allen and Robert
McFarlane; and Anthony Lake, national-security adviser
to former president Bill Clinton; as well as Clinton's
first secretary of state, Warren Christopher; Reagan's
defense secretary Frank Carlucci; and former United
Nations ambassador Thomas Pickering, who served under
former president George H W Bush during the Gulf War,
but who previously served as ambassador to both Israel
and Egypt. The eighth signer was Robert McNamara,
defense secretary in the John F Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson administrations who later headed the World Bank.
The most significant omissions on the statement
included Clinton's second national-security adviser,
Sandy Berger, and secretary of state, Madeleine
Albright, both of whom, according to sources, have
conveyed their support privately and intend to do so
publicly as well. Clinton himself has written favorably
of the initiative and reportedly offered the two authors
his personal assistance when they met by accident on a
train between Washington and New York last week.
Also missing was former secretary of state James
Baker, who, according to sources, has expressed support
but feels it would be awkward to do so publicly now that
he has been appointed by the Bush administration as the
director of its efforts to gain debt relief for Iraq
from its international creditors. Significantly, Baker's
Institute for Public Policy at Rice University
co-sponsored with ICG a recent poll of Palestinians and
Israelis that found that a majority of each people
supported the basic principles of the Geneva Accord.
These endorsements suggest that President Bush's
efforts to refocus attention on the roadmap, which has
made virtually no progress since it was released last
January, may not be as effective as the White House
wishes. Indeed, the Geneva Accord and the People's Voice
(which has been signed by more than 200,000 Israelis and
Palestinians) are clearly stirring up the US Jewish
community.
While right-wing groups such as the
Zionist Organization of America have attacked the accord
in much the same terms as the Likud in Israel, peace
groups have taken heart. "This is really drawing out a
lot of people who have been reluctant to speak out in
the last couple of years," said Lewis Roth, a spokesman
for Americans for Peace Now.
While large,
mainstream Jewish organizations such as the American
Jewish Committee have not taken a position on the
proposals, the largest Jewish newspaper, The Forward,
last week called for its embrace both by "Israel's
friends" and by Sharon.
At the same time,
leaders of the United States' largest synagogue
movements joined a new Jewish, Christian and Muslim
coalition called the "National Interreligious Leadership
Initiative for Peace in the Middle East", which last
week demanded that Bush step up peace efforts.
(Inter Press Service)
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