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Bush urged to seize the moment in
Mideast
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Three dozen of the United
States' most prominent Jewish, Christian and
Muslim religious leaders have issued an appeal to
President George W Bush to appoint a high-level
special envoy to work full-time on promoting peace
talks between the governments of Israel and the
Palestinian Authority (PA).
The leaders,
who together represent 25 national religious
organizations, said on Wednesday that the recent
realignment in the Israeli government and its plan
to disengage from Gaza, coupled with Sunday's
election of Mahmoud Abbas to succeed the late
Yasser Arafat as PA president, offer a major
opportunity for resuming the peace process.
Progress was derailed in 2001 by the
Palestinian intifada and Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's refusal to negotiate with Arafat.
The leaders, who make up the National
Interreligious Leadership Initiative for Peace in
the Middle East, asked to meet personally with
Bush and pledged to activate their own grassroots
networks in support of his initiatives to get
peace talks back on track and begin implementing
the Middle East roadmap sponsored by the so-called
Quartet of the United Nations, the European Union,
Russia, and the United States.
If Bush
moves aggressively to fulfill his own vision of a
"two-state solution", he "will have broad-based,
bipartisan and multi-religious forces [behind him]
across America", said Rabbi David Saperstein,
director of the Religious Action Center of Reform
Judaism.
The appeal was immediately
endorsed by the special Middle East envoy under
Bush's two predecessors, Ambassador Dennis Ross:
"While it's not important whether the person bears
the title 'special envoy', a senior official in
the administration has to be designated to work on
this issue.
"This is a moment to end the
war between the Israelis and Palestinians," Ross
said. "If we don't transform the reality on the
ground in the next six to nine months, then the
moment is going to be lost."
The religious
leaders' appeal comes amid growing speculation
here about the opportunities created by Abbas'
election, the entry of the less-hawkish Labor
Party into Sharon's Likud-led government, and
Sharon's commitment to withdraw Jewish settlements
from Gaza by as early as the end of this year.
The Bush administration, which backs
Sharon's Gaza plan, has encouraged the Israeli
prime minister to support Abbas, also known as Abu
Mazen, in contrast to Sharon's refusal to bolster
his position when he served as Arafat's prime
minister in 2003.
So far, Sharon, who
personally congratulated Abbas on his election
victory and promised to hold a summit - something
he refused to do with Arafat - in the coming days,
has cooperated, to the extent of even relaxing his
earlier position that peace talks could only
resume when the PA stops all Palestinian attacks
against Israelis and cracks down hard against
terrorist groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad,
and Fatah's Al-Aqsa Brigade.
"There is a
recognition on the part of the US and Israel now
that you're not going to completely end terrorist
acts," said Lewis Roth, an expert at Americans for
Peace Now (APN). "If Abbas sets up a political
arrangement that accomplishes this, that's fine.
They're willing to give him the benefit of the
doubt as long as they see him making the effort."
Sharon's concerns about the demographic
and long-run political consequences of maintaining
Jewish settlements in Gaza and parts of the West
Bank appear to have persuaded him of the necessity
of a two-state solution of some kind. He hopes to
gain Palestinian cooperation in carrying out his
disengagement plan in order to reduce his
vulnerability to attacks by Israel's far-right,
which opposes the plan.
At the same time,
according to Roth, Sharon has made clear he is in
no hurry to negotiate a final peace accord with
Abbas pursuant to the roadmap, which among other
things calls for an unconditional freeze on
Israeli settlement activity.
Under Bush,
the United States has adhered more closely to
Israel's positions than it has under any previous
president, going so far, for example, as to
support the government's policy of "selective
assassinations" of Hamas leaders as a legitimate
act of preemptive self-defense. Bush's staunch
backing for Sharon has in turn been strongly
supported by the US religious right - both
right-wing Jews and the mainly fundamentalist
Christian right - both of which exercise a
formidable influence on Congress as well,
particularly the Republican leadership in the
House of Representatives.
Since it became
clear, however, that Sharon was indeed determined
to disengage from Gaza and isolated enclaves in
the West Bank, these forces, like their
counterparts in the settler movement in Israel,
have launched a major campaign against the plan.
Influential neo-conservatives such as Frank
Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, the
editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, the
far-right Zionist Organization of American (ZOA),
as well as a number of Christian right leaders and
lawmakers, have claimed that giving up Gaza would
be the first step down a "slippery slope" that
could eventually place Israel's very survival at
risk.
For now, however, Bush clearly is
backing Sharon - one result of which is a growing
split within neo-conservative ranks between those
who support Sharon and those who are sympathetic
to the radical settler movement.
It is in
this context that the mainstream religious leaders
are calling on the US president to take a much
more dynamic role in pushing both sides to
implement the roadmap, while assuring him that
they will rally their own congregations behind him
if he moves in that direction.
"Mr
President, based on the deepest beliefs in our
three Abrahamic religious traditions and on past
progress and current new opportunities, we believe
peace is possible. And we believe determined US
leadership is essential for achieving peace," the
group said.
Among the signers were the
Catholic Archbishops of Washington and Baltimore,
the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the
heads of the United Muslims of America.
"We believe we represent a large portion
of the American religious community," said Rabbi
Amy Small, president of the Reconstructionist
Rabbinical Association.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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