Bush's fantasy Middle East plan is bound to fail. It will strengthen those who want war, not peace
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday June 26, 2002
The Guardian
That was a fantastic speech. Quite literally, fantastic. George Bush's address on the Middle East, delivered outside the White House on Monday evening, consisted, from beginning to end, of fantasy.
It bore so little relation to reality that diplomats around the world spent yesterday shaking their heads in disbelief, before sinking into gloom and despair. Our own Foreign Office tried gamely to spot the odd nugget of sense in the Bush text - but, they admitted, it was an uphill struggle. Israelis committed to a political resolution of the conflict were heartbroken. Even Shimon Peres, foreign minister in Ariel Sharon's coalition, reportedly called the speech "a fatal mistake", warning: "A bloodbath can be expected."
The core of the president's message was that the Palestinians must embark on a sweeping process of internal reform before they can even think about getting back to the negotiating table. They must transform themselves into a democratic market economy, free of corruption and with a separate judiciary and legislature if they are to be considered eligible for statehood - which, when it comes, will be merely provisional.
Shall we count the ways in which this is completely absurd? George Bush is demanding that Palestine become Sweden before it can become Palestine: it must be stable, prosperous and boast constitutional arrangements which still elude Britain - our judiciary and legislature are not separate - let alone the Arab world before it can become even a state-in-waiting.
This would be laughable if Palestine were in tranquil Scandinavia. Even there it would count as putting the cart before the horse, asking a nation to create the institutions of a highly developed country before it becomes a state. But this, remember, is being demanded of the Palestinians - statebuilders with every possible obstacle in their way.
Like the fact that they are under military occupation. As the New York Times noted yesterday: "How the Palestinians can be expected to carry out elections or reform themselves while in a total lockdown by the Israeli military remains something of a mystery." Palestinian ministers complain they cannot visit a village 10 minutes away; they can pass laws but not implement them. They are Potemkin ministers, existing on paper only. Yet now they are to build the Switzerland of the Levant, where the streets are clean and government functions like clockwork. This is George in Wonderland stuff.
Monday's speech even had a touch of black comedy. The president said the new Palestine should be taught good governance, nominating the Arab states for the role. Imagine it: democracy lessons from Saudi Arabia, a masterclass in liberty from Kuwait.
But that is not the president's greatest fantasy. Yasser Arafat must go, he says, though without naming him. It may be refreshing to hear a US president come clean in his conviction that he has the right to pick other nations' leaders, but this demand exposes fully the vacuousness of Bush's thinking.
For who does he imagine might replace Arafat? Does he not realise that Palestinians are angry with their leader not because he has been insufficiently pro-American but because they see him as too moderate, too willing to do Israel's bidding. The Palestinian street is not clamouring for a man who will crack down harder on Islamist militants or sing a western song about free trade and local elections.
So if elections go ahead, here's what will happen. Either Palestinians will deliberately defy Washington and re-elect Arafat or they will choose someone more hardline. Any leader who has the Israeli or US stamp of approval will immediately be discredited as a puppet and promptly rejected.
Also, for all his flaws, Arafat has an asset none of his rivals can match. He is still, thanks to his long history, Mr Palestine: his signature on a compromise deal is the only one that could persuade his people to accept it. By rushing his exit now, Bush is depriving any future peace agreement of the only Palestinian who could deliver it.
So the president's speech shows a man unconnected to Middle Eastern reality. But it is worse than unhinged; it is dangerous. First, Bush has given a green light to Sharon to continue his policy of military force coupled with a refusal to freeze settlement building on the West Bank. Monday's wording implied that Sharon is only obliged to pull back from Palestinian cities or freeze settlements once the Palestinians have worked their way through the US wishlist. So long as violence goes on, or Arafat remains in place, the Israeli PM can do what he likes.
Given that the president refused to specify what the final settlement might look like - delaying that and other questions to later talks - he has supplied Sharon with an incentive to get busy now, building settlements, putting up fences and carving new borders. If Bush had declared that the eventual Palestinian state would be on the other side of Israel's 1967 borders, there would be no point in Israel trying to redraw the map. But now Sharon has every motive to create his notorious "facts on the ground".
There is danger on the Palestinian side too. The only people celebrating yesterday were the Islamist extremists of Hamas and Jihad, chiding moderate Palestinians for ever believing that politics, rather than violence, might bring results. Bush has not dangled any serious carrot before the Palestinians: no promises on Jerusalem or refugees or final borders. Even Colin Powell's planned international conference seems to have vanished. All Palestinians will get if they comply with Washington's demands is a provisional state on 42% of the West Bank. Maybe. Few will consider that a prize worth the sacrifice of their own leader and a national transformation.
So this new plan of Bush's is a flight of errant, irresponsible fancy that can only fail, bringing more bloodshed and ruin to the peoples of the Middle East who are desperate for something better.
But it will reverberate far beyond. It will damage the international standing of the US president and America along with it. Muslim and Arab nations will be antagonised by this plan of inaction, while chancelleries from London to Moscow will realise they are dealing with a leader who pays no lip-service to them - or to basic reality.
This is a foreign policy failure for George Bush. If he were a Democrat, both the Washington press corps and Congress would already be racking it up alongside the unextinguished threat from al-Qaida and the continued freedom from captivity of Osama bin Laden. Those failures, and now the guarantee of further slaughter in the Middle East, should be prompting hard questions about Bush and his war on terror. America needs to snap out of its post-9/11 torpor of consensus and realise there is a leadership problem in the US - and his name is George Bush.
Robert Fisk: I wonder why Bush doesn't let Sharon run his press office
26 June 2002
Put your flak jackets on, President George Bush has spoken. He wants a regime change in Palestine, just as he wants a regime change in Iraq. He reads the Israeli government press handouts and accurately quotes them to his American people.
Ariel Sharon, wants the destruction/ liquidation/ resignation of Yasser Arafat. So does Mr Bush. "Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership so a Palestinian state can be born," Bush told the fearful American people, waiting for the next apocalypse, be it on 4 July or after.
So, no Palestinian state unless Arafat goes. There were no Bush conditions for Israel. He did not secure an end to the continuing building of Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab (that is somebody else's) land. Nor did he secure a halt to continuing Israeli military "incursions" how I love that word "incursions".
Mr Sharon, in his highly mendacious demand for Palestinian "'transparency", has demanded Palestinian reform must be neither cosmetic nor an attempt to preserve Arafat. And what does Mr Bush say? Why, that Palestinian reform "must be more than cosmetic changes or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo".
Why, I wonder, doesn't Mr Bush let Ariel Sharon run the White House press bureau? Not only would it be more honest we would at least be hearing the voice of Israel at first hand but it would spare the American President the ignominy of parroting everything he is told by the Israelis.
All that he offers to the Palestinians is a ghastly mockery of what the Palestinians are told to do by the Israelis.
There never has been an "interim" state, let alone a "provisional" state. These are fantasies of the Israelis and Mr Bush. White House "officials" we can guess who they are believe a Palestinian state can be "achieved" within 18 months. Let's forget international law provides for no such entity.
Let's go over again that most crucial and most dishonest part of the Bush statement.
"When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbours," he told us, "the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state, whose border and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East." Let's see what this means: when the Palestinians have elected a leader whom the Israelis want a condition that could go on to the crack of doom the Americans will support a Palestinian state whose very existence will mean nothing unless Israel approves what that state wants to do.
In other words, the United States will be Israel's spokesman in any negotiations. A growing number of Americans know they are being suckered by their own government and their own press, that their country's foreign policy is being manipulated to give maximum support to one and only one country in the Middle East. So will "certain aspects of its sovereignty". Note these weighty words. "Certain aspects" of its sovereignty.
What, I wonder, does this mean? Do these "certain aspects" include the continuation of illegal Jewish settlement building? Or the absence of any international guarantees for this interim/provisional state? Or perhaps a get-out clause for the United States to wash its hands of the whole shebang if Israel decides to annex the entire West Bank?
Note, again, the weasel words. Palestine's borders will be "provisional ... until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East". Yet never before has an occupied people been led by so pathetic a person as Yasser Arafat. Nineteen years ago, this same Yasser Arafat swore to me on a hilltop above the Lebanese city of Tripoli that his "Palestine" would be "a democracy among the guns". His Palestine, he told me, would be unlike any other Arab state. There would be no secret policemen, no "regime", no cronyism, no corruption.
Fast forward to the spring of 1998. I am listening to a French diplomat who has returned from Gaza. He and his delegation carried a personal letter to Arafat from President Chirac. Again and again, Arafat disregarded the letter, only interested in when the new French school in Gaza will open. The diplomats understand. One of Arafat's relatives will be the headmistress of this school. Family before nation. The Chirac letter stays unopened.
Yes, as Nabil Shaath, one of the most loyal and most obsequious of Arafat's ministers, says, "a state is a state, and you cannot be provisionally pregnant and you cannot have a provisional state". It might have been wiser and more honest if he had reminded us that the CIA trained the gunmen and intelligence thugs who worked for Arafat; if he had outlined the imprisonment and torture that Arafat inflicted on his Palestinian opponents with the complicity of those who supported the "peace process". For it is becoming ever more obvious that Arafat did not fail in his duties as Palestinian leader. He failed in his duties as Israel's and thus America's proxy colonial apparatchik in the West Bank and Gaza. The fact he is a corrupt little despot does not change this.
He was given time to prove his loyalty to the West, to America, to Israel. He was supposed to have made Israel's settlements both safe and sacred.
Now, when he can no longer control the people he was supposed to control remember the BBC's repeated question: "Can he control his own people?" his usefulness is at an end. He must go, to be replaced by our choice of leader forget elections who will be as democratic as the new Afghan "interim" government.
George Bush insulted the Palestinians and enraged the leadership of the Arab world. Who cares about the latter? Most of them were appointed by us. But I have a feeling that the Palestinians will not accept this nonsense.
Which is why they will be condemned as never before as "terrorists".
The President's proposals make peace in the Middle East impossible
If I were a careerist in Ramallah, I'd start organising the Palestinian version of the early Sinn Fein right now
David Aaronovitch
26 June 2002
The speech itself was not so much White House as Little House on the Prairie. All, said George Bush, that had to happen for there to be a Palestinian state (which, of course, we all want) was for the Palestinians democratically to kick out their horrid old leadership and replace it with a nice, new, peace-minded leadership. This new dispensation -- plus major reforms -- would clear the way for talks which, in the fullness of time, might or might not settle a few other tricky little matters, such as how big a Palestinian state might be, whether part of Jerusalem would be in it and whether Israeli settlements built in violation of United Nations resolutions would be dismantled. We'd have to see about that.
So it's all knitted samplers and best bonnets. As the President argued, the present situation is hopeless. "It is untenable," he said on Monday, "for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation". And you can't say fairer than that. It was the same belief that drove his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to his hunt for a peace plan, which just eluded him, first at Camp David and then at Taba on the Israeli-Egyptian border.
It's worth recapping on that process. There was, for a moment at the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, a deal possible in which the Palestinians ended up with almost all of the West Bank, with part of Jerusalem and with a territory that was contiguous. But the Israelis had done too little to build Palestinian confidence in the period following Oslo, and Arafat lacked the courage or vision to seize the moment. A new intifada began, that was met by tanks, the number of terrorist attacks increased and Israel reoccupied much of the West Bank. Now, so far have the prospects for peace receded, that even exchanges between participants -- conducted in the almost scholarly pages of the New York Review of Books -- sound as though they can only be resolved by violence.
So what is George Bush's Ingredient X, the thing which, when added to the punch, makes agreement possible? It is, apparently, that Yasser and his mates sling their hooks and make way for a new generation of leaders. "Peace," says the President, "requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror." If they do this, then Ariel Sharon and the Israelis will presumably be cajoled by the United States into reviving the Taba agreement (or something like it).
Well Amen to that. I don't actually possess (nor have I seen) the evidence that Arafat has been organisationally involved in the suicide bombings, but I do know that -- Janus-like -- he has said one thing to the Western media while talking the easy language of martyrdom to his own constituency. But I find myself asking why it is that his constituency requires the language of martyrdom to be spoken to it in the first place. Surely that's the reality that must be dealt with. OK, I'm getting ahead of myself, so lets take a rain-check on reality for a moment and go back to George W. Who continues: "Leaders who want to be included in the peace process must show this by their deeds and undivided support for peace." Never mind the Palestinians, how should we apply such a sentiment to Ariel Sharon and his Likud party? Let alone to the vulture figure of Binyamin Netanyahu and those cabinet ministers who support the forcible transportation of the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza? Should we wish them all away, blow on them, like dandelion heads in the summer?
It is not even a matter of democracy. After all, was not Arafat himself elected back in 1996, in a process overseen by, amongst others, ex-President Carter? And when Bush adds, "If Palestinians embrace democracy, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on America's support for creation of a provisional state of Palestine", one wonders what would happen to other nations were their statehood only to be recognised under the same conditions. No wonder that, according to a Likud minister, Danny Naveh, Bush's address is to be remembered as "the end of Arafat speech".
Even so, if any of this were likely -- for one single moment -- to work, then many people would be prepared to ignore its na�vet� and asymmetry. But it can't. It is, uniquely, the peace plan that makes peace impossible. Successful peace processes depend upon narrowing the number of people and situations that can, in effect, place a veto on progress. They operate by allowing the accumulation of small confidences, and binding their results into a bigger picture. This is the opposite. It offers just about anyone a veto who wants one.
Cherie Blair's mistake, when she gave her short impromptu answer to that journalist the other day, was to seem to assume that desperation alone leads to suicide terrorism. It is probably the case that desperation causes more young people to volunteer for such missions, but the organisations and ideologies behind the murders are not motivated by temporary anger. Their objective is the destruction of a peace process that they see as being the end to their hopes of eventual victory. For the lover of peace they have no redeeming moral features whatsoever. They are the enemy. It follows that if you allow acts of terror to disrupt the process of peace, then you allow the suicide bombers an effective veto. You give them what they want.
There are brave Palestinians who oppose the suicide bomb obscenity. Two thousand academics and intellectuals have signed a petition calling for an end to this form of terrorism. These, presumably, would be the type of people whom we would want to encourage and to strengthen, who would become the partners for peace. In the elections already scheduled for next year, these are the forces who we might hope will come forward. Just as we might have hoped that Sharon, with his grim history, would never lead the state of Israel. If I were a careerist in Ramallah I'd start organising the Palestinian version of the early Sinn Fein right now.
In any case, imagine the results of the Palestinian election. "Him?" says an Israeli spokesman, justifying a refusal to negotiate. "He was once a member of an organisation whose armed wing was behind a bombing in Haifa 10 years ago. "Her? She was a journalist on a station which broadcast a eulogy to a bomber."
On the other side, any Palestinian opposed to peace only has to reject the seeming attempt to impose a leadership on his or her people.
I have my own ideas about what can work, but this cannot. You cannot make peace by dictating who represents the people you are dealing with. Especially since the voters who will have to find and elect these negotiators have no guarantee even that there will be negotiations. Colin Powell's original plan was to recognise a provisional Palestinian state, and to move gradually on from there. Then someone in the White House got to mess with it. Someone stupid.
World reaction: 'Go on bleeding for now, then eventually we'll have two states'
26 June 2002
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who headed the commission that developed the peace plan: "There's a risk that someone from Hamas or Islamic Jihad could succeed Arafat, which would make it much, much worse."
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan: "President Arafat was chosen freely by the Palestinian people in elections that were widely welcomed by the international community in 1996. He remains their leader and it will be up to them to decide through fresh elections already announced who will lead them in the future."
Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian legislator: "Bush adopted the Israeli approach by putting preconditions on any type of movement in the peace process, and the preconditions are on the Palestinians only. Bush is presenting a vision without giving us a road map. Instead of taking up the Arab initiative and running with it, he didn't allude to it even obliquely. He based his position on the simplistic polarisation, either you are with us or you are against us. He didn't launch any effective process. He bought more time for Sharon and gave him the green light to continue with these very dangerous policies."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: "The Palestinian Authority has supported this statement. If it has agreed upon it, then we support it, because it is balanced to a great extent... I do not see in this speech the removal of Arafat, but a demand for reforms of the Palestinian Authority and the formation of a new administration."
The Jordanian government: "We urge Israel to live up to this moment in history. Delay is a recipe for disaster."
Yossi Beilin, former Israeli justice minister and an architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords: "The worst thing we can do is just to say we got a kosher stamp from the US President to do nothing. To do nothing means the continuation of the vicious circle of violence. Since there is no reference to an international conference, Bush is telling the parties to go on bleeding for now, then eventually we'll have two states."
Tragic truths Bush didn't address
Wednesday June 26, 2002
The Guardian
George Bush throughout his speech (Israel celebrates as Bush tells Palestinians: Arafat must go, June 25) avoided any mention of the fact that all West Bank cities have been invaded by Israeli military forces; that hundreds of thousands of inhabitants are imprisoned in their homes by a strict curfew; that even before that conquest, the towns and villages where Bush would have a flourishing market economy set up are cut off from each other by checkpoints and closures and sieges, with inhabitants replacing their cars with donkeys able to negotiate mountain paths.
How are Palestinians to implement any kind of reforms under such circumstances? How are they to reform a Palestinian Authority which is being systematically choked out of existence? How could elections be held "before the end of the year" without a pullout of Israeli forces, and some assurance of their non-interference? And what would President Bush do if Palestinian voters, exercising their democratic right to choose, re-elect Yasser Arafat as their leader? Would that democratic choice be set aside in yet another military invasion?
The root cause of terrorism and suicide bombing was hardly addressed: the situation of young Palestinians under an increasingly tight occupation, who see themselves oppressed and dispossessed, deprived of all hope and expectation for the future, and who reach the point where they decide to blow themselves up in order to kill random Israelis. No end to terrorism can be expected without offering some tangible hope to such people.
George Bush's speech - making strident demands upon the weaker party to the conflict, and only vague polite requests upon the stronger side - contributes little to that cause. But the two peoples, locked in this terrible struggle, pay the price for the arrogance, short-sightedness and lack of resolve of the US president.
Adam Keller
Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc), Tel Aviv
� President Bush's speech delivered just what Ariel Sharon wanted - to give the green light to Israel to depose Yasser Arafat, democratically elected by the Palestinian people in an election which was supervised by the international community.
His speech focused overwhelmingly on demands on the Palestinians, was delivered as Israel re-occupied yet again almost every Palestinian city, and placed Yasser Arafat under house arrest, while making no demand on Israel to end its aggression. Bush's demands for "democratising" the Palestinian leadership ignores the fundamental undemocratic, illegal and continuing occupation by Israel.
The demand on the Palestinians is: elect someone acceptable to both Israel and the US, and you will be given a "provisional state" - an entity not even recognised in international law. For this, they will receive no guarantee that Israel will abide by the UN resolutions it has flouted for the last 35 years and withdraw from the Occupied Territories; or an end to settlement building, military checkpoints, land confiscation or detention of Palestinians without charge or trial. On the contrary, Ariel Sharon's government will feel it has US support to continue to attack the Palestinian people with impunity.
The Palestinians are being told by the US to accept the impossible - submit to an occupying power that is continuing to destroy schools, hospitals, preventing free movement, stifling the economy, and that has killed over 1,500 people since September 2000.
Peace is only possible if a solution is posed that delivers justice for the Palestinians. We are calling on all those who support justice to demonstrate outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square today from 4.30 to 6pm.
Betty Hunter
National secretary, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
[email protected]
� I look forward to President Bush now calling on the people of Israel to elect new leaders "not compromised with terror". Then we will know that he is serious about peace in the Middle East.
Paulinus Barnes
Rawtenstall, Lancs
� In the event of Palestinian elections, will Bush be sending brother Jeb to help ensure a new and different leadership is elected?
Dave Hanson
Hull
Vacuum not vision
George Bush squanders his moment
Leader
Wednesday June 26, 2002
The Guardian
George Bush's statement on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict cannot accurately be termed a new policy. Nor is it a plan in any meaningful sense, certainly not a substitute for the Oslo process. It does not even furnish a road-map towards the longed-for ceasefire and a resumed dialogue. Mr Bush's speech does not represent the long-awaited, post-Clinton re-engagement of the US in Middle East mediation. On the contrary, by making a series of impracticable and unrealistic demands of the Palestinians while accepting without question the numbingly destructive policies of Ariel Sharon's government, it ends any remaining pretence of US impartiality.
Mr Bush's suggestion of broad Arab and European support for his approach is plainly untrue, especially with respect to his ostracism of Yasser Arafat. His premise, that his ideas if adopted would restore hope to ordinary Palestinians, will be cruelly misleading while Mr Sharon is allowed to act as an arbiter of what constitutes progress. In several key respects, in fact, Mr Bush's proposals are wholly regressive. To say this is disappointing would be an understatement. After 18 months of dilly-dallying in the Middle East, and an interminable internal administration debate, Mr Bush has failed to rise to the challenge or even, it would seem, to comprehend its true nature. No peacemaker he, and no statesman either. This was not a "vision" of future harmony. It was more a cock-eyed squint, distorted by his domestic constituencies, his obsessive, catch-all definition of "terrorism", and by other priorities such as Iraq, at a basic issue of peace and justice that, despite his sympathetic words, he cannot or will not grasp.
The principal victims of this signal failure of American leadership, as in the past, will be the Palestinians. The onus is entirely on them to conjure up sweeping institutional and judicial reforms that, while intrinsically worthwhile, must be achieved in the teeth of an expanding and now US-approved military occupation. That same Palestinian Authority whose structures and resources were systematically trashed by the Israeli army during incursions earlier this year is now somehow expected to manage a rapid transition to incorruptible, democratic governance. The Palestinians are also told that they must depose Mr Arafat and elect new representatives "not compromised by terror". While the replacement of Mr Arafat by more able and stronger-willed leaders would indeed benefit the Palestinian cause (in part by curbing the extremists and the bombers), this is not something which Washington can sensibly achieve by diktat. Nor will the cynically proffered blandishments of new international funding do more, at this point, than add insult to injury. For, in defiance of practical reality and hard-won peacemaking experience from Dili to Derry to Dayton, Mr Bush insists that all of the above must be done, and seen to be done, before there can be a meaningful bilateral and multilateral process, let alone recognition of a Palestinian state. And even then, such a state would only be a provisional entity, fatally dependent on voluntary Israeli concessions in respect of its final borders.
It is at this point that Mr Bush can most plainly be seen to be going backwards. This interim statelet would occupy, at most, 40% of the West Bank land seized by Israel in 1967. And who could guarantee that Mr Sharon would not seek to render interim into permanent? Mr Bush makes much of his support for UN resolutions 242 and 338, of his hope that Israeli settlement land-grabs will cease, of his wish to oversee a regional solution. But all this has been said before by his administration. What is on offer now to the Palestinians, subject to stringent conditions, is far less than was on the table at Taba in January 2001 and so foolishly let slip by Mr Arafat. Yet even in such reduced circumstances, Mr Bush provides no tools for the job. His secretary of state, Colin Powell, has put off plans to visit the region. No special US envoy has been charged with pursuing Mr Bush's ideas. The peace conference promoted by Mr Powell is indefinitely postponed. There is no timetable and, crucially, no immediately persuasive incentive for extremists to stop the daily killing. The conclusion must be that Mr Bush and his senior advisers, excluding the hapless Mr Powell, do not actually expect any progress and hope effectively to freeze the conflict on Israel's terms while absolving the US of Arab blame.
Sad to say, with his vapid talk of a "vision", Mr Bush has created a vacuum, confused the issues, ducked responsibility, and set back the cause of peace.
Forget Mr Arafat for a moment. Americans and Israelis also deserve better leaders!