[a] regional summit will take place at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday, attended by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan.Haaretz (Israel) reported on Thursday.
Government sources said that the summit would conclude with the announcement of new security understandings between Israel and the PA. The details of the understandings were concluded in a series of talks between Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and former PA security minister Mohammed Dahlan, and will be approved today by a special ministerial committee.
The sources also said that Egypt and Jordan would announce at the summit the return of their ambassadors to Israel, though not necessarily immediately,
There was some dispute about the genesis of the meeting, but like so many other things in the struggle there, it's hard to tell what's true, what's misunderstanding, and what's being said just for effect. For example, Haaretz also reported that
[a]ccording to the Israeli version of things, the invitation to the summit meeting ... caught Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his aides by surprise. ...On the other hand,
[Egyptian intelligence chief Omar] showed up at the PMO [Prime Minister's Office] yesterday[, February 2,] and began the discussion by saying that in light of the significant progress in the area of security and the pending new Israel-Palestinian Authority security arrangement, Mubarak wanted to host a meeting between Sharon and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Sharm el-Sheikh rather than Jerusalem, and with Jordan's King Abdullah in attendance too.
Sharon gave his immediate nod, and the meeting with Suleiman lasted a mere 40 minutes.
[s]enior Palestinian officials complained ... that the summit was cooked up by Egypt and Israel alone, with the PA being informed only after the fact. They charged that Israeli officials failed to mention the summit initiative during any of the high-level Israeli-Palestinian talks of the past few days, including the Mofaz-Dahlan meeting.Even so, both sides have agreed to go and a summit that was thought to be weeks or months off is suddenly just days away.
And oddly, that may not be the best news. With things developing so fast, expectations can easily become unrealistic. It's happened before, when hopes have spiralled up only to come crashing down because there was no solid mutual understanding of what needed to be done to support them. While a readiness, even an eagerness, for a settlement would be a welcome change on both sides, some moderation of speed might be even better.
The thing is, summits usually work best when they are the culmination of lots of spadework, when agreements are already pretty much in hand. The sources quoted above do suggest some agreements will come out of the meeting, but each side is coming in with its own agenda and there is not much overlap between them. Palestinians want to focus on areas such as release of Palestinian prisoners, removal of checkpoints, and Israeli withdrawal from West Bank cities. But "Israeli sources say the summit meeting will focus on security issues," which usually means demands for crackdowns on militant groups.
How far there is to go can be seen in the fact that each side has made some gestures toward the other only to have them downplayed or outright dissed. For example,
Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas' political bureau, said that Hamas has already agreed to a cease-fire in principle, but "the lull will not last long if the rights of the Palestinian people are not restored, including regarding Jerusalem and the refugees,"which would seem to indicate Abbas's efforts to win militant cooperation are having some success. What's more,
[i]n Gaza, calm was restored ... after a few days of renewed violence, and senior Israel Defense Forces commanders praised the PA's efforts in this regard. They particularly commended the PA's discovery and destruction of an arms smuggling tunnel on the Gazan-Egyptian border.That would seem to be a good thing. However, in a statement just two days later, and less than a week after praising Palestinian efforts and saying, according to CNN, that conditions are "ripe" for "a historic breakthrough," Ariel Sharon complained in an official statement that the PA was not
taking substantive steps to fight terror....Does that mean the praise by the IDF for the efforts made was wrong? Or just irrelevant? Meanwhile, on the other side, Palestinian officials
The prime minister stressed that getting into the road map will happen only after the Palestinians halt terrorist activity, dismantle the [terror] infrastructures and carry out governmental reforms....
on Thursday rejected the Israeli offer to release 900 prisoners as a gesture to Abbas, calling the proposal "insulting."That is, Israel was only releasing people who would have been released soon anyway. That may well be true, but "insulting" still hardly seems a fair (or wise) description. They should have called it a "positive development" and that they looked forward to further agreements on prisoner releases that would address those held under longer sentences.
Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erakat criticized Israel's offer, saying it was freeing only people serving relatively short terms.
The fact that at least publicly each side sees only problems and recalcitrance on the other side instead of (even if grudging) progress may be all we need to know about how great a divide is still to be crossed.
And still in the background lurk the radicals on both sides, the ones who would wreck any hopes for peace if they could and who still well might, for their own varying reasons, try to do just that. Some are obvious and require no reminders: the militants, the murderers, the suicide bombers who have targeted shopping malls and buses. Some are obvious but we do need to be reminded of them:
[Israeli] Attorney General Menachem Mazuz said Thursday that administrative detention would be increased as punishment for settlers who resist evacuation under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.And it's not just obstructionism involved: Ariel Sharon, like Yitzhak Rabin before him, in greater physical danger from the Israeli rejectionist front that he ever will be from the Palestinian one.
The attorney general said that Jews could be arrested if proof is shown that they intend to carry out hostile attacks to obstruct the evacuation planned for Gaza and West Bank settlements.
And finally, some of those in the background have been dragged into the daylight, as a commentary by journalist Jonathan Cook in the Daily Star (Lebanon) lays out:
The latest legal maneuvers by the Israeli government to confiscate Palestinian land in East Jerusalem have rightly caused outrage, even among senior Israeli officials.The outrage was great enough that, even though the commentary says there is evidence he oversaw the implementation of the policy last year,
Last summer, it emerged that the government secretly resurrected a 55-year-old piece of legislation drafted in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Using the 1950 Absentee Property Law, Israeli officials have the right to seize [without compensation] the holdings of any Palestinian landowner they define as "absent."
The renewed application of the law came to light only after an Israeli lawyer pressed the army for a promised entry permit into Israel for his client, Johnny Atik, a Bethlehem farmer who needed to reach his fields. His land lies on the Jerusalem side of the "security barrier." The permit never arrived; instead Atik received a letter advising him that his land had been passed to the office of the Custodian of Absentee Property. His fields now declared state property, he is ineligible for compensation.
Israel's attorney general has told the government to call an immediate halt to confiscating Palestinian property in East Jerusalem under a 1950 land law.the BBC reported on February 1. Suspicion - which would appear justified - is rife that the purpose of the land grab, which has involved hundreds of hectares (1 hectare = 10,000 square meters = a touch less than 2.5 acres) over the last few months, was to seize all Palestinian land around Jerusalem that lay within the "separation fence," thus cementing Israeli control over the disputed eastern part of the city; Cook asserts that Mazuz issued his finding only because of the bad press the practice brought to Israel.
Meni Mazuz said he was never consulted about the policy, which was secretly approved by the cabinet last summer.
He wrote to the finance minister saying the law could not be used for people absent from their property because of Israeli security measures,
Still, in the face of it all - the forces arrayed against it; the suspicions and hatreds; the lengthy, depressing list of failures - there is cause for hope. Even Secretary of State CantBe Right
recently said peace was impossible unless the Palestinians gained a state of their own that satisfies their aspirations....And they are talking. And they are meeting. And some progress is being made, some things offered by both sides. Michel Rocard, a former prime minister of France and now a member of the European parliament, wrote in the Daily Star for Thursday that he could attest to "the gathering momentum toward peace" from his experience as an international monitor for the Palestinian elections. He went on to say that
[t]here is no question that current conditions present a unique window of opportunity. But we must keep in mind the major difficulties that can limit our ability to seize this opportunity, and the international community must make these difficulties very clear to both parties.Which, at least on the first two points, seems to me pretty much exactly what I've been saying.
The first difficulty is that, although Sharon evidently intends to go through with his military withdrawal from Gaza, he is vague about what he wants to achieve in future negotiations. Indeed, he has never made the slightest allusion to the idea of including the West Bank and Jerusalem in such negotiations. But, for the Palestinians, there can be no negotiations that do not include both issues.
The second difficulty concerns the fact that Sharon has always appeared to believe that it is within the means of the Palestinian Authority to eradicate all terrorism arising from inside the Palestinian territories and aimed at Israel. However, external observers know that this is not the case, even if Abbas can succeed in reducing the level and number of attacks.
In order for the Palestinian people as a whole to cease to glorify, support and shelter terrorists, they need to discover real hope for a new life for themselves. That, in turn, depends on an economic recovery in the Occupied Territories and a belief that concrete steps toward a negotiated political solution are being taken.
The creation of such hope now depends exclusively on Israel, which must act immediately to give a boost to the many Palestinians who yearn for peace rather than continue focusing on a total disappearance of terrorism. Delay on this front will only delay the disappearance of the terrorists.
The third difficulty concerns the fact that, on both sides, most religious authorities, rabbis and imams alike, have maintained a hard-line stance. They continue to preach that the respective "taboos" of their communities, the very issues that block all efforts to make peace - in particular the status of Jerusalem and the "right of return" to Israel for Palestinian refugees - are non-negotiable. To make these religious authorities acknowledge their responsibility is a duty that all of international civil society, including religious leaders, must embrace.
None of these efforts are undoable. All will be demanding. But a chance to achieve real, lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians has clearly arrived. We must seize this moment.
And yes, we must seize this moment. But we - that is, they, the Israelis and Palestinians who truly want peace, have to make sure they do not run so hard and so fast after that so-far elusive goal that they again fall flat on the blood-soaked sands.
Updated to add the links to info about Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Jonathan Cook and Michel Rocard.
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