September 10, 2003	Wednesday	Rajab 12, 1424

CAIRO: For 23-year-old Egyptian Hatem, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict could not be more simple.

“There has to be a final battle,” said Hatem, who is performing his military service.

It’s hard to believe he has only ever known peace between his country and Israel, whose leaders 25 years ago forged framework agreements that paved the way for first peace treaty between an Arab country and the Jewish state a year later.

“Peace is a delusion,” Hatem said, adding that Egypt should join its Arab brothers in a war to recover Palestinian and Syrian land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

“That which is taken by force can only be recovered by force,” he said.

The Israeli-Egyptian peace accords, signed in 1979, were hammered out from September 5-17, 1978, during intense negotiations at the US presidential retreat of Camp David under the mediation of President Jimmy Carter.

Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared the Nobel Peace prize for their efforts.

Today ties between their countries are frosty and the deal that other Arab states condemned has failed to bring broader Middle East peace.

Egypt withdrew its ambassador from Israel in 2000 over Israel’s handling of a Palestinian uprising against occupation, which began after US-brokered Palestinian-Israeli negotiations — again at Camp David — failed to produce an agreement.

Syria is still officially at war with Israel, which occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in the 1967 war.

“Israelis have proved themselves to be good warriors but not good peace makers,” said Egyptian political analyst Mohamed al Sayid Said.

But for Israel, Camp David “taught us that a genuine peace could be reachable, once the parties share a strategic decision to achieve it in serious negotiations and in good faith,” said Gideon Ben-Ami, Israel’s ambassador to Cairo.

“It projected a visible cornerstone for a lasting peace in the future with the rest of our Arab neighbours,” he said.

SEPARATE PEACE: The agreement forged at Camp David in 1978 returned to Egypt a demilitarised Sinai peninsula and secured peace for Israel with its strongest Arab enemy. It also included a plan for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Arab states, including Syria, rejected it as a separate peace that weakened the Arabs, and suspended Egypt temporarily from the Arab League.

“Syria has proven all the time to be right,” said Syrian foreign ministry spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban. “When Camp David was signed...Syria said no partial solution would bring peace to the region.”

In hindsight, Egyptian Camp David delegate Abdel Raouf el-Reedy said Israel had never intended to work for regional peace at Camp David.

“Menachem Begin was focused only on the Egyptian-Israeli treaty and his strategy was to get Egypt out of the Arab camp so as to divide the Arab position,” he said.

DIPLOMACY CAN WORK: But Camp David had forced a rethink of the Arab states’ strategy in dealing with Israel, said analyst Said. Egypt’s exit from the conflict had “deprived the Arab world of the prospects of seeing a war-like scenario for resolving the conflict”.

“Camp David established a precedent that strengthened the peace camp in the Arab world. (It showed) diplomacy can work and bring back fundamental rights,” he said.

Israel held talks with all its frontline Arab neighbours in 1991, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994 and Palestinian-Israeli talks in Taba, Egypt 2001 brought the sides closer than ever to agreement.

But failure to reach a deal with the Palestinians, who want a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and an Arab view that Israel has tried to extract unjust concessions from them, has widened the gulf between Israel and the Arabs, Said said.

Ambassador Ben-Ami blamed current Middle Eastern strife on what he said was Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s decision to ditch negotiations for violence.

Former Egyptian statesman Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who played a major role in negotiating the 1978 Camp David agreement, said Israeli-Egyptian ties could not advance without progress on solving Palestinian problem.

“You cannot have normal relations between Egypt and Israel if this objective has not been achieved,” he said, insisting that ensuring comprehensive peace had been Sadat’s original aim.

The lack of normalization disappoints Israel.

“Normalization...is regarded as a bad word in the Arab world, while for us it is a vision, that, regrettably, has not come true,” Ben-Ami said. But “a disturbing cold peace is much better than a hot war in the view of most Israelis”, he said.

STRONG US MEDIATION: Aside from setting a precedent for future Arab-Israeli peace efforts, Camp David could teach those currently trying to push forward the US-backed “roadmap” for Israeli-Palestinian peace the importance of strong US mediation in striking a deal.

“We have not been able to find a mediator who would have the same energy as President Carter,” Boutros-Ghali said.

Reedy said a successful US mediator would have to be determined to pressure Israel into dismantling an expanded number of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state there.

Applying the land-for-peace formula which produced Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel to the occupied territories had been complicated by settlement expansion, he added.

Washington would also have to break down what Arabs see as a traditional bias towards Israel to win Arab trust, Shaaban said.

“Arab people would love the United States to play an important role in the peace process,” she said. But “the United States is not playing the role it is supposed to play of a mediator between two parties”.—Reuters