AL QUDS: By spelling out a straightforward deal in which the Palestinians get their state and the Arab countries make peace with Israel, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler has infused a lifeless Middle East peace process with new vitality.
Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz al-Saud’s vision of peace may break a year-long impasse in efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Saudi leader has turned the US-endorsed logic of mediation - achieve calm first, then talk peace - on its head.
Since he came to power last March, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has insisted that a complete cessation of violence precede any discussions about a peace deal. The Palestinians continue to object, saying that cease-fire efforts are doomed without a sense of where they would lead. But the US has backed the Israeli approach, and American mediators have devised ineffectual mechanisms to stop the killing.
Now Abdullah is circumventing Sharon’s approach by fast-forwarding to a discussion of the endgame of Middle East peace. He made his views known in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that appeared on Feb 17, but his intervention is only now gaining momentum. On Thursday, Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief and an energetic promoter of Middle East peace efforts, rearranged his travel schedule to meet with Abdullah in Jeddah.
The Saudi prince “said he will work from now onwards to present the initiative” to the annual Arab state summit in Beirut on March 27 and 28 so it can be “presented by all Arab countries” as a joint peace plan, Solana’s spokeswoman told Agence France-Presse.
Sharon, indirectly breaking a public silence about the Saudi initiative, told Solana on Tuesday that he found it ”interesting.” Other Israeli officials have been much more enthusiastic, as have members of the Palestinian leadership.
US officials, after displaying only tepid interest last week, are concentrating more seriously on the Saudi proposal. On Tuesday, President Bush called Abdullah about the proposal. But the US remains adamant that it is part of a “goal” or “vision” that does not replace a peace process where the need now is to end violence and reestablish mutual trust.
That may be so, but diplomats in Al Quds say that the Saudi initiative seems to have reminded Israelis and Palestinians alike that a peaceful future could indeed await them.
Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to do something similar in a speech last November that included a demand that Israel end its occupation of Palestinian lands and a reference to the “state of Palestine.” The idea was to create what diplomats call a “political horizon” - a clear sense of what lies at the end of a process of compromise and reconciliation. “The Saudis are also stating a vision,” says one State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, “perhaps as much to the Israeli people as anyone else, of how, from out of the violence, peace can be reached.”
Where Powell’s words failed to inspire, however, Abdullah’s initiative appears to be doing so. “It seems to have caused a certain amount of excitement and acceptance in the Arab world,” says Henry Siegman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York who queried his Saudi contacts to elaborate and clarify Abdullah’s proposal in another New York Times article last week.
One reason for this enthusiasm is that the proposal is exactly in tune with what most Arabs have long demanded of Israel: that it pull back to the borders it maintained on the eve of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and allow the Palestinians to have their capital in Al Quds. In exchange, Abdullah said, the Arab states would normalize relations with Israel. This deal is tougher for Israelis to accept, to say the least. Still, says Danny Ayalon, Sharon’s foreign policy adviser, ”we do not sit idle and we are looking in the appropriate channels - discreet ones as well - to see if there is indeed a (substantive) proposal.”
The main problem, say observers, is that it is hard to conceive of Sharon making peace as Abdullah envisions it. The Israeli premier holds an “undivided” Al Quds as an article of faith and has long insisted that many of Israel’s 1967 territorial gains are necessary for its security. “I don’t see any Israeli government that would agree to the pre-1967 lines,” asserts Ayalon.
Even so, two prominent members of the Israeli Labour Party, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, have spoken glowingly about the Saudi initiative. Although they are members of Sharon’s “unity government,” Labour historically has shown itself more willing than the Likud bloc to consider significant Israeli concessions.
Observers such as Abdel-Monem Said, director of Egypt’s Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, say they hope that the Saudi offer will enliven the Israeli left to topple Sharon. The idea would be for Labour to “push Israel into elections in which hopefully (its voters) will choose peace.”
William Quandt, a Middle East expert at the University of Virginia, says that not just Arabs but Europeans and others are looking for something new from the US to calm the violence in the Middle East. —Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.