WASHINGTON: Condoleezza Rice talks about a brighter “political horizon” for Palestinians, a more hopeful vision of their future as an independent state. Yet renewed violence and political infighting are clouding the goal.
An explosion of violence involving Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinians largely leaves the United States on the sidelines and may doom unlikely chances for a new US-sponsored push for peace.
The conflicts in recent days in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories spring from different agendas but are related. Both involve the festering problem of stateless Palestinians, pose a threat to Israel and undermine the long-term US goal of spreading democracy in the region.
In the short term, fighting in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and in the streets of the Gaza Strip will focus political attention inward and further stall the prospect of renewed peace talks.
“I was never much persuaded” that US efforts would bear any quick fruit, said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and a former US negotiator in Israeli-Palestinian talks. He is now even less optimistic.
“You have a weak Israeli government. You have a weaker Palestinian government. I don’t think it’s realistic to talk about permanent status issues” until both sides’ own politics are more settled, Miller said.
“Permanent status” is a diplomatic catch phrase meaning all the really hard topics that must be resolved for the Palestinians to have an independent state. Such issues include eventual borders, the fate of disputed ground in Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinians and their descendants displaced when Israel was created in 1948.
Those refugees are dispersed across the Middle East, including in Lebanon, as this week’s violence reminded, and in Jordan, one of the loudest voices telling the Bush administration it must become a much more active peacemaker.
Washington had hoped to move beyond the contentious but small-bore disagreements, such as painstakingly negotiated accords involving border crossings, that have defined the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in recent years.
The talk on Wednesday dealt with how to end open warfare.
Moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah faction and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas met for the first time since Hamas-Fatah fighting broke out two weeks ago. More than 50 Palestinians have died.
The leaders were trying to restore a cease-fire with Israel that collapsed under a barrage of Hamas rocket fire.
In Lebanon, hundreds of Palestinian civilians carried their belongings in plastic bags as they trickled out of a besieged refugee camp on Wednesday. They capitalised on a truce in fighting between militants and Lebanese government forces.
About 15,000, nearly half the camp’s residents, fled Tuesday night, and an additional 1,000 left on Wednesday, officials said. It was unclear how long the truce would hold; there were fears that allowing civilians out could be a prelude for a major showdown.
The fighting comes on top of other setbacks for nascent Arab-Israeli peace efforts this year.
The Palestinian infighting in Gaza is the larger obstacle to peace, analysts said. It reveals the paralyzing depth of their internal divisions despite Palestinian and outside efforts at political reconciliation.
It also threatens to draw Israel into greater military conflict with Hamas. The Islamic military and political group, which won Palestinian elections more than a year ago, has refused to drop anti-Israel positions or stamp out rocket fire aimed at Israeli towns.
The Bush administration’s tentative attempts to reinvigorate Palestinian-Israeli peace talks is focused on offering Palestinians a sunnier hope for their future to give them a reason to keep talking. That supposes a Palestinian leadership that can speak on behalf of its people, which the embattled Abbas cannot promise.
US diplomats sound disheartened in private and cautious in public.
“It’s easy to get discouraged by some of the images we see, especially the violent ones, but also by the messages,” of extremism coming from some Palestinian quarters, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch told Congress on Wednesday.—AP