WASHINGTON: After a week of both staggering bloodshed and intriguing offers from the Arab League and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, US peace efforts in the Mideast remained dependent on the answers to two broad questions: Are any of the parties actually on the same wavelength about what should happen next? And is anyone really listening to the United States?
The most hopeful reply to both, amid conflicting signals, is a very tentative “maybe.”
Despite the cautiously optimistic spin offered on Thursday by US officials, they privately acknowledged that the crisis could get far worse before any real progress is made.
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe welcomed the Arab League’s decision on Thursday to embrace a proposal from Saudi Arabia that offers Israel “normal relations” in exchange for its withdrawal from territories occupied since the 1967 Middle East War. And President Bush pledged that the United States will continue to push for progress.
“I know the Middle East looks like there’ll never be peace. But I can assure you, we’re not giving up. We’re not going to let murderers disrupt a march to peace,” he said at a Republican fund-raising luncheon in Dallas.
“When the United States remains firm and strong and determined,” he said, “we can achieve peace in the parts of the world where people never thought peace could happen.”
Yet the US efforts basically are stuck in bloody limbo, as illustrated by the events on Thursday. To pave the way for deeper US mediation, Arafat announced his willingness to accept an unconditional cease-fire _ at the same time that Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a Jewish settlement near the West Bank town of Nablus, killing four people.
Meanwhile, Israel expressed skepticism about the overtures from both the Arab League and Arafat. Arafat “has to take real action,” said Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “Declarations won’t do.”
And Israel deployed tanks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following a suicide bombing in Israel on Wednesday that killed the bomber and 21 other people and injured more than a hundred.
So despite a new sense of movement generated this week, the gap between the two sides is still wide _ perhaps the biggest chasm since the peace process began more than a decade ago. “I don’t know if we’ve ever witnessed such a total collapse of trust,” a Bush administration official lamented. “It’s hard to see how to move forward.”
Both sides appear to be playing for points with their own constituencies, not each other, analysts say.
“Arafat’s offer is disingenuous. If he were able to deliver on a cease-fire, why didn’t he do it before?” said Henry Steigman, a Mideast expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Without a commitment from Israel to end the occupation and agree to the emergence of a Palestinian state, there’s no way he can enforce a cease-fire. So it’s a desperate ploy to hold off Israeli retribution.
“And Sharon’s approach has given more importance to annexing the territories and maintaining settlements than to peace with his neighbours. So his objective is to avoid returning to the borders of 1967, which means there is no reason to expect him to pay attention to the Saudi offer.”
Even the United States appears to be on a different wavelength. The Bush administration virtually dismissed Arafat’s ceasefire offer on Thursday because it didn’t include an agreement on specific steps called for in a plan mediated last year by CIA Director George J. Tenet. And the State Department called the Arab League proposal a catalyst for peace, rather than a specific plan.
“It’s a vision. It’s an idea. (But) how to get there is still the problem,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. “Many of the issues need to be negotiated by the parties.”
Just how far apart the Israelis and the Palestinians remain is underscored by the very means of communication between them.
“Both sides have come to believe that violence is the most important instrument in preventing the other side from compelling them to accept undesirable terms,” said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians and Israelis often appear deaf to the appeals, proddings, suggestions and proposals from the Bush administration.
US officials concede the difficulty of the situation. “Neither side is heeding the message. There’s little regard for our pronouncements, and there’s almost no sense of urgency for action,” the administration official said. “Both sides have instead become focused on what they perceive as the complete unreliability of the other party, and it’s hard for us to prove otherwise.
“And unfortunately, in the meantime, there’s still a lot of fight left in both sides.”—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service.