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More pampering for Israel, anyone?
Delegates at this year's Arab League summit must resist the pressure to tamper with the language of the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 March 17, 2007
- Image Credit:
Ha-hum. Yawn. It is the kind of event that no longer merits much notice as news: The Arab League will hold yet another summit. Yet, the Arab League is one of the few, the very few, Arab institutions in a position to define the Arab consensus on issues of great concern to Arabs. It is thus folly to give credence to Arab cynics who dismiss this body as a mere debating club where heads of state meet to shoot the breeze, forever powerless at determining the evolution of pan-Arab political life. But truth be told, when the times are out of joint, and problems out of whack, the Arab League was always there, and it's all we've got.
As the summit convenes in Saudi Arabia on March 28, the one document expected to be high on the agenda will be the Arab Peace Initiative, a plan authored by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, which offers peace and normal relations with Israel in return for the evacuation of the territories, in Palestine and Syria, occupied by it since 1967, and for accepting a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194 allowing these refugees to choose between repatriation and compensation.
Revolutionary boldness
The plan, it will be recalled, was adopted by all the 22-member states at the Arab League summit held in Beirut in 2002. It was no less than revolutionary in its boldness, for nothing like it had been advanced collectively by the Arab countries, or individually by an Arab head of state, since the late president Habib Bourghiba of Tunisia had told an audience in 1965 that Arabs should recognise Israel if Israel went back to its 1947 borders. (Never mind that Israeli officials scoffed at the idea.)
So why will this old document, resurrected from the attic of the Arab League, be relevant to the upcoming summit in Saudi Arabia? Simply this: There will be pressure by Israel, applied via Washington, to tamper with the 2002 language of the document, whereby the "evacuation" of the Occupied Territories will be amended to mean that what territories are returned is subject to negotiation, and that the "just" solution to the refugee problem will be resettlement elsewhere, not repatriation to Palestine.
The Arab delegates should resist that kind of pressure, exerted at the behest of outsiders. The initiative is explicit and stark in its simplicity: Leave our national territory and right the wrong committed against those Palestinians whom you expelled from home and homeland in 1948, and we will accept you as a sovereign state in the heartland of our world. No room for hedging here.
Meanwhile, the State Department, whose Condoleezza Rice has apparently caught peace conference fever in recent weeks, is in touch with European allies, members of the Quartet, Arab countries and officials at the UN about convening a Middle East peace summit a la Madrid, 2003. And reportedly the main issue that will be up for debate there is the textual content of the Arab Peace Initiative. (Are you, incidentally, guessing who will not be coming to dinner at that event? If you guessed Hamas government officials, you guessed right.)
And, again, guess what? The whole exercise may be moot after all. A thousand Israeli spokesmen, whether representing Likud or Labour governments, have reiterated, over and over again, that no total withdrawal from, or dismantling of colonies in, the Occupied Territories will be contemplated.
Ever since 1967, the purpose of colony building was to "create facts" on the ground, and the devil with the Geneva Conventions, facts that would determine the final status of the land, long before the notion of "final status negotiations" was conceived.
After 40 years, these facts include 250,000 colonists who have squatted on 125 officially sanctioned colonies, built on choice Palestinian land in the West Bank, as well as 180,000 others living in the annexed areas of the eastern part of Occupied Jerusalem and its environs. And how was Israel, this two-bit, shirt-pocket empire in our midst, able to sculpt the political reality in Palestine in such a way as to pre-empt and render pointless any meaningful peace negotiations?
Search me. But you can always ask Washington, whose UN ambassadors over the decades constantly voted against resolutions in the General Assembly, and vetoed resolutions in the Security Council, that would have put a stop to this madness from the outset. One thing is plain: Without the massive economic, military and diplomatic support extended by successive American administrations to Israel all these years, we would not have had the mess we have on our hands today. One is reminded here of the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia who was once asked by a reporter about the Palestine problem. His response was this: "There is no Palestinian problem, there's only an Israeli problem."
And that problem is directly of America's creation. Food for thought here as the State Department lobbies its friends for the convening of yet another wretched "international conference" on Palestine. Meanwhile, Arab heads of state should simply reaffirm, not debate or dilute, their Arab Peace Initiative, when they meet in Saudi Arabia in less than two weeks.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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