With Arab commentators becoming ever more skeptical about US intentions in the Middle East, Saudi-run Al-Hayat carries an in-depth interview with US Secretary of State Colin Powell in which he stresses the Bush administration’s commitment to promoting peace in the region and fulfilling President George W. Bush’s “vision” of a Palestinian state.
The pan-Arab daily leads with Powell’s revelation that the Bush administration is thinking of supporting the idea of a “temporary state” for the Palestinians, as an interim step toward the Palestinian state that would eventually be set up as part of a final peace agreement with Israel.
He sheds little light on the arrangements envisaged, but argues that if a “temporary” state were quickly created, it would provide the Palestinians with hope for the future and something to “invest in.” But he indicates that they will have to agree the final borders in negotiations with Israel.
Powell also made clear to Al-Hayat’s New York bureau chief, Ragheda Dergham, that the idea of an international Middle East conference that many in the Arab world had thought Washington was losing interest in remains very much on the US agenda.  He said he expects to personally chair the gathering this summer, and that it would not be a one-off meeting, rather the first in a series ­ but it had not yet been decided who would attend.
Powell confirmed that Bush will soon announce how he views the way forward in the Middle East and propose steps for translating his “vision” into reality.
In addition, Powell used the interview to dispel a growing impression in the region that the Bush administration shares Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s goal of getting rid of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, indicating more than once that Washington accepts that he is currently the chosen leader.
With the term “temporary state” now looking likely to enter the Middle East political lexicon, Al-Jazeera Satellite Television presenter Mohammed Kreishan warns against what he dubs the “trivialization” of the concept of Palestinian statehood.
Writing in his column for the pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Kreishan writes that in media and political discourse, the notion of a state is gradually being distorted from an assertion of Palestinian sovereignty after the end of Israeli occupation into a favor to be granted by the Americans at the time and in the form of their choosing.
If this process continues, it will inevitably reduce what has for years been the cherished dream of the Palestinian national movement
into “a sedative,” to anesthetize the Palestinians by granting them token trappings of sovereignty while ensuring that the central issue of ending the Israeli occupation continues to be evaded, he writes.
The intifada, which broke out in September 2000, put the issue at the top of the agenda, and Israel’s  military blitz highlighted it to the world at large, says Kreishan.
“But the shabby deal to secure the lifting of the siege of the Mukataa, and the even shabbier deal over the Church of the Nativity ­ combined with official Arab submission and failing, American bias, and the paralysis, indifference or impotence of the other international players ­ breathed new life into international efforts to search for a dramatic diversion.”
Thus, the Israeli occupation was removed from the agenda, through hollow talk about an international conference of undetermined purpose or about establishing a Palestinian state without any of the key features of statehood.
The Palestinian leadership bears a major responsibility for this regression, because it struck the bargains that spared the Arabs and the world the embarrassment of having to address the situation on the ground, and gave a new lease of life to the “deal brokers,” Kreishan writes. And their new catch phrase during this period is “Palestinian state ­ a state to be established no one knows exactly when, on what basis (international law or the whims of Bush and his ally Sharon?) or on which patch of land.”
Is the state to mark the end of the occupation, or will it have to live under it for a while, and if so for how long, Kreishan wonders
“Is merely turning the Palestinian negotiating delegation into the delegation of the state of Palestine going to change Israel’s intransigence and contempt for international law?”
And if statehood in its own right facilitates progress in peacemaking, why has Syria gotten nowhere in its efforts to negotiate an Israeli pullout from its Golan Heights?
“There are many other questions too, but no one raises them because no one is seriously talking about a Palestinian state. Even the reference to a state in the famous UN Security Council Resolution 1397 was left floating and ambiguous ­ and it wasn’t the ‘constructive ambiguity’ that many in the US State Department have theorized about over the years,” Kreishan writes.
The Palestinian leadership contributed to the “trivialization process” by repeatedly threatening to proclaim statehood and then backing down, turning it into a nonsensical term lacking substance.
That in turn has enabled “all and sundry to tailor this state to their own specifications,” to the extent that the prospect of statehood no longer even works as a “carrot” that can be used to persuade the Palestinians to “put up with a few strokes of the stick,” Kreishan continues.
It is therefore vital that a firm stand be taken to put the full legal and political substance back into the concept of statehood, “making it the fruit of the Palestinian people’s past and present struggles, and not a gift from anyone,” he concludes.
In the Beirut daily As-Safir, Mustafa Husseini balks at the kind of Palestinian state proposed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during his talks at Camp David.
He says that official Egyptian sources explained ahead of his visit that Mubarak was acting according to the “theory” that the best way of reviving the peace process would be for the Arabs to “come up with an offer Israel cannot refuse.”
Until then, the prevalent assumption was that this offer was the Saudi Peace Initiative, adopted at the Arab League summit in Beirut in March. How much more accommodating could the Arab states be, than by proposing full peace and normalization in exchange for Israel withdrawing its troops to the June 4, 1967 lines and recognizing a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem?
It did not take long to transpire that there is room for plenty more Arab climbdowns, Husseini remarks.
The offer Mubarak took to Camp David proposed that the US and Israel agree to the declaration of a Palestinian state in the enclaves designated as being under autonomous Palestinian administration by the 1993 Oslo Accords ­ or 43 percent of land seized by Israel in 1967. Then, a timetable would be laid down for talks on “remaining issues” over the course of four years, at the end of which Israel would withdraw to the June 1967 lines.
Although Saudi Arabia inexplicably declared this to be consistent with its own initiative, the Egyptian plan clearly drew its inspiration from other sources ­ namely, the Bush-Powell “vision” of a Palestinian state, and Sharon’s proposal for a “long-term interim solution,” to which was added the idea of eventual withdrawal to the 1967 border.
The outcome: Bush avoided the substance of the plan, instead reiterating what he said before about a Palestinian state. The only element of Mubarak’s proposal that he commented on was the idea of a timeline, which he said it was premature to consider now, before repeating again that he has no confidence in Arafat. Yet strangely, Egypt trumpeted Mubarak’s talks as a “success” merely because Bush didn’t rule out a timetable in principle.
Mubarak had been summoned to Washington urgently, Husseini adds, two months ahead of his “normal” annual visit. He had asked for it to be postponed for a couple of weeks because of other engagements, but his hosts wanted to see him in a hurry. Yet the proposal he was bringing wasn’t exactly a secret, having been published in the New York Times. Why was Washington in such haste?
“Wasn’t it to officially register a fresh Arab climbdown from the Saudi-turned-Arab initiative?” he asks.
“That is what happened. The Egyptian proposal has become a formal document held by the US and Israel. The latter did not see the proposal as an ‘offer it couldn’t refuse’ but as ‘containing nothing new,’ as Sharon put it. Israel thus had to reject it, and it did.”
And to drag yet more concessions out of the Arabs, Sharon proceeded to “define his horizon” after his talks with Bush: Israel will not return to the 1967 borders, and it does not have a Palestinian peace partner ­ neither Arafat nor any other, Husseini writes. “He closed the door. And anyone who wants to offer new concessions to Israel must break it down.”
Kuwaiti columnist Ahmed al-Rabi wonders why the unprecedented wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, solidarity activities and fund-raising campaigns that was sweeping the Arab world just a couple of months ago has died down.
The way the Arab public has reverted to a “spectator role” with regard to the Palestinian cause would appear to confirm the stereotype that when it comes to politics, the Arabs behave emotively and reactively, and are incapable of sustaining organized and long-term efforts, he writes in the London-based pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat.
That is why we are such easy prey to all manner of criminals, despots and demagogues who stir up public passions rather than appeal to logic and reason. And that is why we are only driven to act in the heat of
a crisis or disaster, and soon revert to passivity, Rabi argues.
“Anyone watching us now would be excused for thinking that the Palestinian refugees have returned to their homes, Palestinian land has been recovered by its owners, schools in the occupied Palestinian territories are open as normal, and the hospitals have a surplus of medication and equipment,” Rabi remarks.
“Israel is still vandalizing the occupied Palestinian territories. There are still thousands of needy Palestinian families who are becoming ever poorer. The Palestinians’ infrastructure and institutions of civil society are still biting the dust … Yet silence reigns,” he says.
The mass protests have tapered off, the official and popular solidarity activities have ceased, and the satellite TV stations have stopped holding telethons to raise money for relief supplies.
“Do we need a disaster on the scale of the 1967 war to start going beyond rhetoric,” he wonders.

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