Palestinians send an explosive ‘message’
to their would-be Arab ‘trustees’
The latest guerrilla attack on a busload of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank was
not just the first major successful operation by Palestinian resistance fighters after a
monthlong lull.
“It was also a political message of the utmost importance from the Palestinian people
… that they alone are responsible for their fate, decision and choices, and that they
have the capability to reject any tutelage or attempt to deny them of their legitimate
rights,” says the UAE daily Al-Khaleej.
The operation coincided with the meeting in New York of the international
“Quartet” (the United States, the European Union, United Nations and Russia) to
discuss the Palestinians’ fate and come to a decision about their leadership and
future in the absence of any Palestinian representatives, the paper writes. And it can be
seen as an “adamant rejection” of that and of “any other attempt to put the
Palestinians under anyone’s wing,” it says.
The attack also confirmed the failure of Israel’s vicious American-backed military
onslaught on the West Bank to crush their resistance, the Gulf paper writes.
Consequently, the US and its Quartet partners will have to rethink their assumptions,
“particularly the hypothesis that having been subjected to such massive aggression,
the Palestinian people are now ready to accept anything that Israel and the US want,”
Al-Khaleej says.
In Jordan, the semi-official daily Al-Rai says the attack on the settlers should serve as
a reminder to the international community that there can be no military solution to the
conflict and that it is imperative to “open up a political horizon.”
Likud’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his defense minister, Labor Party leader
Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, have been pursuing the military option for 20 months and blocking
every opportunity to restart the political process. The attack confirms the
“bankruptcy” of their approach and their “ridiculous” attempt to blame
Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA) for the operation, it says.
“The PA is dismantled and besieged, its security men are either in prison or under
curfew unable to move or operate, and the Israeli Army is in sole control and has the
first and last say on everything.” Yet, despite its campaign of arrests, closures,
assassinations and curfews, Israel’s army failed to prevent fighters from ambushing
the settlers’ bus, clashing with the security detail that arrived on the scene, and
then escaping and evading a manhunt.
This demonstrates, among other things, that it is impossible to protect the settlers while
they colonize the Palestinians’ land, Al-Rai says. And Sharon trying to impose his
dictates on the Palestinians and cancelling talks they were due to hold with his foreign
minister in response to the attack cannot change that fact.
“There are no harsher or sterner military measures he can use against the Palestinian
people and their Authority that he has not already employed. And his endeavor to force his
political terms on them has reaped nothing but failure. Sharon must listen to the voice of
reason,” the Jordanian paper says.
The pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi says the attack was a message not only to Sharon, but
also to the three Arab foreign ministers currently in the US for talks with the Quartet
and a subsequent meeting with President Bush at the White House.
The message to Sharon was that the lull in guerrilla attacks following his West Bank blitz
was only temporary, and that the attacks will persist until the occupation ends.
The message to envoys from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan who are seeking to cut a deal
with the US over Palestine is that “the Palestinian decision is not in their hands,
that they have no mandate to speak on the Palestinians’ behalf either to the US
administration or the Quartet, and that any deal they do behind closed doors will not be
acceptable unless it fulfills the Palestinian people’s rights in full,” the
paper writes.
The Arab ministers’ effort to bypass the Palestinians and facilitate the Bush-Sharon
attempts to nurture a hired Palestinian leadership are “doomed,” it says.
The Palestinians look to their fellow Arabs to support their resistance, but Arab
officialdom has become a burden on them and their cause, serving the purposes of the
Israeli occupation and the Bush-Sharon objective of “liquidating the Palestinians as
a prelude to forcing all the Arabs into the Israeli house of obedience,” Al-Quds
al-Arabi charges.
But Al-Rai’s Hamada Faraaneh applauds the diplomatic engagement of Egypt, which he
says is aimed at strengthening the “forces of reason” in Israel so as to make a
resumption of the peace process possible.
Thus, while reducing its contacts with the Sharon government to a minimum, Cairo has been
opening up to the Israeli opposition, including the Arab parties and the Labor Party, he
writes.
It has been proven beyond any doubt to Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians that no
settlement, agreement or understanding is possible with Sharon’s government. The only
hope of achieving peace and coexistence lies in its replacement by a government that does
not share its destructive approach, and whose “natural” supporters in the
Knesset would be the Labor, Meretz and the Arab parties, he reasons.
While it is true Labor is Sharon’s coalition partner, and its leader Ben-Eliezer is
his defense minister, the latter, unlike Sharon, does have a political program that could
constitute a basis for negotiations with the Palestinians, Faraaneh says.
By engaging with Ben-Eliezer and like-minded figures, rather than treating all Israelis as
one uniform mass, Cairo is attempting to help “create the missing Israeli partner who
is capable of returning to the negotiating table,” he says.
Cairo’s policy of encouraging Israelis to recognize the justice and legitimacy of the
Palestinians’ goals is courageous, he says, and it stands a good chance of
succeeding. For while the Palestinians may be in a “predicament,” so is Israeli
society. It needs someone who knows how to approach it, and Egypt is best placed for that
role, he says.
In Cairo, Egyptian columnist Salama Ahmed Salama wonders where the various Arab
governments really stand in relation to Washington’s plans to overthrow the ruling
regime in Iraq, of which last week’s London conference of Iraqi military defectors
appears to have been a component.
The appearance of Jordan’s Prince Hassan at the gathering was “not without
significance,” given persistent reports that Jordan is set to be a staging post for
the anticipated American military campaign against Iraq, he writes in the semi-official
Egyptian daily Al-Ahram.
And although the Amman government adamantly denied those reports, there remains much
evidence that “secret arrangements” are in place for US forces to use bases in
various Arab countries to mount air strikes, he says.
Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan have been named as likely launching pads, Salama notes, adding
that Jordan is known to have allowed US warplanes enforcing the “no-fly” zones
over northern and southern Iraq to use its air bases in the past.
At the last Arab League summit in March, all the Arab states unanimously opposed any
military intervention in Iraq, and this continues to be their official position without
exception, he writes.
“But the problem is that much that is said in statements and resolutions in the Arab
world does not stand up for long in the face of reality. The Arab peoples often discover,
after it is too late, that what the foreign media publish is more honest and closer to the
truth,” Salama writes.
“The Arab world is currently living in a whirlpool of truths, lies and half-truths,
and under a tent of rumors, speculation and conjuncture. Whenever Arab officials meet with
each other, no one knows what it is they agreed or disagreed about. And whenever they meet
with foreign officials, the picture becomes even more obscure and opaque. When are we
going to reach the stage of being honest rather than economical with the truth?”
In the Beirut daily An-Nahar, Rajeh al-Khoury says while Jordan denies involvement in
Washington’s war plans, the Americans have been actively readying bases in the Gulf
for an a blitz on Iraq.
Khoury is particularly struck by what he says are the hints that have been coming out of
Washington suggesting that it no longer opposes the replacement of Iraq’s
Sunni-controlled regime by one led by the majority Shiites.
It was no “slip of the tongue” when former Iraqi Army General Najib al-Salhi
who Khoury describes as “Baghdad’s Karzai” remarked last week that
Washington is no longer suspicious of the Iraqi Shiites but sees them as part of the Iraqi
people, a hint that it might favor a Shiite taking over from Saddam.
A “Shiite regime” in Iraq used to be unthinkable to Washington, as it could team
up with Iran to constitute “a major Shiite power in the Gulf, a prospect that worries
not only the Americans but their Gulf allies too,” he says.
So its change of heart could mean one of three things. Either it has the
“understanding and blessing” of Iran for its plans in Iraq; or it intends to
follow its attack on the Baghdad government with a wider operation targeting Iran’s
influence in the Gulf; or else it is assuming that an attack on Iraq will inevitably
result in the country’s dismemberment.
That was alluded to by Salhi when he warned that Iraq’s armed forces could split
along sectarian lines, because Sunnis from Saddam’s home district of Tikrit dominate
the Republican Guards while other units are composed chiefly of Shiites.
In Kuwait, meanwhile, Al-Qabas columnist Matar Saeed urges Syria and Jordan to drop their
objections to American military action against Iraq and join Washington’s drive to
topple Saddam. If they did so, they would rid themselves of a harmful neighbor and put
themselves in good standing with the leadership that assumes power in Baghdad, he argues.
But if they opt to defend Saddam, they will alienate the successor regime, “which
will be an ally of America, and that will in turn affect the policies of the Gulf states
that Syria and Jordan currently consider to be politically and materially supportive of
them,” Saeed warns.
He advises the two countries not to be deterred from cooperating with America on Iraq
because of its position on Palestine.
“The priority now is Saddam’s regime, and it won’t do the Palestine
question any harm to wait for a few months, having already waited half a century” for
a solution, he writes.
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