[A-List] Britain/US split: Palestine

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

While of course the press and other news media will play up any sign of
a split between Blair and Bush, just as they would any apparent
difference between cabinet ministers, for example, this does look
significant. The Independent is, in the interests of maintaining a broad
readership, covering all bases and publishing other views. But its main
writers are adopting a very critical line on the Bush speech, and while
it might be easy to dismiss Robert Fisk as someone who "went native"
years ago (all those years in Lebanon can't be good for anyone, etc.),
the article below by David Aaronovitch is telling. Aaronovitch has
crossed our paths before, as a longtime close friend of Peter Mandelson,
who was recently appointed to the "international advisory board" of
Independent newspapers (prop. "Sir" Tony O'Reilly). Aaronovitch linked
up with Mandelson in the Communist Party, and stayed with him when both
worked for "Lord" John Birt at London Weekend Television during the
1980s. See
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg06071.htm. Thus
Aaronovitch's intervention here looks indicative of mainstream "New
Labour" opinion.


Blair in rift with Bush over Israel
By Paul Waugh, Phil Reeves and Stephen Castle
The Independent, 26 June 2002

George Bush was facing his first serious rift with Tony Blair last night
after Britain joined the European Union and the United Nations in
rejecting American calls for Yasser Arafat to be ousted as leader of the
Palestinian authority. In a sharp rebuff to President Bush, Downing
Street and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said it was up to the
Palestinian people to decide their leader.

President Bush's speech delighted the Israeli government, but was
greeted with anger and despair in the Arab world, bringing protests that
the US is trying to dictate to the Palestinians who should be their
leader.

Buoyed by the presidential message, Israeli troops raided the
Palestinian Authority's security headquarters in Hebron and killed four
policemen, including a senior intelligence officer, in an exchange of
gunfire.

Mr Bush's call for a new Palestinian leadership was rejected not only by
the Palestinian Authority but by a wide range of world leaders. Kofi
Annan, secretary general of the UN, warned last night that President
Bush's call for the removal of Mr Arafat could backfire if a more
hardline leader was elected. The former US senator George Mitchell, who
tried last year to broker a Middle East peace deal, expressed similar
worries that Islamic Jihad or Hamas could take over from the PLO leader.

The British Government's stance echoed that of the EU and foreshadowed
similar conflict with the US over Third World debt and trade tariffs
that could dominate the G8 summit that begins today in Canada. Mr Blair
tried to play down differences with the Americans, welcoming the broad
thrust of President Bush's strategy, setting out a timetable for
Palestinian statehood within three years. But the refusal of both
Downing Street and the Foreign Office to endorse the removal of Mr
Arafat made it clear that this was the biggest foreign policy clash
between America and Britain since 11 September. Mr Blair's official
spokesman said that although the Prime Minister believed Mr Arafat
should do much more to bear down on suicide bombers, Palestinians had
the final say. "In terms of Chairman Arafat, we have always said that it
is for the Palestinian people to choose their own leader," the spokesman
said. "The British Government uses its words. The American
administration uses its words," he added.

In the Commons, Mr Straw went further. "Our view has never been in
doubt. We deal with the leaders who are elected as we find them. If
President Arafat were re-elected by the Palestinian authority, we will
deal with him." Mr Straw's aides pointed out that the Foreign Secretary
made plain last month he was "relaxed about differences" between the UK
and US on the Middle East, the Kyoto protocol on climate change and
steel tariffs precisely because the two countries agreed on many other
issues.

Mr Bush has always refused to meet the Palestinian leader but Mr Blair
has received him in Downing Street as well as meeting him in Gaza. On
the flight to Canada, Mr Blair tried to smooth over the differences, but
he also acknowledged that the Palestinians would "elect who they want to
elect", while emphasising the importance of finding a leadership
"prepared to make a deal".

-----

The President's proposals make peace in the Middle East impossible
If I were a careerist in Ramallah, I'd start organising the Palestinian
version of the early Sinn Fein right now
David Aaronovitch
The Independent, 26 June 2002

The speech itself was not so much White House as Little House on the
Prairie. All, said George Bush, that had to happen for there to be a
Palestinian state (which, of course, we all want) was for the
Palestinians democratically to kick out their horrid old leadership and
replace it with a nice, new, peace-minded leadership. This new
dispensation - plus major reforms - would clear the way for talks which,
in the fullness of time, might or might not settle a few other tricky
little matters, such as how big a Palestinian state might be, whether
part of Jerusalem would be in it and whether Israeli settlements built
in violation of United Nations resolutions would be dismantled. We'd
have to see about that.

So it's all knitted samplers and best bonnets. As the President argued,
the present situation is hopeless. "It is untenable," he said on Monday,
"for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for
Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation". And you can't say
fairer than that. It was the same belief that drove his predecessor,
Bill Clinton, to his hunt for a peace plan, which just eluded him, first
at Camp David and then at Taba on the Israeli-Egyptian border.

It's worth recapping on that process. There was, for a moment at the end
of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, a deal possible in which the
Palestinians ended up with almost all of the West Bank, with part of
Jerusalem and with a territory that was contiguous. But the Israelis had
done too little to build Palestinian confidence in the period following
Oslo, and Arafat lacked the courage or vision to seize the moment. A new
intifada began, that was met by tanks, the number of terrorist attacks
increased and Israel reoccupied much of the West Bank. Now, so far have
the prospects for peace receded, that even exchanges between
participants - conducted in the almost scholarly pages of the New York
Review of Books - sound as though they can only be resolved by violence.

So what is George Bush's Ingredient X, the thing which, when added to
the punch, makes agreement possible? It is, apparently, that Yasser and
his mates sling their hooks and make way for a new generation of
leaders. "Peace," says the President, "requires a new and different
Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call
on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised
by terror." If they do this, then Ariel Sharon and the Israelis will
presumably be cajoled by the United States into reviving the Taba
agreement (or something like it).

Well Amen to that. I don't actually possess (nor have I seen) the
evidence that Arafat has been organisationally involved in the suicide
bombings, but I do know that - Janus-like - he has said one thing to the
Western media while talking the easy language of martyrdom to his own
constituency. But I find myself asking why it is that his constituency
requires the language of martyrdom to be spoken to it in the first
place. Surely that's the reality that must be dealt with. OK, I'm
getting ahead of myself, so lets take a rain-check on reality for a
moment and go back to George W. Who continues: "Leaders who want to be
included in the peace process must show this by their deeds and
undivided support for peace." Never mind the Palestinians, how should we
apply such a sentiment to Ariel Sharon and his Likud party? Let alone to
the vulture figure of Binyamin Netanyahu and those cabinet ministers who
support the forcible transportation of the Arab populations of the West
Bank and Gaza? Should we wish them all away, blow on them, like
dandelion heads in the summer?

It is not even a matter of democracy. After all, was not Arafat himself
elected back in 1996, in a process overseen by, amongst others,
ex-President Carter? And when Bush adds, "If Palestinians embrace
democracy, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count
on America's support for creation of a provisional state of Palestine",
one wonders what would happen to other nations were their statehood only
to be recognised under the same conditions. No wonder that, according to
a Likud minister, Danny Naveh, Bush's address is to be remembered as
"the end of Arafat speech".

Even so, if any of this were likely - for one single moment - to work,
then many people would be prepared to ignore its naïveté and
asymmetry. But it can't. It is, uniquely, the peace plan that makes
peace impossible. Successful peace processes depend upon narrowing the
number of people and situations that can, in effect, place a veto on
progress. They operate by allowing the accumulation of small
confidences, and binding their results into a bigger picture. This is
the opposite. It offers just about anyone a veto who wants one.

Cherie Blair's mistake, when she gave her short impromptu answer to that
journalist the other day, was to seem to assume that desperation alone
leads to suicide terrorism. It is probably the case that desperation
causes more young people to volunteer for such missions, but the
organisations and ideologies behind the murders are not motivated by
temporary anger. Their objective is the destruction of a peace process
that they see as being the end to their hopes of eventual victory. For
the lover of peace they have no redeeming moral features whatsoever.
They are the enemy. It follows that if you allow acts of terror to
disrupt the process of peace, then you allow the suicide bombers an
effective veto. You give them what they want.

There are brave Palestinians who oppose the suicide bomb obscenity. Two
thousand academics and intellectuals have signed a petition calling for
an end to this form of terrorism. These, presumably, would be the type
of people whom we would want to encourage and to strengthen, who would
become the partners for peace. In the elections already scheduled for
next year, these are the forces who we might hope will come forward.
Just as we might have hoped that Sharon, with his grim history, would
never lead the state of Israel. If I were a careerist in Ramallah I'd
start organising the Palestinian version of the early Sinn Fein right
now.

In any case, imagine the results of the Palestinian election. "Him?"
says an Israeli spokesman, justifying a refusal to negotiate. "He was
once a member of an organisation whose armed wing was behind a bombing
in Haifa 10 years ago. "Her? She was a journalist on a station which
broadcast a eulogy to a bomber."

On the other side, any Palestinian opposed to peace only has to reject
the seeming attempt to impose a leadership on his or her people.

I have my own ideas about what can work, but this cannot. You cannot
make peace by dictating who represents the people you are dealing with.
Especially since the voters who will have to find and elect these
negotiators have no guarantee even that there will be negotiations.
Colin Powell's original plan was to recognise a provisional Palestinian
state, and to move gradually on from there. Then someone in the White
House got to mess with it. Someone stupid.