YOUSSEF IBRAHIM discusses it in the NY Sun
[..] The platitudes of this new search are so many, so old, and so repetitive. Go back and check the late 1970s or the heyday of the Oslo accord fever of 1993, and you will encounter the same stuff: last chance, critical moment, now or never, the area is ready, etc.
Here is what is not new. The Arab Quartet is about as useless and toothless as the Arab League itself, none of whose members are prepared to recognize Israel’s right to exist unconditionally. The Israelis are not about to pull out of the West Bank or the Golan Heights of Syria unconditionally, if at all.
Hamas and the other Islamic Palestinian Arab fanatics will continue to lob rockets into Israel. Hezbollah is preparing for the next round in Lebanon of fighting Israelis and Lebanese. The Palestinians will remain at each other throats in Gaza and the West Bank, regardless. Saudi Arabia is scared silly about Iran and the sectarian wars between Shiites and Sunnis on its borders, which is just about the only thing that matters in Riyadh. Egypt is steadily descending into a failed state where the succession to the post of 78-year-old dictator Hosni Mubarak promises to be messy. Jordan has virtually no role to play anywhere and no weight to speak of ever since it lost its West Bank to Israel. And the United Arab Emirates has never had any weight to begin with.
The most startling non-news is that new magical American solution. One newspaper writer asserted Sunday that Secretary Rice ‘’has opened the door to the possibility” she might offer her “own proposals to bridge the divide.” Wow. We can hardly wait.
“Such an initiative would be proof of a profound policy change for the Bush administration,” says another American daily. Ms. Rice’s handlers are telling reporters on her plane that part of her plan is “prodding Saudi Arabia, to reach out to Israel with an offer of eventually normalizing relations between Israelis and Saudis on the horizon.”
Gee, I thought that was what Tom Friedman of the New York Times did in his column the other day when he urged the Saudi King Abdallah to visit Jerusalem and tell the Jews he loves them.
On the other hand, maybe not. Newspapers cited a briefing by a senior American official stressing that ‘‘the secretary was not preaching to them about how they ought to do their business.”
After much reading and listening yesterday it seems the new plan is that “Ms. Rice may be able to get some sort of formal or informal mechanism going that could give Israelis hope of eventually normalizing relations with the Arab world,” American officials told the New York Times and others.
“It would be a very good thing if at some point the Arab initiative provided a basis for discussion,” Ms. Rice herself added.
To which the effervescent secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, promptly replied to the Reuters news agency: “We fail to understand why we should modify such a peace offer and make it less objective and less positive.”
I hope this cleared it all up.
I ave a proposal for israpundit readers: Israel allows te rit of return for arabs in Israel on one condition; All te jews tat were kicked out of te arab countries and all teir decendants are allowed to return. And eres te kicker all teir wealt in 40 and 50 dollars plus future potential earnins plus interest! It sould be sufficient to bankrupt alf of te arab countries!
The Lecarev Report
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has apparently convinced Prime Minister Olmert to accept the Saudi “peace plan” as the basis for Israeli/Palestinian talks. Early Monday, Rice cancelled the Monday night press conference to launch her initiative. Instead, she held a second round of talks with Olmert to overcome his objections. He finally succumbed to the creation of a US-Arab-Israeli mechanism for peace talks based on the resolutions reached at the Arab League summit convening in Riyadh March 28-29. The summit has free rein to approve the Saudi peace plan without any of the modifications requested by Israel.
Olmert and foreign minister Tzipi Livni, whom Rice met earlier in the day, spent hours hammering the phrasing for presenting their concession to the US secretary, without being seen to have abandoned the Middle East roadmap, which is the central plank of this Israeli government’s foreign and peace policy.
They decided that Rice would term the Israel-Arab diplomatic track a preface to the roadmap’s implementation. The US secretary argued that Israel has nothing to lose by engaging Arab representatives and would only improve its image. Olmert asked for the encounters to take place at the senior level of foreign ministers, in order to convince the public that his government had not been browbeaten into a concession contrary to national interests. But Rice could not make this promise. US-Israeli discussion on the framework for Israeli and Arab delegates to meet will continue.
But in Riyadh, meanwhile, the preliminary conference of Arab foreign ministers has already determined the mechanism and forum for the talks with Israel. They have opted for the UN Security Council and Middle East Quartet as sponsors, convinced that both bodies are powerful enough to impose a settlement on Israel. The US Secretary informed Olmert that she does not support this demand.
Regarding the Saudi peace plan, Israeli opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu rejected the clause calling for the return of Palestinian refugees as a threat to Israel’s existence. Arab foreign ministers drafting summit resolutions demanded the refugees’ return to their pre-1948 homes and rejected any prospect of settling Palestinian refugees in any Arab state. They also demanded the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
Particularly distressing are two “conditions” passed on by Arab sources and reported exclusively by DEBKAfile. These are not being talked about in the main media but will be incorporated in the final resolutions approved by the Arab League summit in Riyadh this Thursday.
1. Israel must halt Jewish immigration so that the Israelis leaving the country or revoking their citizenship are not replaced by newcomers. Effectively this calls for an end to “aliya” – the biblical return of Jews to their homeland.
2. The international community must condemn Israel’s High Court of Justice for authorizing targeted assassination of Palestinians in cases of security threats. Arab justice ministers will lobby international judicial bodies to elicit this condemnation.
Stay tuned – and look again at the opening passage from the Psalms to today’s report!