Editorial: Double Challenge

A double challenge confronted the Arab summit that ended yesterday in Tunis. Because the initial gathering was called off in dubious circumstances more than six weeks ago, yesterday’s session needed to be anything but usual. It had to renew the respect of the international community. More importantly, in the midst of a crisis in Iraq and the Occupied Territories, it had to show that it can meet the demands of a seething Arab street and that its leaders can affect change and take concrete steps to tackle these problems. Instead, the summit condemned terrorism, reiterated calls for an Arab-Israeli peace and the respect for human rights and freedom of expression. But the test is action, not reaction, and such familiar resolutions are not enough.

In the conflict with Israel, more will be needed to hold off Israel whose rampage in Gaza was the most massive military incursion there since it was occupied in the 1967 war. The cynically codenamed “Operation Rainbow” has killed 41 Palestinians, the most recent a three-year-old girl out to buy candy.

What happened in Gaza is a war crime. The demolition of houses has been wanton, unjustified and, frankly, motivated by an insane lust for destruction. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon strives to create a “new operational reality” in Gaza, to ensure that his army is not seen to leave Gaza the way it did Lebanon, defeated.

Any Middle East settlement the summit deems just must observe the principles stipulated in international resolutions. All attempts at imposing a solution unilaterally, based on “facts on the ground” — the essence of Bush’s assurances to Sharon — must fail.

In Iraq, the Abu Ghraib scandal grows. These are “crimes, inhuman and immoral acts,” says the Arab summit. “And those responsible must be punished.” But the problem goes far beyond the prison scandal. The lack of a clear strategy for the US troops to pull out of Iraq is glaring. With around five weeks to go before the Americans are to hand back sovereignty to a provisional government, what kind of powers it will assume is still up in the air.

In fashioning a response to the democratic reforms Washington is advocating, the summit had to face the premise that the world is divided into two categories of states — one which determines the course of events and the other which accepts whatever is meted out to them. To the Arabs in the street that is becoming intolerable, and they are looking to their leaders to unite to make this clear.

At the same time, they do want the reforms — the greater political participation, the women’s rights — to which the Tunis summit has in principle committed itself, and they will be watching very closely whether their leaders can deliver on both fronts. If they cannot, the troubles of the Arab world are set to continue for a long time to come.