The cold shoulder Yasser Arafat received from the Bush administration over the weekend is but another blatant attempt to not only squeeze him out of power but to stop the peace process from getting restarted as long as the Palestinian president remains at the helm.
How else can the brusque reply of Secretary of State Colin Powell be explained after Arafat’s appeal to him to end Israel’s three-week-old reoccupation of West Bank cities? Powell’s answer, in effect saying he no longer does any business with Arafat, is a produce of the new George Bush doctrine that holds that Arafat will no longer be recognized as the Palestinian leader and the Bush administration will lift not a finger to help the Palestinians until they, too, declare the man null and void. When, in his letter, Arafat also insisted that the Palestinian Authority has embarked on major restructuring efforts but could not go further under the current level of Israeli occupation, Powell gave more of the same: Arafat who?
Where does the search for Middle East goes peace go from here? A peace conference? A dialogue is not expected to take place within a conference. An alternative is the so-called quartet — consisting of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN — which will start deliberations over the situation tomorrow in New York. Many welcome greater international involvement in the search for peace, a task that the US has virtually monopolized for years and has taken to greater, unprecedented heights in the past few weeks. Most European leaders have expressed serious misgivings about the latest American proposals for a settlement but what status does the quartet really have? It cannot lay down policies or issue binding decisions. It can only exchange information and coordinate positions.
Such paralysis will inevitably lead back to Bush who has made the Palestinians an offer they can refuse. His understanding of suicide operations as a reason for, rather than a result of, continuing occupation points to the flawed logic that governs his administration’s foreign policy, one that looks to being formulated inside Israel. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has managed to separate the Palestinian armed resistance from its causes. To recognize the cause is to give the effect a measure of legitimacy and the consequence is that all pleadings have failed to impress Bush of the connection between the brutality of the Israeli occupation and the agony of Palestinian desperation.
So fused are the US and Israeli agendas that it would be next to impossible for Arafat or a successor to both fulfill Palestinian aspirations and meet Sharon’s and Bush’s demands. Arafat’s obituary has been written many times; he has been pronounced dead before. But Bush’s call for Arafat’s ousting, ignoring the fact that he is a democratically elected leader, has little support, even among Washington’s closest allies. The popular Palestinian and other Arab states’ rejection of Bush’s dictate may do nothing to curb White House enthusiasm for Arafat’s removal but seeking to remove him will only increase his popularity. At the end of the day, the matter of who will lead the Palestinians will be determined by the outcome of presidential elections in January. Elections the arbiter, not President Bush.
