Some Palestinians are trumpeting Thursday’s brief encounter between President Bush and a top Palestinian official as a small success. They say that not only did Bush and Nabil Shaath shake hands at a reception in New York but had a good 10-minute discussion on the Middle East. Since Bush became president almost two years ago, he has met Ariel Sharon at least half a dozen times. He has not once met Yassar Arafat and these days would not give Arafat neither 10 minutes nor the time of day.
It might appear odd that some Palestinians would highlight what looks to have been an innocuous meeting. But in the aftermath of Bush’s call in June to the Palestinians that they must vote Arafat out of office — in essence a call for a coup — that Washington will no longer have any dealings with Arafat in any way, shape or form, Saturday’s meeting, coupled as it is by the fact that Shaath works under Arafat, does hold some powerful symbolism that will be quickly grabbed.Some Palestinians are, in fact, looking at the meeting as something more potent than merely a courtesy gesture. Bush reportedly assured Shaath that the US will insist that Israel must also meet its obligations if there is ever to be a Palestinian state. Bush’s statement gives rise to optimism to some that the glass is half full, that Bush’s speech in June was not entirely an exercise in passing blame on the Palestinians while pardoning Sharon from the steps he must take if there is to be true peace. The same optimists also point to Bush’s UN speech on Thursday in which he said his country remained committed to an "independent and democratic" Palestine and his pledge to work to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Of course, the speech focused almost entirely on Iraq and what the US plans to do — or not do — about the country and Saddam Hussein. To insert a few words about Palestine in a speech the world was waiting to hear where Bush stands on Iraq, suggests that Bush plans to put the Mideast conflict on the backburner but will pay lip service to it every now and then. With the US now taking aim at Iraq as its next likely target after Afghanistan, Washington is hoping for an extended lull in the nearly two-year-old Palestinian uprising as it struggles to crack Arab opposition and European wariness to another Gulf War.
Should this analysis be correct, the region is then no closer to peace. In a situation duly frozen as this, the call made by Kofi Annan, in his address to the UN General Assembly, for an early international peace conference on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should be taken seriously. Not necessarily because the conference will solve the conflict; it probably will not. But it will at least be a marked improvement over Sharon’s answer, strongly backed by Bush, that there is a military solution to everything, that the problem can be solved by simple extermination. Also in vogue but highly impractical is the so-called Quartet which can neither lay down policies or issue binding decisions.
As matters now stand, decision-making powers with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are vested exclusively in the United States, the reason, perhaps, why Bush’s meeting with Shaath was accorded such importance. Even if a conference invites the UN, the organization will participate only to the extent necessary to serve Bush’s vision, and not in its capacity as custodian of the key Security Council resolutions, such as 242 and 338, on which a settlement of the conflict should be based. The conference was an idea that Washington itself proposed in May, but it has since then dropped this and taken up the banner that Palestinian leadership is flawed and must go. It would not be the worst of ideas for the US to drop, its insistence that Arafat go and return to the idea of a peace conference.
