President George Bush’s intervention yesterday, ordering Secretary of Colin Powell to the Middle East and seemingly urging Ariel Sharon to end his invasion of the West Bank does not seem to be anything more than a fig leaf to disguise American inaction. It goes nowhere near far enough to ending the conflict. It is one-sided, holding the Palestinians to blame for the present crisis; and it allows the Israelis the right to hit out at what they want to call "terrorism".
All Bush does is "ask" the Israelis to pull their troops back. There are no demands, no threats. It has not stopped the Israelis in their tracks, and was probably not intended to. It has been couched in such a way that the Israelis can ignore it. And, taking the cue, Israel’s finance minister has said that they would do just that.
This does nothing to restore faith in Washington’s sense of justice or hope that it might understand the gravity of the situation. Bush does not seem to realize that the Middle East is no longer in crisis. It is in a catastrophe. It is a catastrophe for the Palestinians who are under attack as never before; goaded beyond endurance, their hatred for the Israelis will certainly take much more than a peace deal to dissipate.
It is a catastrophe, too, for the Israelis who, thanks to the aggressive policies of Sharon, now face greater insecurity than they have ever known. Even a return to the 1967 borders may no longer provide the basis for peace. Such is the Palestinian fury.
It is a catastrophe for the US which is now seen by virtually all Arab public opinion as the co-villain of events, first for having given the Israelis the green light to carry out their rampage and now for doing nothing to stop them.
Lastly, it is a catastrophe for moderate Arab states who have tried to secure a just peace through negotiations based on a two-state solution but have seen it trampled by the Israelis and virtually ignored by the Americans. Sharon’s response, dangerously shortsighted though it was, came of course as no surprise. But that of the less emotionally involved and supposedly more astute Bush administration, with all the brains that it supposedly contains, came as a profound shock. True, the initiative was praised. But, every step of the way, in every single reaction, it looked as though Washington was taking special care to vilify, humiliate and demonize the Palestinians. The impression Washington gave was of following an Israeli script calculated to ensure that the Palestinians never got a chance to opt for peace.
There is no other explanation. Claims that the Americans do not understand the region, that their vision does not extend beyond the US, no longer ring true. Their vision extended perfectly well to Afghanistan.
The Middle East is at its most explosive for years. The Bush administration had better start getting its priorities right. It has to rein in the Israelis — and, for its own future credibility in the Muslim world, must be seen to be doing so. Behind-the-scenes pressure will not be enough to repair the damage. If it continues to do nothing, it will have no friends whatsoever in the region at all — and for a very long time to come.
