BEFORE EMBARKING ON his Middle East trip, Colin Powell said that at the very least, he hoped his visit would help calm the situation down and possibly promote a dialogue between the Palestinians and Israelis. Neither was achieved.
The warning signs were there from the start. It was, firstly, supposed to be an “urgent” peace mission to the region; but the region was his last destination on a five-stop tour. The weeklong interval between the announcement of the trip and Powell’s arrival in Israel was widely interpreted as granting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a grace period in which to continue his rampage throughout the Palestinian areas before pulling out. But once you start, you cannot stop and the interval seemed only to give Sharon a big window of opportunity in which to broaden and intensify his military campaign. Which he did to his heart’s content. Before arriving, Powell enlisted help from the Arabs, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. The mandate he secured, while helpful, only strengthened the view that the United States could not go it alone and needed help to rein in not just Palestinian militants, but Sharon as well.
When Powell finally arrived in the region, the results were a foregone conclusion. He made no headway with Sharon, who gave him no commitment, no timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian lands it recently reoccupied.
The only commitment Sharon has, but will not say, is to eliminate the Palestinian national movement because the essence of Israeli existence and survival is occupation. He is hoping to turn every single Palestinian life upside down in the hope of mass submission or mass migration if he could not have mass graves.
Without anything of substance after more than four hours of talks with Sharon, Powell met Yasser Arafat, demanding that he “stop the violence”. Arafat is under siege, so are his people, he has little contact with the outside world, he has no army, a decimated police force, a destroyed authority infrastructure, yet the irrelevant Palestinian leader should stop the violence.
The kind of violence Powell should have been referring to was in the Jenin refugee camp where a replay of Sabra and Shatila was staged. The Israelis, who at first spoke of around 100 deaths, whittled the figure down to a few dozen. For almost two weeks Jenin has been all but inaccessible, closed by the Israelis to international observers and media. The longer the camp remains closed the greater the belief that Israel is trying to hide something. Apparently, the Israeli Supreme Court senses a huge cover-up could be in the making, blocking an Israeli government move that would have the bodies, strewn on the camp’s streets, to be buried before the world can ascertain who they are and their exact number. The Israelis were keen to fly Powell over the site of Friday’s suicide bomb blast in Jerusalem. Why not allow him to see what happened in Jenin? But then Powell did not ask to get a first-hand look either.
How could the Jenin massacres have happened while Powell was in the region on a peace mission? But then the siege on Arafat and then Jenin and Nablus took place while US envoy Anthony Zinni is in the region. So nothing surprising about these developments. The Sharon snubs to Bush were also expected. Everyone knows that Israel is the only country in the world which could defy the US and get away with it.
“I will not come back at the end of this trip with a peace treaty in hand,” Powell said before embarking on this formidable undertaking. “I’m not even sure I’ll have a cease-fire in hand.” His itinerary gave one the impression that he was not sure of anything — the nature of his mission and where it should begin. The only thing he was sure of was that at every step he would run into a stony wall, in the form of a man called Ariel Sharon whom President Bush described as “a man of peace.”
