THE PROPOSED SUMMER international conference on the Middle East, to be high on the agenda of yet another White House visit by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is basically a misnomer. While the conference might have the look of an international gathering, only the United States and Israel are likely to run the show.
In the so-called quartet sponsoring the conference, only one — the United States — can be considered truly influential in the region. Russia has not be seen or heard from in months, the EU is constantly watering down its criticism of Israel to avoid being vetoed by the US and the United Nations, judging by its inability to get a fact-finding mission to Jenin, is an organization which can churn out plenty of resolutions but is helpless to implement any of them — at any rate in the case of Israel.
As for the Arab states which will be participating, while it was their pressure which helped spur Washington into coming up with the conference idea, they come up second best to pressure from pro-Israeli interests in Congress and from within President Bush’s administration who are pushing for unconditional support for Israel.
This effectively pares down the international conference to America and Israel and they are bonded in precepts and priorities. Much is being made of the protégé turning the tables on the patron, of Sharon defying Bush numerous times to end his military offensive in the West Bank. But in truth, never before have the two countries been this close, indeed interchangeable, in their attitudes and policies. No other state on earth could have done what Israel has done with as much support as the United States has given it. Indeed, it is getting increasingly hard to tell where US interests end and Israel’s begin.
The conference will certainly be an improvement over Sharon’s long-term plans which he will be bringing to the Oval Office. A few weeks ago, Sharon laid down his road map to "peace" in the Middle East. It consists of a cease-fire, a long-term interim agreement or armistice with the Palestinians and a permanent agreement based on a definition of borders and, if Sharon is to be believed, full normalization with the Arab world. These borders and relations would be based on Israel’s security needs, which will be met by throwing up barbed wires and buffer zones. The Palestinians will have to agree to negotiate over issues that are miles away from the status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, borders and Israeli settlements.
In exchange for this Palestinian cooperation, Sharon will throw in a limited agenda pertaining to the conditions for and relations with a Palestinian governing entity to exist for a lengthy interim period. Sharon’s ideas are implausible but the conference will also get nowhere if the United States continues to be unwilling to distinguish murder from murderer, culprit from victim, right from wrong. The official line of both the US and Israel is that the Jewish state has been defending itself by retaliating for the bombings that have undermined its security and even threatened its existence. That claim has gained mythical status and repeated so often and without thinking that it has given Israel the right to do what it has wanted to do, which is in effect to destroy Palestinian civil life.
The Bush administration and the Israeli patriots in the US conveniently ignore the fact that occupation is permanent terrorism, while being only too ready to consider the Palestinian resistance as illegitimate violence, indeed as out-and-out terrorism. Thus the Palestinians are required to relinquish their resistance while Israeli terrorism is repeatedly justified as legitimate self-defense.
There is a distortion here that needs to be cleared up. Until and unless this is done the proposed conference will be neither international in character nor about the crux of the Middle East crisis.
