The summit began and ended in a day at Sharm El-Sheikh on Feb. 8, hosted by Egypt and attended by four leaders: President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdallah II of Jordan, President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon. Sadly, the summit came up with no tangible political solutions, except for an agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel on stopping violence.
Too much attention to the security aspect cut short the scope of the summit and turned it into a media circus. The summit benefited Sharon as it projected him in the eyes of the Israelis as a man of peace for the simple reason that he has agreed to stop violence and abandon assassination of Palestinian resistance leaders whom he refers to as “the wanted”. And, of course, Sharon also gave his nod to the release of some Palestinian prisoners who violated the Israeli labor law, but not the resistance detainees who were put behind the bars for fighting to win back their usurped land.
Sharon has cleverly imposed on the summit the security agenda that resulted in the sole resolution adopted on stopping mutual violence. At the same time, he refused to commit himself to a permanent cease-fire. No wonder then that the Israeli Army gunned down five Palestinians, including a child, just a day after this fragile cease-fire.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict cannot be confined to talks on violence. But Sharon is only interested in providing security for Israel at the expense of the Palestinians’ rights. These are fundamental rights that could never be given away, such as the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and the return of refugees.
Reservations expressed by various Palestinian groups, headed by Hamas, and their announcement of “no compliance” with the results of the Sharm El-Sheikh summit are but natural and was only to be expected.
In fact, Palestinian groups expressed their reservations even before the president of the Palestinian Authority headed for Sharm El-Sheikh. Experience makes one wiser, and all the previous dealings show that Sharon — who has steadfastly rejected all peace initiatives, from Oslo to the road map — is not a man of peace. He only wants solutions that preserve the right of Israel to exist at the expense of just solutions that will preserve the right of the Palestinian people to a dignified life, like the free people in the rest of the world. The Sharm El-Sheikh summit has come up with nothing new that could benefit the Palestinian despite the efforts undertaken by Egyptian and Jordanian leaders to bring Abu Mazen and Sharon to the negotiation table. Protocol practices and diplomatic niceties that amount to nothing in real terms characterized the summit. Furthermore, the absence of the US, the official patron of the Middle East peace process, has weakened the summit to a great extent. This absence has given a message to all observers that the US does not want to take responsibility for any result emerging from the summit.
The Palestinian-Israeli issue has clear-cut features, and Sharon, or any other person, cannot amend it, whether at Sharm El-Sheikh or other regional or international forums. This is a conflict that should be solved through a complete commitment to all the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, not through discussing them one by one, or restricting them to security issues, as Sharon did at Sharm El-Sheikh.
— Essa bin Mohammed Al-Zedjali is editor in chief of The Times of Oman.
