Is the EU on the verge of at last abandoning its slavish endorsement of Washington’s inflexible and highly partial Palestinian policy? France, Spain and Italy Thursday signaled the possibility after a minisummit between French President Jacques Chirac and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. They proposed a new EU peace initiative because the 2003 US-designed Road Map to Peace had become a dead letter.
According to Zapatero, the five-point plan will be put to the regular EU summit next month and will, he believes, receive the backing of other member states, particularly Germany and the UK. This suggests that all EU member chancelleries are already actively involved in discussing and formulating the initiative in advance of the summit and that Zapatero’s announcement was the opening move in the process. If this is true, then it indicates a key change in British policy, which under Tony Blair has been committed to working through and with the United States. But Blair is in his last few months as premier. His almost certain successor, Gordon Brown, is already beginning to shape the British government agenda. Brown only reluctantly supported the Iraq invasion. He admires the US far more for its economic than its foreign policy. It is, therefore, conceivable that after the electoral drubbing Bush’s Republicans received last week, London really is prepared to get behind a new EU initiative.
The Israelis immediately rubbished Zapatero’s announcement. They are entirely happy with an impasse that locks up the Palestinians as prisoners in their own homeland and casts them and the Hamas government they elected as intransigent terrorists. Washington’s endorsement of Israel’s response is a virtual given.
Spain, France and Italy are the major contributors to the peacekeeping force in the Lebanon. They are seeing at first hand the degeneration of the political situation there and the rising regional tensions caused by the continuing lack of any progress on a genuine peace deal. Their plan certainly seems to offer a new start. The first of five points would be an immediate cease-fire, followed by the formation of a Palestinian national unity government that would immediately be recognized internationally. There would be an exchange of all prisoners and direct Israeli-Palestinian talks, while an international peacekeeping force monitored the cease-fire in the occupied territories.
If this is indeed the substance of an initiative due to emerge next month from the Brussels summit, the Europeans will have to do more than work out the details among themselves. It is imperative that Russia, which with the UN, US and the EU has been part of the Quartet charged with driving through the Road Map Peace plan, is involved from an early stage. If Moscow backs the new proposals, the UN may do so too, thus leaving Washington isolated. The new Democrat Congressional majorities are sure to be more pro-Israel than even Bush, but as America faces a new Vietnam disaster in Iraq, its power to obstruct a EU peace initiative is lessened.
Could Brussels then persuade the Israelis to play ball?
