Arab League ultimatum

I always try to keep these postings brief, but this lengthy posting from two articles in the Jerusalem Post, Mar. 29 is ESSENTIAL READING (my own emphasis added)...

...first from an article by HERB KEINON ...

Israel adopted a low-key, wait-and-see approach Wednesday night to the Arab League's unanimous decision to relaunch without changes its land-and-refugee-for-peace initiative from March 2002.

...According to an AFP report,.... in the resolution the Arab leaders "reaffirm the commitment of all Arab states to the Arab peace initiative as approved at the Beirut summit in 2002 in all its elements."

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa .... said the Middle East was at a "critical junction...If we don't move forward, we will witness an escalation (of violence) in the region....."

In recent weeks Israel had sent signals to the Arab League urging it to change two articles in the initiative viewed in Jerusalem as enshrining the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel. .....The initiative also calls for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem in return for a peace agreement, an end to the conflict and normal relations.

...in a Daily Telegraph interview Wednesday, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud warned that the "lords of war" would decide Israel's future if it rejected a peace plan "crafted by the entire Arab world."

"What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done," he was quoted as saying, "so now it is up to the other side because if you want peace, it is not enough for one side only to want it. Both sides must want it equally.

"If Israel refuses, that means it doesn't want peace and it places everything back into the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war." The prince said there wouldn't be any further diplomatic overtures towards Israel.

....Vice Premier Shimon Peres, in a meeting he held with visiting British parliamentarians, responded to Saud's statements by saying that "there are disagreements between us on a number of issues. The question is how they are overcome - through attempts to dictate terms, or through negotiations. They will come with their positions, and we will come with ours. We will discuss them and reach an agreement as we did with Egypt and Jordan."

Jonny Paul and AP contributed to this report.

...and from the same issue of the Jerusalem Post, from an Analysis by DORE GOLD....

Are the Saudis seeking peace?

With the visit of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week and the special attention she gave to the revival of the 2002 Saudi-inspired Arab Peace Initiative, expectations had been elevated that yesterday's Riyadh Arab summit might provide a mechanism for restarting the Arab-Israeli peace process.

....But the Arab Peace Initiative got off to a bad start when Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned Israel that its rejection of the plan would leave its fate in the hands of the "lords of war."Rather than obtaining some flexibility, Israel was handed an ultimatum.

This was not the style of either President Anwar Sadat or King Hussein, but rather a grossly mismanaged way of launching any modus vivendi with Israel.

Moreover, if Israel thought Rice's optimistic diplomacy earlier in the week was based on some well-established US-Saudi coordination, it came as a total surprise when Jim Hoagland disclosed in The Washington Post yesterday that Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah canceled a mid-April gala dinner with President George W. Bush in the White House.

Hoagland heard from administration sources that Riyadh had decided for now to seek common ground with Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah. It now becomes understandable why the Saudis chose to strengthen Hamas, with the Mecca Agreement, at the expense of Mahmoud Abbas, who just became politically even more sidelined.

If Saudi Arabia has decided to distance itself from the US at this time, then how could Washington expect that now the time was ripe for a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement under an American umbrella?

The last time the Saudi initiative was discussed during the 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, Hamas attacked the Park Hotel in Netanya during the first night of Pessah, killing 29 Israelis and wounding over 150. At that time, Saudi Arabia did not signal to Israel that it was serious about peace by cutting back its financial support of Hamas; in fact, it grew to over 50 percent of Hamas's total income in 2003.

Moreover, the Saudis did not approach Israel directly but chose to launch their initiative through the columns of Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. The medium was the message. The key figure making the press contacts for the Saudis was Adel al-Jubeir, who had been sent to Washington to coordinate the Saudis' efforts to improve their declining image in America. It was apparent that the Saudi initiative was not directed towards Israel but rather to post-9/11 American public opinion, which had been shocked to learn that 15 of the 19 hijackers that attacked New York and Washington were Saudi citizens.

The real problems with the Saudi peace initiative go well beyond the much-discussed issue of the "right of return." The Saudi plan demands "full withdrawal" from "all the territories" Israel captured 40 years ago in the 1967 Six Day War, thus negating the territorial flexibility contained in UN Security Council Resolution 242 that intentionally did not use this limiting language.

Adopting the Saudi plan as presented would lead to the redivision of Jerusalem. It would also strip Israel of the "defensible borders" that Bush said was Israel's right in his April 2004 letter to prime minister Ariel Sharon. In 2007, with al-Qaida jihadism pouring out of Western Iraq and Iran on the ascendency across the region, these security assurances have only grown in importance.

The assurances contained in the Bush letter are critical for Israel and had constituted the main quid pro quo that Israel had gained for the Gaza disengagement. Yet now the letter seems to have been forgotten. Indeed, there was a glaring contradiction between the Bush administration's new embrace of the Saudi initiative and the assurances it gave Sharon only three years ago.

Even the peace that the Saudi initiative presents is not what it might seem to be to the uninitiated. It promises "normal relations" with Israel, a Syrian diplomatic term from the 1990s which was intended to be a watered down alternative to European peace implied by the term "normalization" (tatbiyan in Arabic). Nonetheless, the Saudi initiative came to be known as a grand bargain between Israel and the Arab world: full withdrawal for full peace with the Arab world as a whole, even if there are serious questions as to whether that was the Saudis' real intent.

For even today, as in 2002, peace with Israel is not likely to be at the top of the Saudi agenda. The paramount problem of Saudi Arabia is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite King Abdullah's strong ideological identification with the Palestinian cause in the past. What is shaping Saudi Arabia's new diplomatic activism is the rapidly expanding Iranian threat and the weakness of the Western response.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had committed himself to a second Iranian revolution: that means a revival of Iranian efforts to export revolutionary Shi'ism, wherever possible. In some Sunni-dominated countries, like Sudan and Syria, the Iranians hope to convert Sunnis to Shi'ism. In the Gulf, there are already substantial Shi'ite populations. Indeed, Saudi Arabia's main vulnerability is in its oil-rich Eastern Province, which has nearly a majority of Shi'ites.
Neighboring Bahrain, now connected to Saudi Arabia by a bridge, has an 80% Shi'ite majority.
The potential for revolutionary subversion is enormous. According to US court documents, already the 1996 attack on Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia was conducted by Hizballah al-Hijaz, a Shi'ite terrorist group under the direct control of Iranian officials.

What can the West do? It needs to assure its Gulf allies by being more assertive about countering Iranian power. Rice's instincts to seize the moment of a shared threat that both Israel and the Sunni Arab states perceive are essentially correct, but must be directed in totally different channels.

When Saudi Arabia is facing its own Sunni Islamist threat from within and a Shi'ite threat from without, it is not surprising that the last thing it needs are planeloads of Israeli negotiators and journalists in Riyadh. And with Hamas in power among the Palestinians and building its military strength daily in Gaza, Israel does not need to experiment with new withdrawals.

Under such circumstances, quiet contacts between Israel and its neighbors make far more sense than grandiose public diplomacy. In peacemaking, timing is everything.

What would those quiet contacts involve? First, finding ways of building on those Palestinians who are ready to distance themselves from Iran. And if no Palestinian leadership emerges, encouraging Egypt and Jordan to take a more constructive role in eliminating the present chaos by helping counter the growth of terrorist armies that are in the territories.

At present, there are no indications that anything like this is happening. But if Saudi Arabia seeks to present itself as a constructive force, it must use its political and financial clout behind the scenes to neutralize those groups seeking to undermine the stability of the Middle East at present. Only then will it be possible to explore building the foundations of the regional peace that was being spoken about earlier this week.

Dore Gold heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and is the author of The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West and the Future of the Holy City.