By George S. Hishmeh, Jordan Times

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WASHINGTON — Almost a year ago this March, the Arab League summit meeting was held in Beirut and, in the opinion of one Mideast scholar-in-residence at the prestigious Middle East Institute here, it adopted “momentous resolutions”, including Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's peace plan.

Murhaf Jouejati, echoing somewhat similar opinions elsewhere, wrote quite perceptively at the time: “The achievements of this summit make it the most significant in the Arab League's 57-year history. For the first time since 1948, Arab states collectively offered to normalise their relations with Israel in return for Israel's complete withdrawal from the territories it occupied during the 1967 (Arab-Israeli) war.”

In the following months, relations between the Arab world and the West, particularly the United States, took a nose dive, primarily due to Washington's volte face. Instead of pursuing the war on terrorism, it turned its guns on Iraq, while, at the same time, giving Israel's Ariel Sharon a free hand to plunder the self-ruled Palestinian areas and other areas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that are awaiting liberation.

The Israeli war on the Palestinians continued virtually unchallenged by the world community — over 40 Palestinians were killed last week thanks to the periodic Israeli show of force in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Nablus. Again, Natan Sharansky's Housing and Construction Ministry has continued its colonisation schemes, issuing a tender for 126 new residential units in a neighbourhood of the West Bank settlement of Efrat — and no one raised an eyebrow.

Due to the economic collapse in the Palestinian areas, where 60 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day as a result of the Israeli occupation and the 30-month uprising, the World Bank is now asking for $1.1 billion in humanitarian assistance to cover “the most urgent day-to-day needs”. Physical damage by the Israelis in the Palestinian areas was estimated at over $700 million and a UN economic adviser, Michael Keating, underlined at a two-day donors meeting in London that “only a political solution can offer some hope of resolving the humanitarian crisis”.

But this did not appear to be the case. Rather, a new right-wing coalition has been forged by Sharon, a development that, at best, side-tracks any movement towards peace negotiations with the Palestinians, probably all to the better. After all, his like-minded partners are the centrist Shinui, a secularist party, and the hawkish Nationalist Religious Party (NRP), a champion of Jewish settlements and an opponent of Palestinian statehood.

Adding oil to the fire on the other side of what once was called the Fertile Crescent is the case of Saddam Hussein's Iraq which could go up in flames at any moment this month, thanks to non-stop American warmongering. The Bush administration seems determined to intervene militarily, even at the risk of alienating many US allies and friends. The American leader has not been swayed by the millions who marched in some 600 cities worldwide against a US-led invasion of Iraq and the castigation of the Non-Aligned Movement countries, or even severe criticism from such religious leaders as Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran, the Vatican foreign minister, who said: “A unilateral war or aggression would constitute a crime against peace and against the Geneva Convention.”

Some Americans may want to stop and digest the comment of one European guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He told The Washington Post that there has been a natural progression in attitudes overseas. “It was anti-war, not anti-American. Now it's anti-Bush, not anti-American ... that image is stuck in people's consciousness.”

The only chance for changing the Bush administration's attitude rests with two peoples, the British and the Arabs, especially the fabled “Arab street”, some analysts at American think-tanks believe.