Listening 'to Carter one more time', Ramzy Baroud

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Listening 'to Carter one more time'

Ramzy Baroud

Jordan Times, Saturday, September 27, 2003

THE LAST two years have indeed enforced an undeniable change in American foreign policy. This manifested itself fully on Sept. 18, 2003, when President George W. Bush reiterated that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat is a “failed leader”. Then, again, addressing the United Nations and the world on Sept. 23, he drew a poor comparison between the Palestinian leadership and the former Iraqi government, calling on Palestinians to seek new leaders. The issue here is not whether the statement was accurate or helpful. The problem is that Bush chose to pin the blame on an ailing leader whose decision-making power has been diminished almost completely by Israel's reoccupation of most of the West Bank and its continuous blockade of Gaza.

Still a prisoner of his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah, Arafat is blamed by Israel, on daily basis, for every act of Palestinian violence, provoked or otherwise. On more than one occasion since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising three years ago, as bombs were falling on Arafat's crumbling office where he was literally held hostage in the basement, lacking access to any means of communication, Israeli army radio repeated official statements, commanding him to halt the violence.

The irony was laughable.

Blaming Arafat diverts attention from Israel's own responsibility for all the years of oppressive occupation of Palestinian territories, for doubling the number of illegal Jewish settlements and refusing to abide by international humanitarian law in its treatment of Palestinians.

In the case of Bush and his administration, blaming Arafat diverts attention from their own failure to play a productive, evenhanded role in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, only former American presidents seem to notice such shortcomings. “The United States is not being evenhanded,” said former President Jimmy Carter during an interview with the Associated Press on the 25th anniversary of the Camp David accords. “You have to have a mediator, willing to negotiate freely with both sides, and equally firmly with both sides.”

The poor treatment dished out by Bush and endured by Arafat, a leader perceived by most Palestinians as more of a symbol than a statesman (considering that no real authority is able to function under Israeli occupation), has indeed backfired. At least for now, many Palestinians no longer consider the corruption that thrived under Arafat's rule as their most daunting concern. With Israel openly threatening his life, and Bush's endless degradation of the Parkinson-stricken leader, Arafat has regained his old status, that of a defiant warrior fighting for a just cause.

Hanan Ashrawi, the well-known Palestinian intellectual, believes that the outcome of the US decision to isolate Arafat may have exceeded the internal boundaries of the conflict. She wrote in a recent article that “by trying to isolate Arafat, the Americans also mistakenly distanced themselves from a source of legitimate power and decision making in Palestine. So now they have to get to Arafat indirectly, through intermediaries, whereas before they could influence him directly”.

Furthermore, by trying to isolate Arafat, the US government is isolating itself. A striking example was the US' use of veto power (for the 26th time on behalf of Israel), at the United Nations Security Council on Sept. 16. A draft resolution that prohibited Israel from expelling or physically harming the veteran Palestinian leader was killed by a veto raised by the US ambassador to the world body.

The US veto could not have come at a worse time, as the Bush administration was initiating a campaign to mend the widening rift between it and the international community as a result of its unsanctioned war on Iraq. The gap, however, widened even more when the General Assembly responded to the US veto by passing a resolution demanding that Israel halt its threats against Arafat. Israel snubbed the assembly resolution, but the stakes are much higher for the United States that joined Israel in defiance of the consensus of 133 other nations. That was by no means a sound foreign policy move.

The US administration's act of holding Arafat responsible for the deteriorating situation in the Middle East has indeed made this particular administration the most inept and ineffectual in handling the Arab-Israeli conflict. It greatly jeopardised the United States' chances of being received as a peace-maker at a time when it excels at launching wars.

It is feared that Bush's foreign policy and fiery statements will cause more than further stagnation of a peace process already at a standstill. Some Palestinian officials al§ready see the last US veto at the Security Council as a “licence to kill” their elected leader.

True, Carter's days as the country's commander-in-chief are long gone. Still, one cannot help but fancy that Bush, whose desire to isolate Arafat has grown to near obsession, would lend an ear to the words of the former president.

If only he would stop to listen to Carter one more time.

The writer is a Palestinian-American author and journalist and editor-in-chief of The Palestine Chronicle. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).