Why no one is betting on success for Annapolis
by George Jonas
CanWest Publications
November 29, 2007
Forget the smiles, the hugs, the joint communiqués. Perhaps the most hopeful thing about the Annapolis peace conference is that it's devoid of illusions. Unlike Madrid, Oslo, Wye River, and similar chimeras conjured up under the optimistic tutelage of U.S. presidents as different in other respects as strait-laced Bush the Elder and mellow Bill Clinton, the curtain rose this week on George W. Bush's last-ditch attempt in a mood of total sobriety.
No one expected anything from Annapolis: not the Americans convening it, not the Middle East mavens observing and analyzing it, and certainly not the Palestinians and Israelis going through the motions of participating in it. I doubt if any conference ever started with lower expectations than the one that came to order this week around a U-shaped table in a frescoed hall underneath the chandeliers of the U.S. Naval Academy.
In 2007 most people noticed a factor that only a few saw in the 1980s and 1990s. For peace-negotiations to succeed, it's not enough for both sides to want peace in the abstract. They must both ascribe the same meaning to the term -- and the two sides in the Middle East do not. Israel wants peace and so does the Arab/Muslim world -- except Israel wants peace with the Arab/Muslim world and the Arab/Muslim world wants peace without Israel.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s many people failed to see what seemed self-evident to some, namely that for the Palestinian leadership the "peace-process" was a mere ruse de guerre. When late Yasser Arafat stepped unto the world's stage at first, he made no bones about it. "The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle," he had told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1972. "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else."
Only the rhetoric changed decades later, during Madrid, Oslo, or Wye River, and even the rhetoric hadn't changed much, especially when stripped of the veils of English and delivered in the dialects appropriate for home consumption in the Arab world. "Peace" exercises were to achieve better positions from which to push the Jews into the sea, figuratively or literally -- and, of course, to secure the best position for Chairman Arafat and his mob until that glorious hour arrived.
In a recent issue of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, one-time Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky described an episode when, as an Israeli delegate to the Wye River summit, he and some colleagues managed to extract a promise from Arafat to delete from the Palestinian Charter the sections calling for the destruction of Israel.
"Upon leaving the conference room," Sharansky recalled in his piece, "we saw one of the closest advisers of President Bill Clinton and proudly told him about our achievement. 'Are you out of your minds?' he shouted. 'He's going to be killed because of that. He is too weak for dramatic steps like that. First he has to be strengthened!'"
This anecdote sums up the charade of sham peace initiatives and "road maps" of the last 20 years, up to and including Annapolis.
To begin with, Arafat probably had no intention of excising any section calling for Israel's destruction from the Palestinian Charter anyway. He had made half-hearted promises to do so long before Wye River and nothing came of them. He knew that understanding souls in the U.S. State Department would exempt him from having to go out on any such limb until he was suitably "strengthened." But -- and here's the point -- in the unlikely event that Arafat had actually made an attempt to remove the clause, he might well have been killed, just like Egypt's Anwar Sadat.
Arafat was prepared to accept down payments from Israel on merchandise he had not only no intention of delivering, but which wasn't his to deliver anyway. Arafat had no title to peace. Neither has Israel's current negotiating partner, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud "Abu Mazen" Abbas. If anything, Abbas' grip on peace is even more tenuous. The terrorist group Hamas that controls Gaza has already scheduled a "counter-conference" to protest Palestinian attendance at Annapolis, which they describe as "treason."
Forget the smiles, the hugs, the photo ops. They secure Nobel Peace Prizes for politicians, not peace for people. The region wasn't ready for peace in Arafat's days and it isn't ready now. Some people saw it then; most people see it today. If there's any hope, it's only because majorities are so often wrong.