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>From http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=307992
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Robert Fisk: Fatal vision: how Bush has given up on peace
A vacillating President and lack of a credible plan is fuelling hatred in the Middle
East
23 June 2002
George Bush Junior gave up last week. After all the blustering and grovelling and
the disobeyed instructions to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and all the
hectoring of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and all the "visions" of a Palestinian
state, the President threw in his hand. There will be no Middle East peace
conference in the near future, no serious attempt to halt the conflict between Israelis
and Palestinians, not a whimper of resolution on the region's tragedy from the man
who started the "war for civilisation'', the "war on terror'', the "endless war'' and,
most recently, the "titanic war on terror''. Mr Bush, his ever more incomprehensible
spokesman Ari Fleischer vouchsafed to us last week, "has come to some
conclusions". And � this really took the biscuit � "when the President determines the
time is right, he will share it".
I love the idea of this increasingly incompetent strategist on Middle East affairs
quietly weighing, like Frederick the Great, the odds on the rights of three million
Palestinian refugees to return, the future of Jerusalem, and the continued growth of
settlements for Jews on occupied land � only to decide that these weighty matters
of state must be withheld from his loyal people. After lecturing the pompous and
pathetic Arafat on his duties to protect Israel it only took an Israeli shell fired
into a
crowded Palestinian market � another of those famous Israeli "errors" � to shut
Bush up again. Just a week ago, as we all know, Mr Bush had another of his famous
"visions". They started in the autumn of last year when he had a vision of a
Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. This particular vision coincided
quite
by chance, of course, with his efforts to keep the Arab states quiescent while
America bombed the poorest and most ruined Muslim country in the world. Then
this dream was forgotten for a few months until, earlier this year, Vice President
Dick Cheney toured the Middle East to drum up Arab support for another war on
Iraq. The Arabs tried to tell Cheney that there was already a rather dramatic little
war going on in the region. And what happened? George Bush suddenly had his
vision thing again.
Now, however, after six visits to the United States by Ariel Sharon � and after Bush
was totally ignored by the Israelis when he demanded an immediate end to the
West Bank invasion and an end to the siege of Palestinian towns � the President
has had yet another vision, a rather scaled-down version of the earlier one. Now he
dreams of an interim Palestinian state. It is a sign of how obedient American
journalists have become that not one US newspaper has seen this for the
preposterous notion it really is. The great American newspapers � I'm talking about
their physical bulk not their contents � tiresomely pontificate on the divisions within
the American administration on the Middle East. Or they ask whether there's a
Middle East policy at all: there is not, of course. But the ideas of this US
administration, however vacuous or simply laughable, continue to be treated with an
almost sacred quality in the American press and on television.
What on earth, for example, does interim mean? I noticed that in the past four days,
interim has turned into provisional, an even more miserable version of the original
vision. It reminds me of Madeleine Albright's truly wonderful proposal that the
Palestinians should be happy because they might get "a sort of sovereignty" over
some areas of Arab east Jerusalem.
But what does interim portend? Talal Salman, the editor of the Beirut daily As Safir,
wrote in his newspaper last week that interim envisages "a provisional state on
territory segmented like beehives'', with every town, village and refugee camp cut
off by "a wall of tanks and permanent and moving checkpoints; with everything
under helicopter surveillance ... with death squads monitoring intentions and
dreams, targeting anyone they discover, determine, speculate or suspect may have
explosive materials in their blood".
A provisional state is an innovation no one has ever heard of before. It's a state
unrelated to its land or to its people. All other states are permanent. But the
Palestinian state will be a stop-gap, according to President Bush, and thus its role or
existence can be ended in a day or a year if its usefulness comes to an end. It does
not need to find territory � after all, it is only interim � and permanent institutions
such as an army (perish the thought), the luxury of independence, or sovereignty, or
an economy, or foreign relations will be denied. This will be Israel's luxury.
And in the absence of leadership from President Bush, Ariel Sharon can do what he
wishes. He can dig ditches and lay down so much barbed wire that a map of the
West Bank will portray a land covered in blisters; a smallpox of settlements and
surrounded villages. Crazy ideas blow through Washington. Israelis can discuss in
all seriousness the eviction of the entire Palestinian population. Now Nathan Lewin,
a prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader, is calling for the
execution of family members of suicide bombers.
His exact words are as follows: "If executing some suicide- bomber families saves
the lives of even an equal number of potential civilian victims, the exchange is, I
believe, ethically permissible. It is a policy born of necessity.'' Forgetting for a
moment the logic of this rubbish � if the suicide bomber has already killed himself,
knocking off granny and the kids is not going to have much effect � it raises some
intriguing questions. Who should be the first to die in the family of suicide bombers?
If the bomber has three children, how many of them do you kill? The youngest or
the oldest? Or the whole lot? Is there a minimum age for execution? Is five years
old enough to be put before an Israeli execution squad? It would certainly be hard,
even for Mr Lewin, to explain to a three-month-old baby why it had to be put to
death. Or would it be only men? Or just wives and older sisters?
Merely by asking these questions, it is possible to demonstrate the obscene depths
to which this terrible war has sunk. To their great credit, prominent members of the
American Jewish community have condemned Lewin's fantasies. And it is
necessary to reflect that the Palestinian suicide bombers don't even ask these
questions. For the suicide bombers are executioners, the executioners of whole
Israeli families. The immolation of their own lives does not excuse the fact that, in
their last moments, they are able to see the Israeli child in the pram who will die
with its mother, the Israeli family eating its pizzas on a hot Wednesday afternoon,
the old folk celebrating a Jewish religious festival who will be his or her victims.
The
17-year- old Palestinian girl who blew herself up to kill a 16-year-old Israeli girl
remains an awesome symbol of youth destroying youth.
And amid these horrors, what do we get from Mr Bush? Delay. Obfuscation. A
vague plan � revealed as usual to the pliant New York Times � suggested that the
Bush boys and girls were going to ignore the "right of return" of Palestinian
refugees, dump the "final status" issues of Jerusalem and settlements on the
Israelis and Palestinians and � by far the most hilarious clause � would "find new
language" to bridge Israel's and Palestine's interpretation of UN Security Council
Resolution 242. This is the all-important resolution, of course, which calls for an
Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war in return for the security
of all states in the area. The Israelis claim that they can keep what land they want
because the resolution does not place the word "the" before the word "territories" �
even though the same UN resolution specifically says that land cannot be acquired
through military conquest.
It is somehow fitting as the Israeli-Palestinian war turns incandescent that this weak
and vacillating President should consume his time with a debate on the meaning of
the definite article. Should "the" read "some"? Should Palestine be provisional? Or
should Mr Bush be just an interim President?
End<{{{
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