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Welcome, Mr President, to the misery you've created
In eight years Palestinians have seen the bald eagle of
enlightened US power degenerate into a phoney, biased, cynical
lame duck
By Jonathan Steele
11/01/08 "The
Guardian"" -- -- It is a well-deserved irony for
George Bush that his first presidential visit to Israel
coincided this week with the storm of excitement produced by the
unexpected outcome of the two New Hampshire primaries. Nothing
could better highlight the irrelevance of the final year of the
Bush presidency.
The moment at which an incumbent becomes a lame duck fluctuates
in every US administration, depending on circumstances. The day
on which the first votes are cast is traditionally the symbolic
date, even though the race has been under way in the media for
months. This year's riveting contests in New Hampshire certainly
proved that true, overshadowing whatever interest there was in
Bush's plans for influencing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Even before the president left Washington, expectations for his
visit were low. His much-trumpeted meeting of Middle Eastern
leaders in Annapolis in November produced a predictably tinny
follow-up. Little happened in the subsequent six weeks, and it
was only courtesy to Bush that impelled Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud
Abbas to meet again in advance of the president's touchdown in
Tel Aviv on Wednesday and produce the blandest pretence of
progress. According to Olmert's spokesman, they agreed to "authorise
their negotiating teams to conduct direct and ongoing
negotiations on all the core issues". Isn't this tautological
statement merely a repeat of what they had already launched in
Annapolis?
Bush's engagement in the world's most intractable dispute is
late, piecemeal and phoney. Above all, it is one-sided. As
Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister, remarked this
week: "Palestinians agree that in the history of the United
States, Bush is more biased toward Israel than any other
American president." In any conflict, responsibility for making
the largest concessions always rests on the stronger party,
especially when most of the wrong is on its side. But, despite
his rhetoric yesterday, Bush has not used Washington's enormous
leverage over Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and
East Jerusalem.
He has not even applied pressure for an end to the expansion of
Israeli settlements or the dismantling of the spider's web of
roadblocks that make normal life for Palestinians impossible. A
US plan for benchmarks by which to judge Israeli progress was
quickly abandoned last spring at the first whiff of concern by
Olmert's government. Occasional state department pronouncements
disapproving of settlement expansion are not followed by
measures to reflect US anger when - as happened in Jerusalem
again on Wednesday - Olmert makes it clear he will continue the
illegal construction of Israeli homes.
Any talk of dealing with "core issues" is meaningless without
measures to reduce the daily hardships of Palestinians and end
the kidnapping of hundreds of Palestinian leaders. About 40
Palestinian MPs who were seized after Hamas's election victory
two years ago remain in Israeli prisons, uncharged and seemingly
forgotten by Bush and other western governments. US and European
policies towards Hamas remain hopelessly unjust and
counterproductive.
In the first phase of the so-called roadmap that Bush boasts of
having revived, Palestinians are supposed to build the
institutions of a responsible state. Yet Israel and the US
continue to do all they can to undermine this laudable goal by
blatantly taking sides in the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas.
Bush's comment yesterday in Ramallah about the situation in Gaza
was one of history's most extraordinary examples of tunnel
vision. "Hamas has delivered nothing but misery for
Palestinians," he declared. Had he said, "My reaction and that
of my Israeli and European Union colleagues to the mandate given
Hamas by Palestinian voters has delivered nothing but misery for
Palestinians", he would have been closer to the truth.
The human catastrophe deliberately inflicted on Gaza by western
policies over the past two years is one of the great crimes of
this century so far. It is especially unjustified since Hamas
had been observing a truce in its attacks on Israelis for
several months prior to winning the "free, fair and open
elections" that the roadmap asked for. Hamas was, and continues
to be, punished not for its occasional use of violence but
simply for being popular. And, as often happens with sanctions,
it is not the leaders who suffer, but the whole civilian
population of the territory - deprived of medicine, adequate
food, public services and jobs. Rather than pursuing the chimera
of a final settlement that would mean nothing without Hamas's
endorsement, western policy should focus on more manageable
humanitarian and political goals: lifting the boycott of Hamas,
promoting Palestinian unity, and forcing Israel to end its
brutal siege of Gaza.
Bush is not the first US president to take an interest in the
Middle East in the last year of an eight-year period of office.
Bill Clinton also applied his mind to it in the dying months of
his second term. Yet his performance was very different: Clinton
had endorsed the Oslo process early in his first term, and
showed considerable energy in pushing it forward and supporting
the new Palestinian Authority.
Later, in spite of being a lame duck by the year 2000, he tried
hard to get agreement between Arafat and Barak at Camp David, on
a final settlement that was not loaded overwhelmingly in
Israel's favour. It was a model of how American presidents can
act more firmly when released from the pressures of seeking
election. It only needs an effort of will for a lame duck to
become the bald eagle of enlightened US power.
In contrast, Bush's current visit to the region is nothing more
than a display of partisan cynicism, coupled with the hope that
if some sort of interim deal is signed this year between Olmert
and Abbas, it would erase Washington's failures in Iraq.
Where does that leave Palestinians as the gathering wave of US
primaries prepares to reveal the last two candidates for the
Bush succession? Will they have to wait as long as 2016 before
President Clinton or President Obama is free enough to confront
Israeli intransigence and to insist on concessions? Neither
candidate has yet given any sign of breaking away from
traditional pro-Israeli views of the problem, so once again
Palestinians may have to wait for the eighth-year miracle.
Windows of opportunity open so rarely, yet the need for early
action has never been more urgent.
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
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