Bush Plan Allows Little Optimism for Mideast Peace: Analysis

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Bush Plan Allows Little Optimism for Mideast Peace: Analysis

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After quite some gestation and hesitation, U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday unveiled a much-awaited peace proposal designed to jump-start the Middle Eastpeace process which has been stalled by persistent bloody conflicts between Israelis and the Palestinians.

However, the peace initiative, billed as the "Bush plan" by local media, presented little for the Palestinians and Arabs to cheer, thus damping any optimism over the revival of the Middle East peace process in the near future, analysts said.

Delivering a speech at the Rose Garden of the White House, Bushset tough preconditions for supporting a provisional Palestinian state, strongly suggesting that the Palestinians remove Yasser Arafat from the Palestinian leadership in exchange for U.S. support.

"Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership so that a Palestinian state can be born," Bush said, without mentioning Arafat by name.

The U.S. president, who has minced no words to criticize Arafatand so far denied the Palestinian leader of any face-to-face encounter, called on the Palestinians to elect new leaders and build a "practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty."

"When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutionsand new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian statewhose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East," Bush stated, suggesting that a final settlement be achieved in three years.

Directly linking the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the U.S.-led war against terrorism, Bush also accused the Palestinian leadership of "encouraging" terrorism, noting that Washington will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders get engaged in a sustained fight against terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.

He urged all Arab countries to stop incitement to violence and block the flow of money, equipment and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel.

"There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all partiesfight terror," he said.

Bush, who counts on the conservatives and the powerful Jewish lobby in both the mid-term Congressional elections at the end of this year and his personal bid for re-election in 2004, also adopted an obvious pro-Israel approach in his new peace proposal.

In sharp contrast to his harsh words on the Palestinian leadership, the U.S. president refrained from challenging the tough policy adopted by the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, including the aggressive military incursions by the Israeli forces into the Palestinian-controlled areas over the past few days.

He laid out tough demands for the Palestinians to meet, but asked Israel for no more than the cessation of Jewish settlements and a troop withdrawal to the positions prior to September 28, 2000, when the current bloody conflict broke out. Even those requests are contingent on the Palestinians' efforts to have new aleadership, new institutions and new security arrangements with Israel.

Analysts believe that the tough preconditions for an elusive interim Palestinian state, the arbitrary linkage between the conflict and the war against terror, as well as the bias in favor of Israel, reveal some inherent flaws in the Bush plan, which overshadow any serious attempt to end the cycle of violence in theMiddle East.

First, it is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian soil that isresponsible for the conflict. Any fair and last solution to the half-century conflict should be based on the formula of land for peace and U.N. resolutions 242 and 338, which call on Israel to retreat to the borders before the 1967 Middle East War.

Bush's insistence on changes to in the Palestinian leadership and institutions is not only misleading and oversimplifies a complicated conflict, but is also tantamount to setting new obstacles to the resumption of the peace process.

Secondly, as the United States holds sway in the Middle East affairs, an even-handed or balanced U.S. approach is crucial for the possible settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Continuing an ill-balanced policy of squeezing the Palestiniansin favor of the Israelis will by no means help settle the 21-month-old bloody conflict but only make it worse, analysts say.

Thirdly, compared with the Oslo accords signed by the Israelis and the Palestinians in 1993, the Bush plan came up with another transitional arrangement, as the Oslo deal did, only with less details needed for smooth implementation.

The Oslo deal, based on the formula of land for peace, provideda detailed interim framework focused on Palestinian autonomy whichshould assumably pave the way for the final settlement of the conflict through final status negotiations.

Operationally speaking, it demanded reciprocal steps from both sides -- the Palestinians must forsake violence while Israelis must return occupied land for peace.

The built-in flaws which delay solutions to the thorny final status issues by an interim arrangement later derailed the Oslo process despite widely hailed progress in the first few years of its implementation.

Like the Oslo accords, the Bush plan proposed the creation of aprovisional Palestinian state as an interim arrangement without providing any effective solution to the final status issues.

But worse than the Oslo deal, it also failed to provide any idea of what a "provisional state" means, especially its borders and sovereignty. Moreover, the Bush plan attempts to oblige the Palestinians to first meet U.S. demands on the new leadership, newinstitutions and security arrangement before both sides begin to make concessions to each other.

The analysis may be vindicated when even U.S. media acknowledged that there was little in the Bush plan to cheer the Arabs, let alone the Palestinians.

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