Earlier this month, at the Arab League’s conference in Libya, its monitoring committee on the Arab Peace Initiative gave Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas support for his decision to suspend direct talks with Israel as long as settlement construction continues. The Arab Peace Initiative is a Saudi inspired peace plan first presented by the Arab League in 2002 and then endorsed again in 2007, which calls for a Palestinian state with borders based explicitly on the UN borders established before the 1967 Six Day War. It offers full normalization of relations with Israel, in exchange for the withdrawal of its forces from all the occupied territories, including the Golan Heights, recognition of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a just solution for the Palestinian refugees. Of course, the Arab League, a 22 member league of Arab nations, is not negotiating with Israel, but PA president Abbas has similar demands and is seeking the support and coercive power of the League to pressure the US to get Israel to impose an absolute moratorium on construction in the West Bank before returning to negotiations. He argued that the Palestinian issue was one that affected all Arabs and that if the Arab League refused to intervene, it would mean that it was giving up on the matter. One of the problems according to Haaretz, reporters Avi Issacharoff and Akiva Elldar, who used the London based Al Hayyat newspaper as the source for this article, is that Arab League members seem to be at odds over their role in the Mideast peace process. An example is Syria’s president Bashar Assad who argued that the Arab League’s monitoring committee doesn’t have the authority to give the PA the license to continue negotiations. He felt that the League was focusing on settlements rather than the bigger picture of territories and refugees. As the case has been for decades, the Arab nations are not all like-minded and often have diverging opinions and motivations, but they are all weighing in on the question of Israel/Palestinian negotiations. The question is how much influence will they have in the matter?
It is interesting to note that one of the co-editors of the Palestine-Israel Journal, Hillel Schenker had high hopes that additional Arab participation might be of more influence during these negotiations. In an article he wrote in September, before this round of talks began, he stated that the existence of the Arab Peace Initiative and the fact that both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah were present in Washington at the inauguration of the current round of talks was promising and might make a difference. He saw this as an advantage over the Camp David peace talks in 2000 because he presents these two Arab leaders as seeing the context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations as embedded in a broader regional peace between Israel and the Arab world. Mr. Schenker is very left-leaning in his opinions and the article I’ve chosen is an opinion piece he wrote, so it is not objective, but I used it because he addresses the increased Arab involvement. He presents Mubarak and King Abdullah in a more positive light than Israel’s current leadership and calls on the Knesset Members who are more left leaning to seriously discuss the Arab Peace Initiative. He also stated that if these negotiations stalled, it would be up to the US to offer creative bridging proposals to ensure the negotiations don’t completely fail. He concludes with a well known saying attributed to the late Abba Eban about the history of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in which all sides seem to “never miss the opportunity to miss an opportunity” and hopes that all concerned will not miss this opportunity for peace.
In the meantime, skeptics are saying “I told you so” and the negotiations have stalled. According to an article in Haartz, taken from the Associated Press, Abbas and the Arab League are now saying that they are considering going to the UN as soon as next month to seek United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state if Israel continues to build settlements. The AP is just reporting the facts, but in essence what would going to the UN accomplish? Is it a symbolic gesture? Would it lead to armed conflict? Also, Abbas is threatening to step down if Israel resumes building which would lead to dissolution of the PA. This would cause all civil and security to revert to Israel or the UN – both cases would result in chaos and are not something Israel would like to see happen. These are in essence threats being used by Abbas and the Arab League in the continual political game being played in the course of these negotiations.
