Yasser Arafat is not giving up. As the faltering Middle East peace process continues its up-and-down course, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority is pursuing his grand tour of the Arab world, trying to convince fellow Arabs to unite for a summit.
Arab leaders must come together “not just to face the stalemate in the peace process,” Arafat said this week, “but also to renew Arab cooperation.”
However, by mid-week, there was no summit in sight. As has happened so often in the past, the Arabs appeared to be too divided to form a united front.
Arab leaders have been unable to agree on a date, an agenda or even the participants for a summit. Moreover, not everyone in the Arab world shares the enthusiasm of Arafat and Syria’s President Hafez Assad for such a meeting.
Take Jordan, for example, the Arab country with the closest ties to Israel. For the record, King Hussein is paying lip service to the cause of Arab unity. But at the same time he said this week that “divisions stemming from the 1990-91 Gulf Crisis” were blocking the road to a summit.
Hussein was referring to objections in the Gulf regarding the participation of Iraq in the proposed summit. The Kuwaitis still vividly remember the Iraqi invasion and occupation, and they officially expressed concern this week over a statement attributed to Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, doubting the legality of the United Nations demarcation border between the two countries.
“Jordan cannot allow itself to act openly against an Arab summit,” said Wadia Abu-Nassar, a political science lecturer at the Open University in Tel Aviv and a longtime observer of Middle East politics.
“But at the same time, Jordan is well aware of the fact that not much good can come out of the summit. They are trying to abort the summit using all kinds of pretexts, like the problem of Iraq, and the need to convene an expanded summit which would include all the Arab countries.”
Including all the Arab countries would mean inviting not only Iraq, but also Libya. The participation of these two countries would naturally lead to harsh anti-Israeli resolutions — it would also anger the United States.
“The last thing Arafat wants to do at the moment is to aggravate the U.S.,” said Abu-Nassar. For the first time in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said, the Americans seem to be closer in their positions to the Palestinians than to the Israelis.
Arafat would not give up that newly created alliance just to see Libya and Iraq at the summit table.
Syria, on the other hand, would. Aside from Arafat, the Syrians have been the main force pushing for a summit.
Realizing that the time is not ripe to demand that Arab states fully sever their diplomatic relations with Israel, the Syrians — who do not have ties to the Jewish state — wanted to push resolutions urging Jordan and Egypt to at least lower the level of diplomatic representation in Israel and to freeze all commercial contacts.
But Egypt and Jordan have too much to lose to take such actions, and their refusals have angered the Syrians.
“One can understand that Israel’s prime minister adopts Zionism,” the Syrian government-sponsored daily Thishrin wrote after Jawad al-Anani, Jordan’s foreign minister, publicly said he was against cutting ties with Israel. “But that an Arab leader should adopt Zionism as well?”
The paper wrote that there was no point convening another Arab summit “when those who erred” at the last summit “have not yet admitted that they did.”
The last Arab summit was held in Cairo in June 1996, immediately after Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in the elections for prime minister.
The Arabs convened then amid apocalyptic speculations of a total freeze in the peace process.
However, just like now, Egypt and Jordan pressed for moderate resolutions. “The Arabs have opted for peace,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak declared at the time. They had decided to give Netanyahu a chance.
Indeed, the Arabs have come a long way since the Khartoum Summit of 1967, following the Six-Day War, which produced the famous three “no’s”: No to peace, no to negotiations, no to recognition of Israel.
“One should look at it from the positive side,” Eli Podeh of the Hebrew University suggested this week.
“Thirty-one years ago the Arabs convened to negate any contacts with Israel. Now they want to discuss how to push the peace process forward.”
Whether the Arabs convene at all depends largely on progress in the Israeli- Palestinian negotiations, said Abu-Nassar.
Mubarak said this week that any Arab summit must be well-prepared so that it can yield positive results. “We will wait and see what the Palestinians agree on before deciding.”
The Egyptian leader said the United States did not pressure the Arabs into postponing a summit meeting.
If there is no progress, analysts say, the Arabs will have no choice but to put up a show of Arab unity. It will be mostly up to Egypt and Jordan to determine whether it would be merely a show — or a shift in policy toward Israel.
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