The “egregious, petulant and dangerous” speech George W. Bush delivered on the Middle East this week nevertheless contained a “positive focal point,” writes Raghida Dergham, New York bureau chief of the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.
In her weekly think piece, she says Palestinians and Arabs must seize on the US president’s Middle East policy statement if they are to regain the initiative from the far right in Israel and America, following their “victory in the latest round of the ongoing battle” over the region’s future.

Dergham believes the speech dealt “a slap in the face” not just to the Arab states committed to working for a permanent Arab-Israeli peace settlement, but also to US Secretary of State Colin Powell and the entire State Department. It undermined the moderates in the Arab world and deprived them of valuable ammunition against the “current of extremism and despair.” It demonstrated contempt for the Israeli peace camp. And it also ignored mainstream American opinion, which holds Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as much to blame for the current state of affairs as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
“George W. perhaps discredited himself more than he discredited Arafat, for on Monday he appeared positively childish while delivering an incoherent speech lacking any road map or mechanism for implementing a vision which he has held hostage to Sharon’s vindictive instincts, narrow political calculations and dictates,” she writes.

“And he discredited the United States when he insulted and embarrassed his secretary of state by rejecting all his arguments and adopting those of Ariel Sharon, as though he were America’s chief diplomat.”

Bush “trashed” everything Powell had said in the interview he gave to Al-Hayat two weeks previously, says Dergham ­ who conducted the interview ­ “and the reason is Arafat.”
What happened between the Powell interview on June 12 and the Bush speech on June 24 is that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing. It would have been different if it had been Hamas or Islamic Jihad. But the fact that the Brigades are associated with Arafat’s Fatah movement, coupled with “information” reaching Washington alleging that he had himself “financed” the bombing, enraged Bush and made him decide to “wash his hands” of the Palestinian leader.

Dergham recalls that when she interviewed Powell earlier this month, he “radiated confidence” that Bush’s speech would set out a road map for a permanent settlement, and that Sharon had failed to impose his views on the US president.
But the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades changed all that, “providing Sharon on a golden platter what the US State Department had worked hard to deny him.” Arafat’s condemnation of the bombing was no longer adequate after the warnings that had been conveyed to him by American and Arab envoys that he must take practical steps to prevent such operations. By failing to do so, Arafat undermined Powell’s case and left him prey to the administration’s hawks.

This does not excuse Bush his petulant reaction, which absolved Sharon of any responsibility, blamed everything on Arafat and demanded that the Palestinians replace him if they ever wanted US help in gaining a state. But, writes Dergham, it meant “the positive ‘focal point’ of Bush’s speech got lost in its vindictive and threatening tone toward the Palestinians.”

Despite everything, the positive focal point in Bush’s speech are his statements, “I challenge Israel to take concrete steps to support the emergence of a viable, credible Palestinian state,” and, “The Israeli occupation that began in 1967 will be ended through a settlement negotiated between the parties, based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338.” The speech rejected Sharon’s demand for a long-term interim agreement rather than a permanent settlement. It envisaged a timetable for a peace agreement being drawn up within three years, whereas Sharon had held out for 10. And it promised an active US role at the highest level in achieving the final “vision” that Bush spelled out, and in first helping the Palestinians to carry out reforms and elections.

Dergham says the Palestinians should seize on Bush’s call for elections ­ which would be a “healthy” exercise for them ­ and ask him to ensure that Israel create a climate in which they can be held. That means halting its military incursions and withdrawing its forces at least to pre-intifada lines of Sept. 28, 2000.

Likewise, the demand for reforms ­ badly needed in their own right ­ can be used to demonstrate that reform is not viable under ongoing military occupation, and request that the US help create conditions in which to carry them out.
Instead, the official Palestinian response to Bush’s speech sought to be “smart.” It focused on the positive aspects and ignored the demand for Arafat’s removal, and was accompanied by belated concessions with Arafat’s announcement that he was prepared to accept Clinton-brokered peace terms he had rejected between July and December 2000.
As for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s verdict that Bush’s speech was “balanced,” and Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher’s statement that the speech gave him reason to be “optimistic,” these were “uncalled for,” Dergham remarks.

“The speech wasn’t balanced. It quite simply sided with Sharon and gave him a free hand to act with impunity. There’s no harm or wrong in pointing out the positive aspects of the speech, indeed it is necessary to do so, but without pretending it was balanced. It was a dangerous speech because its tone overshadowed the positive focal point it contained. Arab leaders should dare to speak out honestly, rather than apologize and posture. They should be frank and clear with Washington. Otherwise they won’t be taken seriously,” she says.
Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor in chief of the pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi, sees the positive reactions voiced by various Arab governments to Bush’s Middle East policy statement as proof that they were complicit in formulating it.
Indeed, he writes on the paper’s front page, Arab governments informed Arafat of the contents of the speech in advance, and told him not to protest at the denunciation of him and the Palestinian Authority (PA) that it would feature ­ which is why he issued a statement welcoming it “within three minutes of Bush going off the air.”

“What we’re probably facing here is a carefully-crafted plan to kill the intifada, reoccupy all the Palestinian towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and subject the Palestinian people to as much oppression, pain and starvation as possible ­ until they submit to American and Israeli conditions that they abandon their leadership and accept a new one that agrees to concede their historic rights, completely drop the cause of the Palestinian refugees and accept diminished sovereignty over occupied Jerusalem.
“There are Arab governments secretly or openly complicit in this plan. They want to rid themselves of the risk of infection by the intifada, and seek to save themselves at the expense of the Palestinian cause,” Atwan says.

How else do we explain the banning of pro-Palestinian fundraising and solidarity activities in countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and the withholding of funds already donated, Atwan wonders. Bush “gave the game away” when he threatened at the G-8 summit in Canada to get all America’s friends to withhold external aid and investment from the Palestinian public as a whole, not just the PA. And he has already managed to stop funds donated by Arab charities to support needy Palestinian families, on grounds that they are used to support “terrorism.”
“The Palestinian people’s calamity is no longer a consequence of the Jewish state and America’s blatant support for its massacres and occupation, but also a consequence of the collusion of some Arab governments, who have made appeasement of the US the first and only item on their order of priorities, in the belief that appeasing America is the first and only guarantee of their survival,” Atwan writes.

One can draw one’s own conclusions from the fact that the US wants Arab countries, like Egypt, to supervise the process of cleaning up corruption in the PA and turning it into a model of democratic and transparent government, he quips.
“We cannot ask Arab leaders to stop making the pilgrimage to Washington. But we can request them not to raise the Palestine question in their talks with US officials and restrict them to bilateral matters,” says Atwan. “Had they done that years ago, the Bush administration’s position today might not be as bad as it is.”
Rajeh al-Khoury, writing in the Beirut daily An-Nahar, highlights the climb downs Arafat made ahead of Bush’s “indictment speech” in a vain attempt to earn himself some “mercy, or any prospect of it.”
Arafat sent his aide Nabil Shaath to Washington with a document affirming that he had abandoned his Camp David II positions on sovereignty in East Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and throwing in a host of security-related “assurances” to Israel, Khoury writes.

Shaath gave the document to Powell who must have handed it over to Bush. And if he didn’t, the president could have read about it in The Washington Post before he delivered his “disaster of a speech.”

Arafat proceeded to “further enlighten the White House” by giving an interview to the Israeli daily Haaretz, again listing the points in the document, and adding some flattering remarks about Sharon as a way of “sending a message” to the Israeli leader.

“The Palestinian leader certainly got no positive signals from Bush in response. As for Sharon, he positioned his tanks outside the Mukataa in Ramallah. Yet despite that, the White House last Friday received a Palestinian memorandum marked ‘extremely urgent,’ detailing a ‘reform plan’ to be implemented within 100 days covering everything from the security agencies, to the political and administrative structure, the cessation of violence, the renunciation of extremism, the amendment of school curricula, and the promotion of a culture of democracy, enlightenment and openness,” Khoury says.
“However, all of this did not prevent Arafat’s political death verdict from being passed. That raises two questions: Why does Palestinian acceptance always come too late, and why are American decisions always made by Israel?”

In the London-based Saudi pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, Huda al-Husseini suggests that by focusing on the need to replace Arafat, Bush was in fact seeking to withdraw his administration from the quest for a regional peace settlement.
She says Bush must have known that demanding Arafat’s removal as a precondition for movement toward peace was a nonstarter.

The Europeans were bound to object and argue that the Palestinians must be free to chose their leader, not out of admiration for Arafat ­ and not because they have any intention of clashing with the US over him ­ but because the Europeans genuinely believe in democracy.
And the Palestinians, among whom Arafat’s credibility and standing has plummeted, were bound to rally behind him, if only by way of rejecting US and Israeli dictates. These reactions must have been anticipated by the Bush administration, Husseini writes. So when Bush demanded wholesale reforms and the election of a new and different Palestinian leadership as a condition for US engagement in the Middle East peace process, he set the stage for American disengagement from the process.