President Barack Obama is facing complex issues and thorny problems. However, he, along with those responsible for these matters in his administration, continue to show concern with the Arab-Israeli conflict. They believe that requesting a solution is an administration priority, even if they fear that the Arabs, which are comfortable with dealing with a new White House after their experience with the Bush administration, have delivered the issue to Obama and are sitting around idly, waiting for a solution that will not be achieved without everyone taking part in its achievement. In the last few weeks, I heard the opinion of American diplomats working in the Middle East, and met with some Arab officials, including a foreign minister; I talked with another minister on the telephone. The opinions above and below are based on what I've heard and put together. I said to the American diplomat, with whom I began by agreeing with his opinion that President Obama will not neglect the conflict in the Middle East, and that Arab states need to play an active role in demanding a solution, but I also thought that the president would fail. If he cannot defeat the health insurance lobby, he will not defeat the Israeli lobby and other Likudniks inside and around the administration in the media and all influential positions. The diplomat said that the comparison was unfair. Each US domestic issue is divisive and all sides cannot get everything they want. This produced the health care bill passed by the House by a margin of votes, bringing down the average on the president's original idea. Americans prefer dealing with President Mahmoud Abbas and are not looking for an alternative. This is also the position of Arab countries, especially the big, influential ones. The official warned me that winter was coming, and that there was $4 billion in reconstructing Gaza after the war at the beginning of the year, but that it was frozen, because Hamas rejects seeing another team taking up the mission. As a result, Palestinians are sleeping in the debris of their homes, and young children are among them. I said that Hamas will lose the support of people if it wages a war that resulted in the destruction of the Gaza Strip, then the Palestinian Authority comes to rebuild with foreign money. Instead, the reconstruction should be a joint effort in which Hamas plays a fundamental role, because it controls Gaza. The problem is that I consider Hamas a national resistance movement against Israeli terror, while the US and the European Union consider it a terrorist movement, and will not accept its spending reconstruction money. The Palestinians need to find a way out, except that they, like Arab states, are sitting around idly and waiting for others to solve their problems. Meanwhile, the people of the Gaza Strip pay the price, from their future, after they paid with their lives. The solution will not come via Nicolas Sarkozy; the French president's proposal of a summit between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot succeed as long as Netanyahu wants more settlements, and not a solution to the conflict. The only mediator able to push Israel in this direction is the US, not France or even the entire EU (Syrian President Bashar al-ASsad rejected French mediation with Israel, preferring Turkish mediation, and he is right, for the same reasons). Behind the French president's effort and others is a deliberate effort to rehabilitate Israel and let it appear “accepted” in the Middle East, after it has become the most hated country in the world, after the old South Africa left behind its Apartheid system, and after fascist right wing parties took office. However, Saudi Arabia's position settled the matter in the Arab world. The country's foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, announced that there would be no concessions to give Israel incentives to move ahead in the peace process. Normalization steps will follow and not precede a peace agreement, as stipulated by the Arab Peace Initiative, which was originally a Saudi one. The Saudi position encouraged other Arab states to take a similar line, so that Arab solidarity continued, in the face of the Israeli government. Among the incentives proposed by the Obama administration was opening the skies to Israeli civilian aircraft and direct mail and telephone contacts. An Arab minister told me that any decision of this kind could be taken and then cancelled if it did not produce a return on the peace path, but the current Arab line is against concessions. Finally, I heard from two American officials that the administration did not have intelligence information pointing to Syrian involvement in the August and October bombings in Baghdad, as it was accused of by the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki. Perhaps this is why the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, has not repeated the accusation at his recent news conferences. [email protected]
