Fulfilling a 60-year old Israeli dream and an American unwavering strategy, the 22-member League of Arab states are now in consensus on a potentially groundbreaking Arab Peace Initiative (API), which pledges their collective and full recognition of the Jewish state and full-fledged permanent peace in return for withdrawing the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to 1967 lines, the establishment of an independent Palestine with eastern Jerusalem as its capital, and “an agreed, just solution” to the Palestinian refugee issue in accordance with United Nations Resolution 194, but both Washington and Tel Aviv are not forthcoming.
The API was a dramatic reversal of decades-long policy as well as a peace offensive. It was approved in Beirut in 2002 by the Arab leaders who reiterated their commitment thereto at their following annual summits. A meeting of their foreign ministers in Cairo earlier this month recommended to their upcoming summit in Riyadh on March 28-29 a renewal of their peace offer as a “strategic option.”
The historic potentials of the API were acknowledged by the international Quartet of Middle East mediators, comprising the U.S., the U.N., the E.U. and Russia. In 2003 the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1515 cited the API as one of the terms of reference for making peace between Arabs and Israelis.
Arab leaders seemed recently to follow up on their initiative for the first time with a diplomatic offensive that started ahead of their Riyadh summit and is expected to resume thereafter. Their diplomatic campaign was spearheaded by Jordan’s King Abdullah II’s visit to Washington DC and highlighted by his impressive and eloquent message to the U.S. Congress on March 7.
The API was for five years archived into oblivion on the shelves of the Arab League, rejected by Israel and ignored by the US, who in 2006 swiftly vetoed an Arab League move to revive peace making on its basis by entrusting the mission to the U.N. Security Council. A change of heart following the negative fallout of the Israeli war on Lebanon last summer moved Washington to perceive in the strategic Arab option a tactical tool “to recast the (regional) political landscape from the traditional one of Arabs versus Israelis … into a Sunni vs. Shiia alignment,” (1) thus opening a window of opportunity for Arab leaders to follow up on it.
Seeking to break through Israel’s rejection of their daring offer, the U.S.-allied Arab leaders have turned to Washington appealing for intervention and warning their offer could be the last chance to make peace otherwise the ideologies of hate and terror would plunge the Middle East into a wider conflict.
“Today, I must speak; I cannot be silent,” the Jordanian monarch repeated to U.S. lawmakers: “Sixty years of Palestinian dispossession, forty years under occupation, a stop-and-go peace process, all this has left a bitter legacy of disappointment and despair … It is time to create a new and different legacy.”
Indicating that thirteen years on since late King Hussein, his father, and Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, were in Washington pursuing the cause of peace, the “work is still not completed,” the “ongoing crisis” has failed eleven American presidents and thirty American congresses, and incumbent President George W. Bush’s “vision’” of a two-state solution risks to remain merely a vision for ever, unless the U.S. rises up to the “challenge,” plays “an historic role,” and uses its “unrivalled” potentials and “unprecedented power” to seize on the “indeed historic, moment of opportunity,” made possible by the API.
“The wellspring of regional division, the source of resentment and frustration far beyond is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine,” the king said. “We can wait no longer,” Abdullah II warned: “The status quo is also pulling the region and the world towards greater danger … the cycle of crises is spinning faster, and with greater potential for destruction … Any further erosion in the situation would be serious for the future of moderation and coexistence, in the region and beyond” and “we are all at risk of being victims of further violence resulting from ideologies of terror and hatred.” (2)
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