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Your support makes all the difference.The US yesterday dispatched the State Department's top Middle East specialist to the region in a new bid to secure an end to the fighting which led to the yesterday's horrific carnage at the United Nations refugee camp in southern Lebanon.
According to officials here, Dennis Ross, the special Middle East policy co-ordinator, will try to forge a deal acceptable to both Israel and Lebanon (and by implication Syria, de facto protector and arms supplier of the Hizbollah guerrillas). If he succeeds, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who constructed a similar ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah in 1993, could himself travel to the region before attending a US-Russian summit in Moscow.
The Israeli attack could not have come at a worse time for Washington. Not only does it threaten to change the dynamic of the faltering overall peace process; it took place as President Clinton was en route from Japan to Russia, where the incident could dominate a visit designed to boost the election chances of President Yeltsin.
Now, however, Washington fears that its Middle East peace efforts may unravel.
The slaughter is shaping up as an international public relations disaster for Israel. It also demonstrates the lack of US control over its protege. Washington had been seeking to end the fighting and even the New York Times, a staunch supporter of Israel, argued it should halt its Operation Grapes of Wrath before playing irretrievably into Hizbollah's hands.
That, analysts here say, is precisely what will happen now, re-inforcing the militant Arab argument that Israel is waging not a limited war against guerrillas but a general war against ordinary civilians, and strengthening calls for the Jewish state to withdraw from its "security zone" in southern Lebanon.
Sympathy for Hizbollah will only grow, intensifying international pressure on Israel to make concessions in any ceasefire deal. That however is less likely than ever the run-up to next month's Israeli elections, in which the Labour Prime Minister Shimon Peres is out to show he is as tough on terrorism as anyone.
Terms for a truce, for which earlier separate American and French initiatives are now jointly working, will almost certainly have to involve some future commitment by Israel to pull out of southern Lebanon, in return for an end to bombardment by Hizbollah units of northern Israel. "Israel has to comply with resolution 425," Samir Moubarak, Lebanon's UN Ambassador said yesterday, referring to the 1978 UN call for Israel to end its occupation.
But as US diplomats know, the involvement of Syria, which has 35,000 troops in Lebanon, is crucial. Indirectly therefore, a resolution of the current crisis could bring closer the resumption of the separate Israeli -Syrian peace talks, suspended after the spate of Arab suicide bombings in Israel.
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