Akiva Eldar: Bush's vision is already irrelevant in the Middle East

Last week I met Arafat and found a man in distress, ready to cling to the proposal Clinton made to him

Four days have passed since President Bush delivered the speech that both Israelis and Palestinians were holding their breath for. Yet one can hardly trace any sign of relief in the streets of Tel Aviv and Hebron. The noise of the Israeli tanks redeploying in the occupied West Bank makes the voice of President Bush sound already irrelevant. His decision to prefer the incremental approach, focusing on the symptoms, to a comprehensive strategy that will touch core issues as well, is a prescription for diplomatic stalemate and more violence.

You don't have to be a national security adviser at the White House to understand that in the zero sum game conditions of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, the extremists' smiles are as broad as the moderates' tears are deep. If a Likud minister says on the radio that George Bush's speech would have been cheered at his party's convention, the Palestinian street is sure to boo it.

The most salient weakness of Bush's speech is the obvious asymmetry in its attitude towards the two parties who are responsible for the crisis. There did not seem to be any effort to make the message sound balanced. On the one hand, Bush insulted the Palestinians by humiliating their elected leader and demanding they throw him out. On the other hand, the President made a non-committal reference to the settlements Israel continues to build in the territories over whose future the US demands it negotiate. Bush did not mention the continued seizure of land in the West Bank for the purpose of paving roads for the settlers.

Indeed, there is no symmetry between the deliberate murder of children and helpless victims and terrorising an entire civilian population and the denial of freedom, land and dignity from three million people. There is even justice and logic in demanding terrorism stop before a return to the diplomatic process. But on the other hand, there is no symmetry between the Israeli occupier's might and the occupied Palestinians' weakness.

This month marks 35 years since Israel occupied the territories, and soon it will be nine years since the Oslo accords, which were supposed to put an end to the occupation. Israel may have committed itself to fulfilling UN Security Council Resolution 242, calling for its withdrawal to secure and recognised borders. But in fact it sent 200,000 Jews to settle in the territories from which the world expects it to withdraw, half of them after signing the Oslo Accords. If there was any hint of these facts in Bush's speech, it must have been drowned in the sea of verbiage about the violent struggle against the occupation and reforms in the Palestinian Authority.

The world's greatest superpower cannot merely hand out advice and grades by remote control to other nations. The peace-lovers in the Israeli and Arab societies expect it to shape a programme, offer solutions and use the many tools at its disposal to help implement them. Bill Clinton's disappointment from his tremendous investment in the peace process cannot serve as an alibi for his successor to evade his responsibility for stability in the Middle East.

Last week I met Arafat and found a man in distress, ready to cling with all his might to the proposal President Clinton made him at the end of 2000. It seems that Bush does not want to hear about anything with the name Clinton on it. But if he really wanted to find a solution, it would be waiting for him in the form of the Clinton formula. It would require him to part with evasive formulations such as Resolution 242 and replace them with more concrete proposals such as a return to the 1967 borders, the partition of Jerusalem and a comprehensive solution of the refugee problem, along with security guarantees for Israel.

True, Arafat is a problematic leader whose behaviour embarrasses not only Western diplomats wishing to rescue him from his distress and Israeli peace activists. Even the people in his closest circle do not know exactly where he is leading. But calling upon the Palestinian people to replace him, without any concomitant reservation from the Sharon government, loses credibility and validity. An arbiter whose official policy states that it is committed to guaranteeing Israel's military advantage over its Arab neighbours is suspected of favoring the Israeli client in the first place. Bush's speech provided further confirmation to those who argue that the political advisers worried about the results of elections for Congress in November had more influence on the contents of the speech than the State Department officials worried about the Middle East.

The kind of imbalanced policy expressed by the Bush speech has failed to date to extract the parties from the cycle of violence that has been going on for more than 20 months. It is hard to imagine it will succeed to do so in the coming months. The speech's only advantage was that it put to rest the illusion that salvation will come from without. The fact that President Bush did not repeat his announcement from several weeks ago to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region should teach the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps that from now on their fate is in their hands alone. If they do not stop before the abyss, nobody will do it for them.

The writer is a political columnist and editorial writer for the Israeli daily 'Ha'aretz'