Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is key to the wider issue of global peace and security, but mistrust of the United States is hamstringing the process in the Arab world, a conference on tackling terrorism in Madrid heard Wednesday.
| Comes as a surprise, huh? |
Yeah. if only Israel were pushed into the sea and all the Jooos in the world fall down dead, they'd have to invent something else to seethe about live happily ever after. |
Experts from more than 50 countries are attending the conference, which culminates with Friday's first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings. Wednesday saw the intractable issue of the Middle East take center stage, with Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and Israel's former Mossad head, Efraim Halevy, jousting over the issue. Erekat insisted the existing "road map" for peace had to be a prelude to a wider settlement. "Let's get to the endgame. All issues are doable," Erekat said. "But don't tie my hands, tie my legs, throw me to the sea and ask me to swim," he pleaded, adding that the unilateral nature of the decision by the Israeli government to leave Gaza had "changed negotiations to dictation." Erekat said as long as the Israeli occupation existed, regardless of the impending withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians would feel excluded and humiliated.
He added that the United States should look beyond Gaza if it wanted to see a real Israel-Palestinian settlement. "I hope President [George W.] Bush will find it in his heart to say Gaza is the end of phase one of the road map," he said. "I have a 17-year-old boy, Ali," he said. "I don't want him to become a suicide bomber." Erekat argued that Israel causes the violence by denying Palestinians their homeland, economy and dignity.
In response, Halevy, now head of the Center for Strategic and Political Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said: "We must make sure that terrorism does not dictate the political agenda. Once the genie was out of the bottle it was no longer possible to control it." The moderator of the panel they were on, Rob Malley, director of a U.S. Middle East think tank, suggested that while the United States wanted to foster Arab democracy generally, it had an image problem. He warned that terrorism and democracy could progress simultaneously in theaters such as Iraq and it was up to Washington to prove it could be even-handed in the region. Malley concluded that the United States "has to be seen as acting not in self interest but for the good of the Arabs."
On the sidelines of the confernce, the Arab League and Spain agreed to increase cooperation in fighting terrorism by creating a system for exchanging information. After talks with Arab League chief Amr Moussa, Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said that good intelligence was crucial for fighting terrorism and that Madrid and the Arab League were to encourage "a more fluid exchange of information."
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