The US & the Mideast

What was originally billed as Dick Cheney's mission to recruit Arab nations' support for ousting Saddam Hussein became a lecture tour on the urgency of dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--with Cheney as the lecturee. By the time he reached Israel the Vice President was promising that the United States would become "very actively engaged" in peace efforts in the Middle East.

Was this a Paul-like conversion on the road not quite to Damascus? Hardly. Whether it evolves into a full-scale US diplomatic effort to achieve a workable peace settlement remains to be seen, but there are new glimmers of hope as other key parties are now speaking out. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's proposal injected a fresh impetus into the bloody Israeli-Palestinian impasse. The Saudi plan--which calls for Israeli withdrawal to its pre-June 1967 borders in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and normalization of relations with the Arab nations--is, of course, nothing new. But its source, a conservative Arab state, carried weight, and its enunciation was timely. Such a vision still offers the best framework for a lasting solution. To the Israelis it promises peace, security and commerce with its neighbors; to the Palestinians it promises an end to the occupation and the establishment of a viable Palestinian nation. As Israeli novelist Amos Oz recently wrote, "Even Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat know the solution: peace between two states, established by the partition of the land roughly in accordance with demographic realities based on Israel's pre-1967 borders."

The United States, for its part, has taken several mildly positive steps, including engineering a UN Security Council resolution for a Palestinian state and Bush's admonition that Sharon's massive incursion into the Palestinian refugee camps was "not helpful." US disapproval stopped Sharon's invasion, and the Prime Minister also dropped his condition that peace talks would proceed only after seven days without Palestinian violence.

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