Ayman El-Amir* considers whether the 19th gathering of Arab heads of state was an exercise in grandstanding, or a gathering with substance Arab leaders closed their summit meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by opening up a Pandora's box of explosive issues which trouble the restive Arab region and the wider Middle East. For all their spirited articulations on various issues, particularly the Palestinian problem and its trappings, Arab leaders did not spell out a plan of action that could back up their demands beyond designating a follow-up Arab quartet to resuscitate the Middle East peace process. This show of Arab unanimity was an easy achievement on non-controversial issues; what remains to be seen is how the Arabs will deal with Israeli intransigence and US foot-dragging as it enters the whirlpool of the presidential election campaign. The initial Arab public reaction was sceptical about what Arab leaders can achieve. The summit conference reconfirmed the Saudi 2002 comprehensive peace initiative, based on the principle of the exchange of occupied Arab lands for peace. This builds on the same platform that served as a basis for the peace agreement signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979. What is at stake now is a just and lasting solution of the Palestinian problem, a complex issue given there is no political consensus in Israel to exchange the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 for peace. What further complicates the problem, from the Israeli point of view, is the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and lands in present-day Israel under General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. The universality of this right, which Israel now denies, is borne out by the fact that the US, Israel's staunchest ally, consistently voted in support of this resolution, from 1948 until the last two years of the Reagan administration when it changed its voting position to abstention. The right of return is the central issue that no Arab or Palestinian leader can decide. Nothing short of an international referendum that could poll all six million Palestinians in the occupied territories, refugees in Arab countries and others living as émigrés throughout the world can satisfactorily settle this issue. It is also consistent with the exercise of the universal right of self-determination. But General Assembly Resolution 194 also provides for appropriate compensation for those Palestinians who may not wish to return to their homeland in Palestine. Some may want to exercise this option. The same issue is relevant to Israel's definition of its very existence as a Jewish state. From the perspective of the Zionist movement, Israel was created to gather Jews from all over the world. At the same time, Israel denies indigenous Palestinians the right of return it grants to non-indigenous Jews under the 1950 Law of Return and the Nationality Law passed by the Knesset in 1952. That makes Israel not only a racist state based on discrimination but colonialist power the survival of which depends entirely on military superiority and territorial expansion. That strategy provided no guarantee for any empire in history, from the Roman to the British. US imperial aspirations in Iraq are also getting a taste of that reality. Israel's triple reaction was: no return to the 4 June 1967 armistice lines, no withdrawal from occupied East Jerusalem and no return of indigenous Palestinians to their homes or land. Israel's choice is that territorial expansion and firepower is the best guarantee of peace, at least until the Arabs come to their senses and submit to Israeli conditions. Under a peaceful settlement, Israel is willing to allow the creation of a tourist-attraction -- a Palestinian state that would not be very different from American- Indian reservations in the US. With US support, Israel has also redefined Arab territories under its control from the terminology of the UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, which considers them as "occupied territories", to the more convenient term of "disputed territories" that can be negotiated, pretty much like the Argentine Falkland/Malvinas islands. This is it that the Arab summit's agenda for peace, described as a strategic option, is rendered a non-starter. But is the situation back to the 30-year-old Israeli occupation status quo? Not quite. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the 1967 War, particularly in the last decade. The primary factor is that despite Israeli attempts at annihilation, the Palestinian people have refused to submit to the destiny of the American-Indians. They revolted; they resisted and they paid a very high price for their resistance. Israeli brutality in suppressing the Palestinians has shattered the moral underpinnings it once claimed as a Phoenix born of the Holocaust. It laid bare its colonialist ambition for territorial expansion that would encompass Eretz Israel under the false guise of security. It has also been increasingly demonstrated that Israel is not as invincible as it appears and the Arabs are not as helpless as they have been led to believe. The Israeli war against Hizbullah in Lebanon in July-August 2006 drove the point home but the full implications of that war have not been accounted for yet. The geopolitical regional situation, too, is undergoing profound changes with the defeat of the US in Iraq and the rise of headstrong Iran to face up to US domination of the region and to fill in the political vacuum left by splintered Arab nationalism. The outcome of the Arab summit seems to suggest that the US once again has failed to persuade wary Arab leaders that Iran, not Israel, is the immediate threat to their survival through a fabricated Shia-Sunni conflict. In 1954, the then US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles tried, but also failed, to convince the then rising Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser that Soviet communism and not Israel that was the mortal threat to the future of his Arab nation. The Arabs did not buy it then and they do not seem willing to buy into another version of it now. To pick up the pieces of its failed Middle East policy, the Bush administration has crafted the so- called axis of moderate Arab states, consisting of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arabs Emirates, the main purpose of which is to confront Iran. While these countries have a stake in regional stability it is unlikely that they want to complicate their edgy domestic situations by acting as pawns of Israeli-driven US policy in the region. They well remember the Baghdad Pact of the 1950s and the fate of its shareholders. That should tell US policymakers something about their banana-republic strategy in the Middle East. Some warning shots were even fired from Riyadh over the head of the Bush administration. Iraqi President Jalal Talibani called the US "presence" in Iraq occupation. King Abdullah bin Abdel-Aziz, the summit's host, went even further by calling it "illegal occupation" -- an audacious statement that raised some eyebrows in the Washington, which demanded an explanation. Traditionally reticent Saudi leaders rarely make firebrand statements, but King Abdullah has a reputation of being more outspoken than others. Whether these statements eventually prove to be warning shots or firecrackers will be judged by what follows from the summit, particularly with regard to the Palestinian problem. Where will the Riyadh declaration go from here? Most likely it will move in circles. Initially, it will build into multiple negotiating quartets that will run into Israeli manoeuvres, and possibly negotiations, that seek to extract more concessions from the Palestinians with the help of European-US pressure. Should the proposed Arab quartet try to move the issue of comprehensive peace, including Palestinian rights, back to the UN Security Council and inject new elements into resolutions 242 or 338, it will certainly run into a double-barrelled US-British veto. It is worth remembering that 2007 is the run-up to US presidential elections next year and the Jewish lobby's political blackmail machine is in full swing. No presidential hopeful would dare articulate any policy position that differs from Israeli-dictated conditions. Israel knows that as much as do America's presidential aspirants. The dismal failure of US policies in the Middle East should leave Arab leaders with a sense of the limits of American power and the depth of Israeli vulnerability. But more important, it should teach them a lasting lesson about the scope of their own power if, and when, they liberate themselves from dependence on the illusion of US power. Then the 19th Arab summit conference may well deserve the title of the summit to end all summits. * The writer is former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC. He also served as director of UN Radio and Television in New York.
