The Arab summit offers pledges, but these have to be backed up by meaningful actions,writes Nayef Hawatmeh* To be Palestinian is to live with daily bloodshed, death and destruction. It is to suffer the relentless pummeling of the Israeli war machine and the relentless pounding of Arab and international silence, between which you are left with little bar the choice of which way you want to die. It is as though the Arab-Palestinian Canaan has been fated to teach its children the ABCs of death, rather than the ABCs of life for which they have been created, and which their forefathers enriched with a civilisation meant to foster the humanity of man. The US resembles Israel, Bush told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) mafia. How right he is. The US was built on the skulls of native-American Indians, their land and their right to life on that land as Israel rose on mountains of Palestinian skulls, and the subjection of their land and their life on that land. The White House "neo-cons" and Tel Aviv's "Likudists" also share a philosophy that sanctions wholesale murder in the name of counterfeit banners of civilisation and humanitarianism. While Israeli Apaches bombarded Palestinian civilians in Tel Al-Sultan, American Apaches were slaughtering Iraqis in Al-Qaim. Meanwhile, we could still hear the echo of Colin Powell's appeal to Arab foreign ministers in the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea to work towards "democratic" reforms as called for under America's project for a "Greater Middle East", and to submit annual reports to the White House on the progress they have achieved. Our masters in the White House, who never tire of giving us lessons on democracy, maintain that Israel's state terrorism is -- like their war crimes in Iraq -- "legitimate self-defence" and that the Palestinians' and Iraqis' internationally sanctioned defence of their lands and their lives is terrorism. This is why the State Department's Supporting Human Rights and Democracy report makes no mention of the American war crimes in Iraq, the most brutal and revolting of which have been committed against innocent civilians in Abu Ghraib prison. As for Israel's routine and systematic bloodshed and devastation, the report has confined itself to a timid reproach of that government's "policy of punishing innocent civilians in Palestinian occupied territories". Against this backdrop, the fact that the Arab summit met is not in and of itself a great event, just because Arab governments have been able to patch over some of the differences that obstructed their meeting in March. Many thorny and complex issues remain pending, and solutions to these issues require determination and credibility. Herein lies the test of the official Arab order, and its summit's success can only be gauged on the following criterion: Will its resolutions on the three most crucial issues facing the Arab world -- Palestine, Iraq and democratic reform -- be commensurate to the challenges these issues pose? In Palestine, Sharon -- true to form -- has chosen to escalate Palestinian bloodshed as his message to the Arab summit, the massacre at Tel Al-Sultan in Rafah being his coup de grace. Evidently, Sharon, whose plan for disengagement from Gaza was no more than a tactic to deceive international public opinion and cover up his crimes, has revised this plan to provide for a phased withdrawal, the time frame of which would be set or modified at the whim of the generals of the Israeli military establishment. But here is the point that must be stressed: Sharon could never have stepped up his violence against the Palestinian people had it not been for the absolute silence in the Arab world and internationally over his crimes. Sharon's decision to withdraw from Gaza was the logical response to the quagmire into which the occupation has fallen as a result of the battering it received from the Palestinian Intifada and resistance; the absence of international pressure fed his logic that he could withstand the onslaught a little longer, and make his withdrawal as protracted and as painful for the Palestinians as possible. To a large extent, this is the product of the lack of effective Arab and Palestinian action at the official level, which hindered the coalescence of an effective international position against Israeli aggression. The latest meeting of the Quartet illustrates a major dimension of this phenomenon. The Quartet condemned so-called "Palestinian terrorism" and reiterated the White House's favourite refrain on "the right of Israel to defend itself", and in so doing it ensured that all pending issues remained in the hands of the US administration that is the most gung-ho on Israel's aggressive expansionist policies in the history of the US. The danger of placing so much control over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the hands of this US administration resides in the fact that it heeds only the opinions of the Tel Aviv Likudists and the most zealous American pro- Zionists. This camp of opinion rejects the framework of international legitimacy and UN resolutions as the basis for resolving the Arab- Israeli conflict, the most recent of these resolutions being 1544, condemning Israeli aggression and home demolitions in Rafah. It rejects, secondly, the pre-June 1967 borders and the dismantlement of all settlements in the occupied territories as the basis for a settlement, and it refuses to recognise the Palestinian right of return as stipulated under Resolution 194. As a result, any plans or statements to come out of the US that departed from these points served as no more than a propagandistic expedient, to be retracted at a later date. The roadmap is the perfect example. Announced by Bush on 24 June 2002 and internationalised with its adoption by the Quartet on 20 December 2002, the Americans then hastily shoved it in the freezer only to bring it out to thaw on 29 April 2003 after they completed their occupation of Iraq. Then they managed to void it of its most essential substance in the Sharm El-Sheikh and Aqaba summits of 3 and 4 June 2003 by tacitly adopting Sharon's so-called 12 reservations. And the Arabs, instead of campaigning to restore balance and reciprocity to a plan that was born lopsided, found themselves hemmed in beneath the roadmap's crumbling ceiling, until the Bush administration succeeded in putting the plan back into cold storage, after having succeeded once again in excluding the participation of other international powers and paving the way for Sharon's bloodthirsty and expansionist designs. The participants of the Arab summit must resolve not to backtrack on the Arab peace initiative adopted in the Beirut summit of March 2002. They must underscore their commitment to a fair and comprehensive solution that takes as its foundations the implementation of all pertinent international resolutions, including those calling for Israel's full withdrawal from all Palestinian territories occupied in June 1967, for the right of the Palestinian people to an independent, sovereign state with its capital in Jerusalem, and for a solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the provisions of Resolution 194. In Iraq, the Americans have dug themselves in for a long-term occupation and their recent announcement that they will hand over authority to Iraq on 30 June is one big lie. Iraq will never have full sovereignty as long as one US or British soldier remains on its soil. We must caution here against the grave harm being caused by statements issuing from certain official Arab quarters to the effect that the continued US-British military presence in Iraq is essential in order to forestall the violence that will erupt in the vacuum a departure of these forces would create. Arab efforts must focus unanimously on placing full management over the Iraqi crisis under the sole supervision of the UN, which will then oversee the implementation of a real plan to restore sovereignty to the Iraqi people and reconstruct a country devastated by the US-British invasion. The Arab stance on the situation in Iraq still lacks a minimal level of resolve commensurate to the tragedy in Iraq, and the absence of this resolve works to legitimise the perpetuation of the occupation, to fuel the anger of the resistance and to obstruct an effective international stance against the occupation. It is bitterly ironic to see European powers, such as France, Germany and Spain, adopt more progressive positions on this issue than most Arab official quarters. Arab leaders must immediately address this anomaly. They must take firm action to assure the immediate transfer of the management of the Iraqi crisis to the UN and the departure of Anglo-US troops and the handover of power to the Iraqi people. Any Iraqi authority must not be appointed by the US-British occupation and no attempt should be made to impinge on Iraq's territorial integrity. Arab states must further oppose any attempt to impair the right of the Iraqi people to choose their own leaders and to freely reconstruct their executive, legislative and judicial institutions. In view of the fact that most Arab governments lack both the administration and culture for fostering change, they tend to throw up formidable obstacles before any true structural reform, regardless of their recognition of the necessity of such reform in theory. The avenue to true reform does not lead through the preservation of the vested interests of the ruling classes and elites, and if we are to defuse the forthcoming eruptions in all Arab societies it must be taken as axiomatic that reform must inherently establish new bases for the relationship between the institutions of government and the people. Democracy is not a gift that governments bestow on their people; it is an inalienable right that has been usurped for years on end by repressive authoritarian regimes that have cast their societies back before the era of modernist thought, social modernisation and the age of access to information. Setting the shape and pace of reform in accordance with the agenda of the American administration will only aggravate tensions and generate more debacles. True reform is that which helps render the Arab peoples immune to American projects aimed at entrenching the hegemony of US, and its ally Israel, over the region. As no such project is destined to pass through the White House kitchen where reform recipes are inevitably concocted by pro-Zionist pressure groups, it can only succeed through reconciliation between ruling elites and their peoples. This requires restoring the trust of power to the people as exercised through properly democratic systems of government. Given that politics is action rather than idle wishing, the Palestinian people do not hold out great hopes for the aftermath of the Arab summit. However, I am one of those who believe that change is inevitable and that the results of the Arab summit, whether positive or negative, will define the contours of the struggle for years to come. Domestic, regional and international circumstances are such that ambiguous words and procrastination will only have one result, which is to keep the embers burning beneath the surface until the slightest gust sparks fire in societies that lack even the most elementary democratic freedoms and forms of government. Your majesties and your excellencies, Arab heads of state, we hope that this time your pledge of solidarity with the Palestinians and Iraqis will not be in ink only, which will only dry as Palestinian and Iraqi blood continues to flow. * The writer is the secretary-general of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
