By brokering a deal to end Palestinian-Palestinian strife Egyptian diplomacy is placing the ball squarely in Israel's court, writes Ibrahim Nafie Over the past few days Egyptian diplomacy has been working strenuously to promote an agreement between the government of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and the Palestinian opposition factions, in accordance with which the factions will pledge to halt all acts of armed resistance for a set period in order to give the political settlement plan known as the roadmap a chance to be implemented. It has been a race with time. The longer it takes the various Palestinian parties to reach an agreement the smaller the prospects of implementing the internationally sponsored opportunity to break the cycle of violence and set the course for peace. Exacerbating the time factor is the fact that the first phase of the roadmap -- calling for a halt to violence, the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces to their positions prior to the outbreak of the Intifada, a cessation of their assassination of Palestinian figures and home demolitions, and measures intended to alleviate the day to day hardship and harassment of the Palestinian people -- had been scheduled for completion by the end of May. In addition, the concern that the US administration is now dedicating to solving the Middle East conflict, after a long reluctance to get involved, will soon dwindle as President Bush turns his attention to the presidential campaign due to begin early next year. A major portion of Egypt's diplomatic efforts has had to focus on containing critical situations that could have had disastrous consequences. It is no secret that the sudden visit of Chief of Egyptian General Intelligence General Omar Suleiman to Palestine last Wednesday succeeded in capping just such a situation. The Palestinian prime minister, who has been striving assiduously for the realisation of the rights of the Palestinian people, had come under vicious and unjustifiable attack from various Palestinian quarters. Hamas leaders declared their intention to sever the dialogue with the Palestinian government and Israel mounted an assassination attempt against Hamas leader Abdul-Aziz Al-Rantisi. Faced with attempts from all sides to undermine his efforts, Abu Mazen felt that he had no choice but to tender his resignation and leave the field open to whoever might want to assume the helm in the Palestinian battle to resume negotiations, or conflict, with the Israeli government. Egypt, which has been closely monitoring developments in Palestine, knew that Abu Mazen's resignation would deliver a powerful blow to the Palestinian cause, especially after everything that had been achieved in the recent Sharm El-Sheikh summit and reaffirmed in the subsequent Aqaba summit. Omar Suleiman therefore sped off to the PA territories for an intensive round of meetings with Abu Mazen, President Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian officials. Egypt's message to all the Palestinian parties was clear. Arafat's decision to entrust Abu Mazen with the leadership of the Palestinian government was motivated by patriotic aims and the prime minister's resignation would only serve the interests of the enemies of the Palestinian cause. The Israeli prime minister cannot tolerate Palestinians in a position of leadership who know how to address the US administration and the world abroad and who enjoy the respect and admiration of all. Palestinians of such calibre strike at the very heart of his tendentious rhetoric that seeks to taint the Palestinian people as intrinsically terrorist and claims that Palestinian opposition factions are bent on violence for the sake of violence and therefore incapable of entertaining ideas to restore calm and peaceful negotiating processes. It was therefore vital for the Palestinians to restore order to their domestic front and for the opposition factions to rally behind the continued leadership of Abu Mazen who has the support and confidence of international powers, including the US, Egypt and the other Arab nations that participated in Sharm El- Sheikh. Nor am I revealing a confidence when I say that Egyptian diplomatic efforts succeeded in containing a potentially explosive situation in the Palestinian territories following the recent suicide bombing in West Jerusalem. The operation triggered popular anger in Israel and fuelled the desire of right-wing forces to take massive retaliatory action. The intensive contacts Egypt made with the various parties worked to check the crisis on both sides. Apart from crisis control, the major thrust of Egyptian diplomacy has been to end the heated debate among Palestinian factions over the question of a truce and their position towards the Abu Mazen government. The longer this controversy continues the greater its toll on the Palestinian cause and the prospects of realising Palestinian rights. The persistence of the debate will be read elsewhere to mean that the Palestinian factions reject the notion of a truce and that they are therefore to be held responsible for the failure to implement the roadmap, which, incidentally, was described by such prominent and respected Palestinian figures like Farouk Al-Qadoumi as better than Oslo. Certainly, it suits certain Israeli circles to portray a climate of Palestinian turmoil to divert attention away from any responsibility Israel may have in adding yet another file to that already bloated Palestinian-Arab archive headed "forfeited historic opportunities". Perhaps it was the Aqaba summit that contributed to creating that erroneous image of Palestinian disarray. Abu Mazen was perfectly correct when he said that his purpose in the Aqaba summit was to reaffirm his government's commitments preparatory to getting the roadmap rolling and that this summit was not the occasion to press for Palestinian rights. Nevertheless, some took advantage of his call to halt the "militarisation of the Intifada", charging that he had contributed to bolstering the opinion of the US administration and certain circles in Congress that the problem on the Palestinian-Israeli track begins and ends with the Palestinian factions, as though their resistance activities were undertaken purely for their own purposes rather than in the interests of liberating occupied territories and fighting for the rights of their people. Others claimed that while the Palestinian prime minister left Aqaba laden with bundles of pledges and obligations, his Israeli counterpart was not similarly encumbered. The US president, who had responded to assorted Israeli pressures and referred to Israel as a Jewish state, asked of Sharon no more than to "deal with" the problem of Israeli settlements. He had not demanded a firm commitment on this matter, or on other issues to which Israel should be bound in the first phase of the roadmap. As a result the Aqaba summit left a residue of circumspection, deftly exploited by the Israeli government which hastened to place demands on Abu Mazen based on its own reading of what took place in Aqaba. It converted the restoration of calm, or the "halt to violence", for example, into the need for the Palestinian Authority to dismantle and disarm Palestinian resistance organisations and to criminalise the advocacy of resistance in general. In spite of Abu Mazen's denial that he had not made any concessions to that effect and in spite of Egypt's attempts to soften the impact of the fallout from Aqaba on the resistance organisations so that Palestinian- Palestinian dialogue could resume, Hamas declared that it would sever its dialogue with the PA unless Abu Mazen retracted the pledges he made in Aqaba. Soon afterwards the Al-Aqsa Brigade, a subsidiary of Fatah, joined Hamas, proclaiming the need to sustain armed struggle against Israeli occupation and refusing to enter into dialogue with the Palestinian government. As tensions mounted in Palestine, aggravated by Arafat's statement that Sharon had not offered the Palestinians anything new in Aqaba, which some took as implicit criticism of Abu Mazen's performance, forces in the PA government and the factions began to appeal for reason. Among these were the leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who called for a dialogue between the various resistance organisations so that they could unify their position and enter into dialogue with the government collectively. In tandem with these efforts, an Egyptian delegation, headed by Deputy Chief of Intelligence Mustafa El-Beheiri, went to Palestine with an initiative aimed at reconciling the conflicting positions. Essentially, the proposal entailed that the Palestinians agree to halt all acts of armed resistance inside Israel and the occupied territories for a period of a year on condition that Israel cease its policies of aggression and assassination against the Palestinian people and resistance leaders. The Egyptian delegation met with representatives of all Palestinian factions and resistance organisations. Clearly the Egyptian initiative represents an attempt to cut through to the core of the problem, which is Israel's ongoing belligerency against the Palestinian people. Indeed, we can say that the initiative aimed to shift the onus to the Israel camp by rendering the Palestinian truce conditional upon the cessation of Israeli violence against the Palestinians. Such was the progress that Egyptian mediation helped produce in the Palestinian-Palestinian dialogue that observers predict that the Palestinian government will announce a truce in the context of a general agreement in accordance with which Israel will refrain from all attacks against the Palestinians and, should Israeli intelligence have any information on possible suicide operations, it will furnish such information to Palestinian authorities so that they can handle the situation. This formula will deprive Israel of the pretexts it has used to justify its so-called preemptive assassination campaign against members of various Palestinian organisations. According to the information currently at my disposal, the Palestinian factions have yet to declare any explicit commitment to the truce that the Palestinian government will announce. However, the groups are to meet in Cairo soon, perhaps at the end of this week, in order to agree upon a joint formula which, when signed, will constitute their official approval to the principle of a truce. Egypt's diplomatic drive is grounded in its perception of the need to capitalise on opportunities currently available for reaching a solution to the Palestinian cause. A number of factors have combined to make this possible: perhaps the most important is the current attention Washington is dedicating to promoting a settlement on the Palestinian-Israeli track, which resides at the heart of the Middle East conflict. This concern, moreover, comes within the context of an international drive to resolve the conflict. Devised and sponsored by a committee of delegates from the US, the EU, Russia and the UN, which has become known as the Quartet, the roadmap has set its sights on the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005. Also encouraging are the sustained efforts to create a concrete monitoring mechanism along the lines proposed by France and the US. In this regard Egypt has made it abundantly clear to the US that the success of current efforts to restore calm so that the roadmap can proceed is contingent upon the principle of reciprocity in the honouring of commitments. It is Egypt's belief that we need to keep our sights firmly trained on the essentials, and what is essential at this juncture is a cease-fire, guaranteed on the Israeli side by Washington and guaranteed on the Palestinian side by Egypt. On the other hand it is difficult to imagine that the Sharon government will reciprocate for the simple reason that it has no desire to implement the roadmap. We recall that it was only under compulsion that this government approved the roadmap, as was made apparent by Sharon's appeal to his cabinet to vote in favour of the plan in order to avoid a clash with Washington. At the same time the Palestinian- Palestinian crisis has inspired Israel's supporters in the US Congress to push for actions detrimental to the Palestinians. In addition to the usual calls to expel or otherwise marginalise Arafat, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, proposed that the US send troops as part of an international force to fight Hamas and what he described as other terrorist organisations impeding the cause of peace in the Middle East. It is my belief that Egypt's diplomatic drive over the past few days will have worked to silence such calls. With the PA's declaration of a truce, later approved by the resistance organisations in Cairo, the Palestinians will have done their part in setting the stage for the efforts of US Envoy John Wolf, head of the monitoring team for the implementation of the roadmap.
