The Arab peace initiative has been widely misunderstood, and occasionally even deliberately misconstrued. The initiative is not a road map providing a step-by-step approach to an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, nor does it demand of Israel prior acceptance of certain Arab or Palestinian conditions. It does not provide a framework for peace negotiations other than what is already specified in the Quartet "road map that Israel claims it fully supports: Israel's return to the pre-1967 armistice line as the basis for negotiations for alterations, if any, to that line; the location of a capital of a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem; and a resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem. Negotiations over these three principal permanent status issues are not a condition dreamed up by the Saudis or the Arab League. They are the universally accepted ground rules for peace negotiations that even President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have stated categorically Israel cannot alter on its own. Asked in February of 2006 by a reporter for her reaction to a statement by the then acting Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that Israel wanted to set its permanent borders unilaterally, Rice responded: "No one should try and unilaterally predetermine the outcome of a final status agreement. That's to be done at final status. She added that Bush's suggestion, made in an April 14, 2004 letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, that a permanent-status agreement recognize "new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, could be acted upon unilaterally by Israel "in a preemptive and predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status. The Arab initiative leaves the specific terms of a peace agreement to the parties themselves. Whatever terms enable the parties to close the deal will be acceptable to the initiative's sponsors. Their concern is less that Palestinians will be too generous to Israel than that they will be too inflexible. Arab leaders therefore see Olmert's request for a meeting to "clarify the Arab initiative as his way of obtaining normalization with all Arab countries without doing anything for the Palestinians in return. That their skepticism is not misplaced was confirmed by Olmert's boast in one of his many pre-Passover interviews published in Israeli newspapers that if he were to succeed in his demand for a meeting with Arab leaders, Israel would already have gained a significant measure of recognition from all Arab countries. That is why the Arab League has turned Olmert down. Israel's acceptance of the Arab League peace initiative would not limit its ability to protect its vital interests in negotiations with the Palestinians. Saudi officials confirmed in 2002 that their peace initiative does not preclude minor territorial adjustments, by mutual consent, on both sides of the pre-1967 border for security reasons and to enable Israel to incorporate large concentrations of population in the settlements that adjoin the former Green Line. This would entail no more than about 2 percent of Palestine in exchange for comparable territory on Israel's side of the border. Nor would the location of the capital of Palestine in East Jerusalem preclude Israeli sovereignty over the Wailing Wall, the Old City and Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. This Saudi clarification of the peace initiative was confirmed by senior US administration and Saudi officials on February 21, 2002. Olmert's declaration in his pre-Passover interviews that he would not allow "even a single Palestinian refugee to return to his home inside Israel was heartless and gratuitous. Olmert is aware that the Arab League's version of the initiative requires that a solution to the refugee problem receive Israel's agreement. He also knows that in 2002, the Arab League rejected efforts by several Arab countries to include an affirmation of the "right of return in the initiative, and it did so again at the meeting in Riyadh this past February. Olmert's insistence that any reference to UN General Assembly Resolution 194 - which makes no mention of a Palestinian "right of return - be omitted from the Arab initiative is a non-starter. Even Palestinians who agree that most refugees will have to be repatriated in the new Palestinian state will not agree to the elimination from the initiative of a reference to a UN resolution that acknowledges, however inferentially, a measure of Israeli moral responsibility for the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes in the war of 1948. Israeli historians have established beyond any question that such responsibility does indeed exist. Its acknowledgment by Israel - even if it finds it impossible to permit a return of anything more than a symbolic number of refugees - is no less important to the Palestinians than the demand that its own history of persecution and oppression not be denied is to the Jews. There are no grounds for Israel's rejection of the Arab initiative. If after 40 years of occupation, two intifadas and much bloodshed and suffering by both Palestinians and Israelis, Olmert foregoes this opportunity to normalize Israel's relations with the entire Arab world, the only explanation will be that he - like his Likud predecessors Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu - believes a deadlock in the peace process that enables Israel to continue its territorial expansion into the West Bank serves Israel's interests better than a peace agreement. The United States and its Quartet partners will have much to answer for if they continue to aid and abet such madness. Henry Siegmanis a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and was executive head of the American Jewish Congress. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with the Common Ground News Service.
