Syria is to attend the US-brokered Annapolis conference tomorrow, guaranteeing broad Arab support for an ambitious but risky attempt to relaunch peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians after years of violence and deadlock.
Confirmation that President Bashar al-Assad is sending his deputy foreign minister means that the Maryland meeting will be the best-attended Middle Eastern summit since the Madrid conference in 1991 – although the stakes are higher and expectations far lower.
President Bush said last night that the broad attendance "demonstrates the international resolve to seize this important opportunity to advance freedom and peace in the Middle East".
The news came as Israeli and Palestinian officials worked against the clock to try to agree an elusive joint declaration on principles for peace amid near-universal gloom about the long-term prospects of reaching a workable solution.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, arrived in Washington yesterday declaring their determination to make progress, but acknowledged the difficulties. "I have come in order to fulfil the desire of the Palestinian people for their own state," said Abbas.
Both leaders are meeting Bush separately at the White House today and again on Wednesday. Olmert told reporters he hoped the summit would launch negotiations on "all the core issues that will result in a solution of two states for two peoples".
But in the Gaza Strip, sealed off from Israel and controlled by Abbas’s bitter enemy, Hamas, thousands of women demonstrated against Annapolis, waving banners that read: "The enemy knows only the language of force." Iran condemned the summit as "supporting the Zionist occupiers".
Diplomats said Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, was trying last night to bridge the gaps. Negotiations have been deadlocked for weeks over whether the document should address the final borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, Jerusalem, and refugees. Israel wants to keep it vague; the Palestinians want detail and a timetable.
The idea is to jumpstart talks aimed at creating a Palestinian state before Bush leaves office in January 2009. These will be the first substantive negotiations since the collapse of talks in the dying days of the Clinton administration. That was followed by the second intifada, which claimed 4,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives.
The question is, what can happen beyond tomorrow’s ritual speeches? Both leaders face powerful opposition – Abbas from Hamas and Olmert from coalition partners and opposition parties against concessions on settlements, Jerusalem and easing restrictions in the West Bank.
Arab attendance provides one glimmer of hope. Syria had insisted it would only come if there was discussion of the Golan Heights, still occupied 40 years after the 1967 Middle East war. The country’s official news agency said Syria had been told there would be a session on reviving peace talks with Israel.
Faysal Mekdad, Syria’s deputy foreign minister, is a senior enough figure to avoid a snub, but not so high-level as to constitute a ringing endorsement of the event.
Dialogue with Syria was one of the recommendations of the Hamilton-Baker commission for the aftermath of the Iraq war. Damascus backs Hamas and Hizbullah in Lebanon, both enemies of the US and Israel. Under US pressure, Saudi Arabia is sending its foreign minister, the veteran Prince Saud al-Faisal, although he made clear there would be no "normalisation" or handshakes with Israeli leaders.
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We have not given up
The Palestinian people will not yield to the west’s cynical pressure on them to surrender
Karma NabulsiMonday November 26, 2007The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,2217017,00.html
If you want bad symbolism, you need look no further than the venue. The US naval academy of Annapolis is the current representation of unrestrained global supremacy, from where young cadets are being sent forth to occupy Arab land by force of arms. Appropriate place, then, for the US to host the meeting between Palestinian officials and the Israeli state, with every important government and international institution in obedient attendance. No one has misunderstood the nature of this meeting or is vaguely fooled by what is taking place. What we have at Annapolis is yet another ultimatum to the Palestinian people to surrender their sovereign rights.The language of the Middle East peace process has become utterly weary, intellectually bankrupted; embarrassing. The tarnished trickery of those tired catchphrases – "last chance for peace", "painful compromises", "moderates against extremists" – is now worn so thin a child would not be taken in. There is no peace process, and hasn’t been one for a very long time. It is no secret this conference won’t bring an improvement in the intolerable status quo. It is a meeting to legitimise that status quo. And all this dust and fracas because the leaders of Europe are fed up, and feel they can no longer face the obstinate, immovable strength of the unilateral US and Israeli positions.
More worrying than the acquiescence of our political leaders is the intense defeatism now pervading the mainstream media. They, too, are apparently too exhausted to inform their readers of the shocking reality in occupied Palestine and the refugee camps – especially the unbelievable horror of blockaded Gaza – and report fully, accurately and consistently the long list of Israel’s daily illegalities. True, it has now become nearly indescribable. Why report that three times as many political prisoners were arrested by Israel as were released in its "goodwill gesture" for Annapolis? Somehow, the colossal number of outrageous facts cancel each other out – one can’t keep repeating, especially into a political void. Fed up with telling the same grim story over and over without a glimmer of change from their governments, they have finally accepted the hegemonic version signalling their defeat.
Our leaders, our pundits, are worn out, defeated: they simply want it over with. They no longer believe they can do anything to help the Palestinians gain their freedom, or even have a responsibility to do so. And if Britain, with its nuclear weapons and modern military, its defence treaties and international alliances, its centuries-old democratic institutions, has not been able to stand up to the current US order, and instead has buckled into participating in an unpopular illegal war, then why won’t the Palestinians (with no sovereign state or army to protect them, blockaded, impoverished, hemmed in on all sides by a regional superpower, locked into prisons, bantustans, behind borders, walls, checkpoints, and refugee camps) give up? The desire emanating throughout European ministries for the Palestinians to surrender is now palpable.
Yes, these are tired politicians without valour who are holding the reins of power in Palestine, the Arab world and the west. And there has never been a more visible rupture between governments and ordinary citizens than we witness today. But this also reveals a more hopeful reality: ordinary citizens all over the world have not given up on the Palestinians, and the Palestinians have not given up on themselves. They are organising to create a national consensus and democratic representation, calling for steadfastness and courage: this general will is manifest everywhere today except Annapolis.
In Venice the astonishing art of young Emily Jacir, which paid tribute to the sublime in the Palestinian history of freedom, won her the Golden Lion at the Biennale, and demonstrated to the world that the undimmed Palestinian heart is true and free. Today in Villiers-sur-Loir, a village near Paris, more than 100 young Palestinians from every continent overcame the obstacles of visas, checkpoints and lack of passports to join a remarkable initiative, the Palestinian Youth Network, to "prove that the cause of Palestine remains in the hearts and consciousness of this new generation of Palestinians throughout the world" and to further discussions on a common political platform. Today our eyes are not on Annapolis, for there is no future there. Today they are on Villiers-sur-Loir.
· Karma Nabulsi is a fellow in politics and international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University