What the Arab Press is Saying About the Israel-Palestinian Crisis
By Franz Schurmann, Pacific News Service, May 23, 2001

In recent weeks, our picture of the situation in the Middle East has come to include, to some extent, concerns long expressed in the Arab world. The catalyst seems to be the Mitchell report, which calls for an end to Israel's policy of expanding settlements, and its place in the complex of power and history in the region. PNS Editor Franz Schurmann, professor emeritus of history and sociology at UC-Berkeley, has traveled widely in the Middle East and reads the Arab- and Farsi-language press.

A few weeks ago, American media coverage of the war between Israelis and Palestinians was largely limited to the daily body count.

At the same time, by contrast, the Arabic press was warning that a broader, regional conflict could easily erupt "from Morocco to Muscat."

Now, the American media have discovered the powerful "Mitchell report" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- and the counter-power of Ariel Sharon, who rejects its key demand that Israel freeze all settlement expansion.

By contrast, the Arabic press has left talk of a wider war behind and writes of hope for some sort of peace settlement if Bush uses the Mitchell proposals to check Sharon (perhaps, even, they add hopefully, checkmate him).

"Finally, America is doing something for the Arabs!" was the title of a piece by Waleed Abi Murshid in the May 20 issue of the As-Sharq al-Ausat

He started with a statement that the Israeli- Palestinian conflict now revolves around a "seamless ring" of three questions. The three are:

(1) Does Ariel Sharon really want a settlement of the conflict?

(2) Can the Arabs really come up with a comprehensive resistance to Israel?

(3) Can the Bush administration finally decide to bring about a just peace in the region?

All three are inseparably linked. Murshid quotes a top Israeli general, Moshe Yalon, who admitted "the violence won't end until we reach an agreement with the Palestinians." That suggests the Israeli military recognizes it is not possible to subdue the Intifada by bombing and killing Palestinians.

On the second question, he simply observed that Arab resistance to Israel goes up and down depending on Washington's stance on Israel.

On the third question, he noted that the Bush administration, by distancing itself from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, has given the Arabs a boost they are making good use of.

In effect, Waleed Abi Murshid says that the seamless ring is putting great pressures on Israel. One comes from within the core of Israeli power, its army, whose generals apparently are no longer confident they can win the war against the Palestinians. A second pressure comes from Israel's three key Arab neighbors, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. And the third comes from a significant change in US policy -- Washington no longer sees Israel as the center of its Middle Eastern policies.

Even if Arafat and Sharon reach agreement, the violence will not end, according to Hadi al-Husseini, one of the As-Sharq al-Ausat's top women commentators.

The reason, she explained, is the Palestinian "Nakba" -- cataclysm in Arabic -- the term used by Palestinians to designate what happened to them in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out of Palestine then, and their descendants still live in refugee camps spread over the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The Nakba is the source of both the first and second "Intifada" -- a term that means "upheaval from below."

Hadi al-Husseini notes that on the 53rd anniversary of Nakba, Yaser Arafat was in Cairo urging Palestinians to continue the Intifada -- not in Gaza or the West Bank where the Palestinian death toll is rising. She believes this is because Arafat cannot end the Intifada and could not even if he wanted to. In fact, he has distanced himself from his own security forces that have been systematically assassinated by the Israelis.

Hadi al-Husseini quotes Dr. Khalil Shiqaqi as saying the Intifada has taken on a dynamic of its own and could go on for another two or three years.

Arafat is in a difficult spot, Shiqaqi says, because he thinks the Egyptian-Jordanian peace plan will succeed if he supports it and Israel abides by it.

The core of this plan is the Mitchell report. And its core is a halt to settlement expansion. This refers to the Oslo accords of 1993, when Israel agreed to draw back on the east to the UN-determined 1967 boundaries.

But Ariel Sharon launched a counterattack from his post as minister of construction by seeding one colony after the other in the Occupied Territories. Sharon regards the Palestinians as a secondary people who can easily be ruled. Sharon has rejected the Mitchell Report's call for a freeze. To him, stopping settlement construction would be to pull down the pillars of Zionism.

The word Nakba, after 53 years of silence, has finally appeared in the American media. Israel no longer is so central in the minds of Americans as it once was. The Mitchell report will make this new public opinion trend even stronger.

If the Nakba becomes the focus, then we must face the possibility that the Intifada will continue even if a new agreement is reached and Sharon falls from power.

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