Justice for the Palestinians

When Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel a decade ago, she was thrown out of the Arab League (although the League’s headquarters were in Cairo). But Egypt has now been accepted back into the Arab fold, and President Hosni Mubarak has just launched a new “peace” proposal. This “ten-point plan,” responding to the Israeli plan to hold West Bank elections, proposes inter alia that all Palestinians, including those in East Jerusalem, be allowed to vote and run for office, that Israel allow international supervision of the process, and that the army withdraw from the “area of polling places” on election day.

There is a certain cheek in Arab countries (which don’t enjoy free elections) telling Israel how to run one, particularly since Israel has already run fair elections in the territories it administers. Nonetheless, Egypt’s “plan” has achieved some success. Yasir Arafat has endorsed it, and Israeli cabinet ministers are embarrassingly divided in their reactions to it. (The PLO Executive Council has also rejected it, but divisions in the PLO are generally resolved by the world’s devoting exclusive attention to Arafat’s reaction.) If this sounds familiar, perhaps it is because this latest Egyptian initiative is but one example of a general Arab strategy in the Arab-Israeli dispute. It is to pretend that Israel’s war is with the Palestinians and to treat the Arab states not as participants but as third parties, favorable to the Palestinians, perhaps, but anxious to foster a reasonable settlement.

When Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel a decade ago, she was thrown out of the Arab League (although the League’s headquarters were in Cairo). But Egypt has now been accepted back into the Arab fold, and President Hosni Mubarak has just launched a new “peace” proposal. This “ten-point plan,” responding to the Israeli plan to hold West Bank elections, proposes inter alia that all Palestinians, including those in East Jerusalem, be allowed to vote and run for office, that Israel allow international supervision of the process, and that the army withdraw from the “area of polling places” on election day.

There is a certain cheek in Arab countries (which don’t enjoy free elections) telling Israel how to run one, particularly since Israel has already run fair elections in the territories it administers. Nonetheless, Egypt’s “plan” has achieved some success. Yasir Arafat has endorsed it, and Israeli cabinet ministers are embarrassingly divided in their reactions to it. (The PLO Executive Council has also rejected it, but divisions in the PLO are generally resolved by the world’s devoting exclusive attention to Arafat’s reaction.) If this sounds familiar, perhaps it is because this latest Egyptian initiative is but one example of a general Arab strategy in the Arab-Israeli dispute. It is to pretend that Israel’s war is with the Palestinians and to treat the Arab states not as participants but as third parties, favorable to the Palestinians, perhaps, but anxious to foster a reasonable settlement.