PFP op-ed in News & Observer
27 December 2004
PFP op-ed in News & Observer
The following op-ed from Partners for Peace is published in the News & Observer of Monday, December 27, 2004. The North Carolina newspaper has a circulation of over 160,000, mostly in the area of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.
The sentences about Tony Blair originally read: “And Tony Blair, Mr. Bush’s favorite poodle, must find some bark. He has been played by this president time and again.” It now reads: “And Britain’s Tony Blair must find some bark.”
POINT OF VIEW
Published: Dec 27, 2004
One-sided pressure from Bush
By MICHAEL F. BROWN
WASHINGTON — The message of most of the world to President Bush about Middle East peacemaking does not appear to be getting through: It’s the occupation. It’s the occupation. It’s the occupation.
Somehow, Bush still is laboring under the misguided belief that the major issue is Palestinian democracy.
On Dec. 1 in Canada, he backtracked on his own Road Map to Peace. “Achieving peace in the Holy Land,” he said, “is not just a matter of pressuring one side or the other on the shape of a border or the site of a settlement. This approach has been tried before without success. As we negotiate the details of peace, we must look to the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy.”
In fact, Bush’s own Road Map calls very clearly for a freeze on settlement activity to take place simultaneously with Palestinian security measures. If the president cannot provide potential Palestinian negotiators with some glimmer of hope of American evenhandedness, then they will come to see further negotiation as pointless. In effect, such open American acquiescence in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s brazen plans for the West Bank will consign both Palestinians and Israelis to more misery and bloodshed.
American taxpayers hand over good money for the president to receive solid advice from top advisers. In good conscience they should not allow the president to appear unaware of the fundamental grievances of the Palestinian people. By his recent words in Canada and the Nov. 11 invitation of Israeli hard-liner Natan Sharansky to the White House, Bush indicates the major issues before him are Palestinian democracy and economic development.
Yet even were the Palestinians to develop the highest-functioning democracy in the world with their elections next month, they would still not be free. Freedom from belligerent occupation, in Palestinian eyes, rightly trumps elections. And it certainly trumps economic development.
Make no mistake, both democracy and development are important. But for Palestinians the major immediate issue is how to get out from under the boot of Israeli subjugation.
What is needed now is clear language from the other three members of the Quartet — the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. And Britain’s Tony Blair must find some bark.
The other members of the Quartet must insist that Bush not forever seek new reasons for inaction. The death of Yasser Arafat — Bush and Sharon’s ever-handy excuse for doing nothing constructive — should make new opportunities more difficult to skirt. Instead, the president seems content to flit from roadblock to roadblock — of his own making. In the midst of Palestinian elections scheduled for Jan. 9, the president should seize the moment to speak not just of democracy but of Palestinian freedom and an end to the Israeli occupation.
Imagine the absurdity of our holding elections every two years with colonizing British troops still marching through our towns and cities with bayonets drawn.
• • •
The signs now available suggest that Bush will not make any such call to end the Israeli occupation. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that he is too beholden to a political/religious base that believes God gave all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan — and more — to Israel and the Jewish people. As has been well observed, here God is reduced from the role of vindicator of peace and justice to the status of real estate agent.
This resurgent force in American political life, led by men such as the House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the Rev. Pat Robertson, could well doom peace efforts for the Holy Land by thwarting security and justice not just for Jews, but for Muslims and Christian Palestinians as well.
Middle East peace calls for strong leadership from an American president willing to stand up and say not only must Palestinian terrorism end, but the Israeli occupation and myriad human rights violations that go along with it must end as well. An appropriately courageous president would also note that the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the last 56 years must be justly addressed.
Bush, to date, has lacked the courage to speak hard truths to our Israeli allies. Perhaps even more disturbing is that at a time of real opportunity, he is backpedaling on previous Road Map requirements of Israel in favor of exclusively pressuring the subject and occupied Palestinian people.
This is not moral leadership. It is recklessness.
(Michael F. Brown is executive director of Partners for Peace in Washington.)
