Time to end the charade

By SALIM MANSUR

Every American president, beginning with Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, has been tempted with the idea of an international conference on the Middle East for negotiating the final comprehensive settlement of the long festering conflict between Arabs and Jews.

Now entering the last year of his two terms in the Oval Office, President George W. Bush also has been similarly tempted.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced the United States will hold an international conference next month in Annapolis, Maryland, with the purpose of establishing a Palestinian state.

The history of such conferences is contrary to the promise of bringing an end to the Arab-Israeli dispute in the Middle East.

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, recognizing the futility of such gatherings, nixed President Jimmy Carter's idea of an international Middle East conference in Geneva by going to Jerusalem in November 1977. There he engaged directly with prime minister Menachem Begin of Israel to reach an accord between their two states.

It is apparent that calling for an international conference on the Middle East to broker final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians is a default position of the American administrations when all the antecedent efforts have failed.

American administrations unfailingly have felt the obligation of being fair brokers between Arabs and Jews since William Rogers, the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, floated the idea of a comprehensive peace plan in 1969.

President Bill Clinton fruitlessly invested a great amount of his time -- even into the last weeks of his term in office -- to broker the final agreement between Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister.

President Bush became the first American leader to openly call for a Palestinian state when he presented a timetable and clearly stated plan for Palestinians to follow in reaching their goal.

But the truth of the matter is that there is nothing to broker when one party, the Palestinians and their Arab-Muslim financiers and supporters, remains committed to the destruction of the other party, the Israelis.

Instead of another international conference the Americans would do better in accepting the obvious -- that a Palestinian state exists, and it is called Jordan with its population being overwhelmingly Palestinian.

Another Arab state squeezed on American insistence between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean -- its population hostile to the West and readily embracing every passing totalitarian ideology in its declared aim of harming Jews and destroying Israel -- instead of being a recipe for any final settlement, will be the source of unremitting conflict in the region and terrorism beyond.

Moreover, Palestinians killing each other while continuing to be supportive of terrorism -- in addition to the appalling record of Arab-Muslim regimes disregarding human rights and respect for minorities -- make them undeserving of the amount of attention provided by American administrations in contrast to the level of American support extended to the equal, if not more deserving, claims of the people suffering in Darfur, Burma, Tibet and Zimbabwe. Diplomacy not infrequently is trading politely in falsehood.

It is time for Americans to politely tell the truth and end the charade of demanding Israeli concessions for Arab-Muslim doublespeak where "peace" means, as Arafat explained to his people, temporary truce in the war for "liberating" all of Palestine which includes Israel.