Now Abdullah is doing more than wishing. He’s launched an initiative that’s raised more hopes among Israelis and Arabs than seemed possible a month ago–and, alas, more than seem justified today. No, he’s not planning to go to Jerusalem to make peace the way Egyptian President Anwar Sadat did a generation ago. Nor is he planning to invite Israelis to Riyadh for public talks. And even as the rhetoric of negotiations gained sudden momentum last week, so did the carnage in the occupied territories. After a suicide attack by a Palestinian woman injured three Israeli soldiers, Israel’s tanks and helicopters moved into two densely populated refugee camps on the West Bank. It was the worst escalation yet in fighting that has raged for 17 months; among the 20 Palestinian dead was a 9-year-old Palestinian girl. A second suicide bomber struck Saturday night in Jerusalem, killing at least nine people, including a 1-year-old.
Yet if there’s any real hope for this peace initiative, desperation may be the key. “It’s launched at a moment when there is so much hunger for some way out that it has a real impact,” says a European official who was in on talks with Abdullah last week. The first mention seemed offhand, almost accidental. In a Feb. 17 column by The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, Abdullah let himself be quoted saying he’d drafted a proposal for full Arab normalization with Israel in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories in accordance with U.N. resolutions.
Yasir Arafat, surrounded by Israeli tanks in Ramallah, jumped at the idea. Even conservative Israelis were careful not to sound too negative, and liberals were exultant. European Union foreign-policy czar Javier Solana seemed especially anxious to find a way out of the current impasse, where every bombing or killing is a reason not to talk. He rushed to Riyadh for consultations. CIA Director George Tenet and the State Department’s top Mideast diplomat followed in order to take their own measure of Abdullah’s proposals. “In Arabia,” says veteran Saudi diplomat Hassan Yassin, “what was just talk over coffee yesterday can be ‘Let’s go ahead and do it’ today.”
In practical terms, as diplomats understand it, the Saudi initiative would try to pick up talks where the Clinton administration left them at Taba in January of last year. That is a very long way from anything Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been willing to consider. But added to the mix would be the promise of a collective peace with the whole Arab world, a guarantee of security the likes of which Israel has never seen. As an Arab summit approaches in Beirut later this month, “I think I can get all the Arabs behind the idea,” Abdullah told Solana.
Is this a propaganda ploy? Unabashedly. Since September 11, many Americans have come to see Saudi Arabia as a sort of modern-day Mordor, homeland of evil, where Osama bin Laden and most of his suicide hijackers were born and raised. “Now in one stroke we’ve gone from being a country that harbors extremism to a peacemaker,” says a Saudi who knows the crown prince. But there’s more to it than that. “We needed to shock the system,” says another. “We needed to change the dynamic of what’s been happening between the Israelis and Palestinians.”
Part of the problem is that Arafat just can’t make peace alone. He’s spent his entire career fighting to make sure that he and only he could negotiate with Israel. But as Clinton discovered, Arafat can’t bring himself to sign on that dotted line, especially where Jerusalem’s concerned. He needs to know the rest of the Arab world is behind him.
Sharon’s got plenty of problems, too. He came to office last year promising peace and security, and he’s delivered neither. A poll last week showed 53 percent of Israelis are dissatisfied with his performance. Even if Sharon was ready to soften his line, “the Israeli right wing would not allow him to go beyond asking questions about the initiative,” says Yossi Olmert, a Likud old-timer. Yet ignoring the plan could also spell trouble. Until now, Sharon has been able to tether peaceniks like Shimon Peres to his government only because no viable peace plan has been on the table since Taba. If the Saudi scheme gains momentum and gets endorsed by the Arab summit this month, the Labor Party might leave Sharon’s coalition and fashion a new platform based on the initiative.
But the key question now is how the Bush administration is going to handle Abdullah’s ideas. Initial reactions were tepid; the White House is extremely sensitive about its own lack of a peace initiative. Last week spokesman Ari Fleischer suggested that Clinton’s peace efforts in 2000 only made things worse. “In an attempt to shoot the moon and get nothing, more violence resulted,” said Fleischer. Then a few hours later he retracted his remarks and apologized. “The administration doesn’t want to focus on this,” says former assistant secretary of State Ned Walker. “They are focused on Iraq. They have the war on terrorism. They don’t see this as being a breakthrough.”
Indeed, Abdullah’s initiative may be shooting for the moon. But the Saudis, who’ve been on the defensive since September 11, are sounding pretty feisty now. “You think this is too little too late?” said one based in the United States. “Great. What have you done, mister?” On the ground in the occupied territories and in Israel, where the death toll is now well over 1,000, there are a lot of people asking that question.
