Arab Summit and the Carrot of Palestinian State

A Good Article

By Elias Akleh
(Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer of Palestinian descent, born in the town of Beit-Jala. Currently he lives in the US)

"......The Arab leaders were supposed to deal with political crises in the Arab World such as occupation of Iraq, political division in Lebanon, and the Palestinian problem. Yet, as usual, they failed to come up with positive action plans to remedy any of these problems.

As for the occupation of Iraq, the Saudi King Abdullah acknowledged in his opening speech the fact that there is an illegitimate foreign occupation of Iraq, and the existence of an “ugly sectarianism threatening civil war”. His acknowledgement of this very-well known fact aimed to divert any popular blame from the Arab leaders toward foreign powers. He was trying to deny the fact that the forces of this foreign occupation had been launched from Arab countries, mainly from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan, in 1990 and again in 2003, to murder Iraqis and to destroy Iraq as a sovereign country. Late conservative counts of the murdered Iraqis reached to one million. Two other millions had evacuated their homes and ran away to adjacent countries.......

One wonders why would the Arab leaders revive their peace initiative since they know very well Israel’s response to it. Some attributed this to what they think is the American failure in Iraq. They think that the American administration needs Arab’s help in order to withdraw honorably from Iraq. They believe that Americans have a change in foreign policies due to the Democratic Party “taking over” the Congress......

These leaders are trying to divert the attention of their people away from the fact that many Arab countries had been willing contributors to this financial blockade in order to topple the democratically elected Hamas government. They wanted to mislead the people into believing that Palestine could not be regained since all the Arab armies combined are no match for the “undefeated” Israeli army. History shows that this “undefeated” Israeli army had been defeated many times.....

The peace initiative and the false hope of ending the Arab/Israeli conflict through the two states solution are just a political trick against Arabs to introduce the false hope that peace with Israel, Arab’s mortal enemy, is now possible through the present American administration, providing the Arab countries do not oppose the American policies in the region especially its aggression against Iran. US and Israel are planning to hit Iran shortly, and they want to neutralize any Arab opposition to US using Arab Gulf States as its launching pads, and to prevent any retaliation against Israel. The carrot of establishing a Palestinian state had been successfully used to neutralize Arab opposition to the American aggression in the region in 1990 Gulf War and in 2003 invasion of Iraq when some Arab countries were used as launching pads for the American forces to invade Iraq......"