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Peace Process

Rice to spearhead Bush?s Palestine vision


By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
November 17, 2004

US President George W. Bush’s plan to apparently play midwife to a Palestinian state took another turn Tuesday with his decision to appoint National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice as his new secretary of state.

Bush announced the appointment the day after Colin Powell declared his intention to resign from the post as America’s top diplomat.

At a White House ceremony naming his choice, Bush said he believed Rice had the “wise and skillful leadership” needed to achieve his administration’s aims in the Middle East.

Pining for Palestine

The president has clearly indicated in the two weeks since his re-election that resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict will be his top foreign policy objective over the next four years.

As laid out in his July 2002 “two state vision” speech, Bush believes the solution lies in awarding the Palestinian Arabs their own state in the area encompassing the historic heartland of the Jewish people.

Without exception, the entire international community today insists that the Jews relinquish their millennia-old claim to these lands, which hold the graves of their forefathers – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, as well as their holiest site – the Temple Mount.

Last Friday, the president emphasized his readiness to “spend the capital of the United States” just awarded him on the November 2 election on creating this Palestinian state during his second term.

Tuesday, with Rice at his side, a resolute-sounding Bush emphasized where the central focus of her duties would be:

The US had “undertaken a great calling of history to aid the forces of reform and freedom in the broader Middle East,” he said.

“We're pursuing a positive new direction to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, an approach that honors the peaceful aspirations of the Palestinian people through a democratic state, and an approach that will ensure the security of our good friend Israel.”

False assumption

While he has never disclosed his reasons for doing so, Bush has on a number of occasions expressed the belief that most Palestinian Arabs want to live in peace with Israel, and that Islam itself is “a religion of peace.”

Surveys conducted among these Arabs by their own researchers, however, show consistently that the majority of ordinary Palestinians favor destroying the Jewish state.

Their Islamic faith (over 90 percent of these Arabs are Muslim) demands that they seek to achieve, and fully anticipate, such a destruction.

Two peas in a pod

If her nomination is approved – and most commentators have expressed the belief that it will be – Rice will become the first black woman to head up the State Department.

The daughter of a pastor, she is believed to be a Born Again Christian, as is the president she will serve.

Like Bush, however, Rice is on record as supporting the Road Map “peace” plan – an initiative of the so-called Quartet, comprising the US, the UN, the EU and Russia.

Her faith, together with the almost universally-voiced “fact” that her position on America’s role in the world mirrors Bush’s, has already triggered pre-emptive Arab hostility towards her.

Arab concern

According to a report carried by Agence France Presse Tuesday, the Arab world fears Rice’s appointment will signal an impending toughening of US policy in the Middle East.

Arab commentators “from Egypt to the Palestinian territories to Qatar to Sudan” had expressed apprehension about the idea that Bush would name his national security advisor to the State Department.

The report quoted a professor at Cairo's institute of political studies as calling Rice “more hard-line than Powell…very close to Bush and best placed to relate to his thinking.”

Senior PA official Saeb Erekat said that outgoing Secretary Powell had commanded respect, but added that he hoped “in the future the United States and President Bush will exercise balance with its policies in our region.”

“We want to see the implementation of President Bush's two-state vision, we want to see actions not words," said Erakat.

Erekat voiced his belief that Rice was “committed” to the “two-state solution.”

Israel’s ‘true friend’

In his official response, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom described Rice as “a true friend to Israel.”

“Her friendship toward Israel is very deep and stems from religious feelings and deep faith.”

Palestine advocate

Despite this friendship – as sincere as she might be – Rice supports, and is expected to push for, the implementation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s uprooting of Jews from the Gaza Strip and part of Samaria.

In that context, she has expressed her willingness to negotiate with other Arab leaders once PLO chief Yasser Arafat was out of the way.

Arafat died last week.

Speaking to reporters last May, Rice said the US would support Sharon’s plan to unilaterally pull his countrymen out of parts of the Land of Israel.

She said Bush saw the disengagement plan as giving “a new opportunity to Palestinians to begin to build their state.”

The Sharon plan was “not the end of the road -- it's the beginning of the road.”

“We believe that the road map and the two-state solution, and the President's June 24th vision will eventually get us to the point that you have two states -- Israel and Palestine -- living side-by-side in peace.”

According to what Rice said on that occasion, a unilateral Israeli withdrawal would signify the first time that the Palestinians would actually begin to “recover land.” This “recovered” land would enable the Arabs to build the institutions of their state.

[ Ed note:The Palestinian Arabs have never had any land, nationally speaking. The land Rice says they would “recover” – the “West Bank” and Gaza Strip – was in fact Jordanian-occupied and Egyptian-controlled territory respectively before Israel took control of it in 1967. ]

Rice had praised Bush as “the first President to say that there should be a Palestinian state and it ought to be called Palestine.”

That was, she had said, “a tremendous change in American policy,” and it stemmed from Bush’s belief that, given the opportunity, the Palestinian Arabs and Israelis could live in peace.

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