Arab reactions to the American Secretary of State John Kerry’s framework agreement have been both mystifying and misleading.
Since 1967, the Arab states have been asking Washington for more involvement in the Palestinian cause, since the United States is the only power that can exert some pressure on Israel to abide by the international legitimacy and withdraw from the occupied territories.
The press archives of His Majesty King Hussein indicate great hopes he and Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had pinned on the White House to contribute to achieving peace in the region.
Many messages were sent through Saudi Arabia and Morocco during the last five decades asking Washington to resist the intensive pressure from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), see the injustice inflicted on the Palestinians and help establish peace in the region.
It is in this respect that president George Bush Sr asked, in the 1980s, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to stop settlement activities in the West Bank or else Washington will cancel the $10 billion loan guarantees to Israel. Shamir complied, and joined the Madrid peace negotiations in 1992.
It was an American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who forced Israel, the United Kingdom and France to end their invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis in 1956.
Kerry started his 10th round of talks with Arabs and Israelis, hoping to find a final cure to a festering wound in Jerusalem.
The initial response of the Arab media was to call for a total rejection of Kerry’s peace plan before it was even announced.
The Israeli press managed to manipulate the Arab public opinion to fall into the trap of being subservient to Haaretz newspaper, which succeeded in building an anti-Kerry campaign by publishing undocumented planned solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.
Even Iran, though a cautious calculator, fanned the flames of opposition, due to its reservation against Saudi Arabia’s supposed role in administering the holy basin of Jerusalem while excluding the 222 million Shiites who Tehran claims to represent.
According to Kerry’s framework plan, Israel will hand over to the Palestinians 92.8 per cent of the West Bank territory, which will be a great achievement for the American negotiator, an opportunity that will never be repeated for the Arabs, in case they refuse it now.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has a golden opportunity to stand courageously and say his mind in order to regain his political stature since 2006 when Hamas, his rival, won from him the Gaza Strip with its two million Palestinians.
Currently Abbas is even losing control of the 19 refugee camps in the West Bank, with their population of over a quarter of a million. The camps have become a fertile ground for drug smuggling, crime and racketeering in illicit commodities and arms.
A Palestinian statesman from Jerusalem once said that the refugees who fled in 1948 their villages while at the age of 20 died long time ago, since the average age is 65 among Arabs here. Their sons and siblings are no longer refugees.
In case a fair compensation is paid to the siblings who had never known their old villages, Abbas will be doing them a big favour.
It is in this respect that what happened to former mayor of Bireh, Abdel Jawad Saleh, has to be narrated.
He was deported by the Israeli occupation authorities for his political activities. Following the Oslo accords, he was allowed back to stay there. Then, in a big surprise, he came back to Amman to settle permanently, saying: “It is unbearable there.”
The Palestinian “right of return” has its own symbolic emotional value, but cannot be applied on the ground due to lack of water to drink, shortage of accommodation, absence of job opportunities and because “It is unbearable there”, as Saleh said.
