By Nicola Smith - 3rd May 2004
Israeli and Palestinian moderates are urging the EU to make its voice heard at a meeting of the Middle East ‘quartet’ in New York on Tuesday.
The EU – led by Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen – will gather with the US, UN and Russia to forge a strategy to revive the faltering ‘road map’ for peace in the Middle East.
In an interview with EUpolitix, Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Palestinian Justice Minister and Avraham Burg, former speaker of Israeli Parliament the Knesset, appealed to the EU to stay its course against US unilateralism in the region.
“Europe is less weak than Europe wants to pretend it is. If Bush needs European support now in Iraq, he should be giving American support now to the European position in the Middle East,” said Burg.
“I have two kinds of expectation [for the quartet meeting],” he said. “The first one is to offer UN/European countermeasures to the American Bush single world policy today.”
Referring to US President George W. Bush’s surprise and unabashed support for plans by Israeli leader Ariel Sharon to unilaterally pull out from the Gaza Strip, Burg said the quarter must provide a counterbalance.
“[It must] make sure that the quartet is there to produce a partner to the unilateral withdrawal, a partner that won’t be the Hamas and the religious extremists in Gaza, but will be Yasser Abed Rabbo and the Palestinian
Authority that takes over.”
Rabbo, one of the chief architects of an alternative Middle East peace plan – the 'Geneva initiative' – said the quartet must reinstate the Palestinians as partners with the Israelis.
“I think the main target is to say that nobody can replace the Palestinians as the counterparts to the Israelis,” he said.
“The Americans cannot be the partners in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. They can be the sponsors and supervisors with the other parties.”
Bush angered Palestinians with his unwavering backing for Sharon’s plans which would deny Palestinian refugees the right of return to their property and allow large settlements to remain in the West Bank.
But Sharon may yet be forced to amend his plan after it was crushed by his own Likud party in a vote on Monday.
Although the plan may still be put to Israeli voters in a referendum, its defeat at the first hurdle will make today’s statement by the quartet all the more influential on its success.
“Bush and Sharon can meet, they can make agreements but in the absence of the Palestinian side, this agreement cannot be considered as obligatory, or things that we are committed to,” said Rabbo.
Rabbo, along with former Israeli minister Yossi Beilin, sparked controversy last year with the launch of the secretly-negotiated Geneva initiative – a 50-page accord setting out an alternative peace plan.
The agreement, which calls for a two-state solution, goes further than the US-backed ‘road map’ for peace, calling for an almost complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.
It envisages a shared sovereignty over Jerusalem and grants Israel the right to decide how many Palestinian refugees can return to Israel.
Although meeting with international acclaim, the plan was rejected by both the Israeli and Palestinian administrations.
On a recent visit to the European Parliament to promote the Geneva initiative, both Burg and Rabbo urged the international community to strongly back the plan as an alternative to the current “vacuum” in the peace talks.
“We shouldn’t fall into the trap of extremism that will be the unilateral Sharon patronising politics on the one hand and unilateral violence and suicide bombing from Hamas on the other hand, and no middle ground which represents the hopes of the majority of the people,” said Burg.
“We believe eventually the Geneva initiative is bilateral, done by both. As painful as it is, it is a compromise agreed upon, rather than a policy dictated upon.”
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