Mideast peace treaties lack teeth, U.S. Arab says here

The president of the National Association of Arab Americans compared the Mideast peace process to an extended courtship in which the groom is reluctant to make the trip down the aisle with the bride.

"The Palestinians and Israelis have slept with each other, have awakened in the same bed, and now the Israelis are not sure that they want to cement the relationship," Khalil Jahshan said, speaking last week at San Francisco's World Affairs Council.

The event, co-sponsored by the Palestinian American Congress and the Arab American Cultural Center, took place Thursday of last week, just two days before the signing of a new Israeli-Palestinian agreement. About 40 people attended the talk, titled "The Prospects for Peace in the Middle East."

Jahshan, who is based in Washington, D.C, directs political efforts of the only full-time Arab-American foreign policy lobby. Born and raised in Nazareth, he received undergraduate and post-graduate degrees at U.S. universities.

During the talk, he expressed pessimism about the prospects for a lasting Mideast peace, describing the stalls in the peace process as the fault of all three participants, Israeli, the Palestinians and the United States. He then proceeded to lay the lion's share of the blame on the United States and, to a lesser degree, Israel.

Jahshan, who called the Clinton administration the most pro-Israel U.S. government of the past 50 years, said the Oslo accords were merely the latest in a series of ineffectual and biased treaties.

"The Madrid process was the 76th attempt at peace," Jahshan said. "By this point, there is a cemetery full of failed peace-process attempts."

He called the Oslo accords nebulous, saying the flimsy terms of the agreement gave Israel too many loopholes to escape through, and that the United States has consistently allowed Israel to do so.

The end result, he said, was an agreement "deprived of its legitimacy in the eyes of its direct constituent, the Palestinians, who have yet to savor the tangible fruits of peace."

American political leadership, he said, is held hostage by a powerful pro-Israel lobby.

"Generally speaking, there is no ability to debate freely about the subject of Israel," Jahshan said. "Most people in elected office feel that there is no room for maneuverability on this issue. You're either with the Jewish people, or you're out of office."

Commenting on the most recent Israeli elections, Jahshan said that most of the Arab world preferred the current prime minister, Ehud Barak, to former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, he cautioned that the Palestinians were adopting a "wait-and-see" attitude toward Barak and that troubling signs were already on the horizon.

Barak, he said, wants to avoid seeming out of step with the Israeli majority, and therefore is reluctant to make too many compromises regarding peace. Because he is perceived more favorably by Arab countries than his predecessor, Barak is more susceptible to attacks from Israeli hardliners. Consequently, Jahshan believes Barak will be the toughest Israeli negotiator of the past decade.

The chief fear of the Palestinians, Jahshan said, is that the current peace process will offer a mandate for progress, while creating a "blueprint for the Middle East without Palestine."

"There are only two solutions for peace in the Middle East," Jahshan said. "One is a political solution, and the other is a miracle. The political solution would be for God to intervene and ensure that everybody lived in peace and harmony. The miracle would be if the Israelis and Palestinians did it by themselves."