Special Report
What derailed Middle East peace process
By Qutubuddin Aziz

William Jefferson Clinton’s 8-year presidency of the United States of America ended on January 20 without the realisation of his dream to make Yasser Arafat sign on the dotted line a humiliating deal with Israel’s Prime Minister Yehud Barak under which a captive Palestinian State in virtual Israeli bondage would have emerged. No other American, who reigned and ruled from the White House, did so much to safeguard and advance the interests of Israel President Clinton did. He was beholden to the powerful Israeli lobby and its supportive Jewish moneybags in the USA for their huge funding of his election campaign for entering the White House eight years ago, defeating President Bush (Sr.) who had provoked the wrath of Israel by obstructing the pledging of vast US State funds to the Zionist State. Even during the recent US Presidential election, the Israeli lobby in the USA lavished its largesse on Al Gore and Mrs. Hillary Clinton so much so that the outgoing President’s wife, seeking election to the Senate from a New York constituency, bowed to Jewish blackmail and returned the money given for her campaign fund by an American Muslim organisation.

I have it on the authority of well-informed Arab diplomats that the Clinton plan, motivated by Israel’s Barak, envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state under Arafat with no well-defined frontiers with no Palestinian armed force except a police force and a National Guard bearing light weapons, with Jewish Settlements in the Palestinian heartland turned into fortresses guarded by the Israeli military, with Palestinian economy virtually hooked to that of Israel, and with captive Palestine barred from entering any alliance hostile to Israel. The “Clinton Proposals” would have clipped the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their lands in Israel from where they had fled in 1948 owing to Israel’s armed occupation of more than half of Palestine. Aware of the global Muslim sentiment in regard to the future of Jerusalem, the “Clinton Proposals” conceded the semblance of Palestinian Arab sovereignty over East Jerusalem but wanted the divided city to be policed by an international force. In the earlier Clinton-Barak-Arafat parleys in the USA, Mr. Clinton was putting pressure on Mr. Arafat to abandon his demand for Arab sovereignty over Jerusalem tempting the aged Palestinian leader with huge US funds for the proposed Palestinian State under Israeli control. Arafat was brave enough to spurn “the Devil’s temptation.” When the full story of the eight Clinton years in the White House unfolds in the not-too-distant future, the world would know the immense pressure President Clinton exerted on many weak Arab states to recognise Israel and establish trade and diplomatic relations with it. It is true that President Clinton did urge the Israeli Prime Minister to withdraw his armed forces from South Lebanon and gave some bits of American largesse to Arafat’s fledgling Palestinian Authority. He is also reported to have supported Mr. Arafat’s demand for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their hearths and homes in Israel – a right which has been upheld in operative UN resolutions on Palestine. But the Israeli rulers limited the exercise of this right by the Arab refugees only to the “first generation refugees” and not their Arab children. More than a million Jews from the former Soviet Union states have emigrated to Israel with its government’s money and facilities. Under the racist Zionist philosophy that rules the Israeli State, these foreign Jews are imported by the Israeli Government and settled on the lands and houses owned by Arabs driven out of Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory from 1948 onwards. The Israeli Government and its American benefactors know well that most “first generation” Palestinian refugees will be reluctant to part with their children in the countries where they are living now.

In the last weeks of his Presidency, Mr. Clinton was so blatantly pro-Israel that he telephoned, his friends in the Arab world such as the King of Morocco, the President of Egypt, the King of Jordan and the President of the UAE to pressurise Arafat to accept the “Clinton Proposals” for settling the Israel-Palestine dispute before his exit from the White House.

Mr. Clinton refused to condemn the barbarism of the Israeli repression on the stone throwing Arab Palestinians in Palestine since October last year. He seemed unconcerned over the killings of more than 380 Palestinians by the trigger-happy Israeli troops in recent weeks. Owing to political considerations and the electoral and financial clout of the Israeli lobby in the USA, Mr. Clinton could not dare annoy Israel and its American Jews. Guided by them, he had drawn up for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating teams which the Americans called DECLARATION of principles on permanent and comprehensive peace in the state of Israel and between the state of Palestine.

Arafat’s acceptance of the “Clinton Proposals” would have smothered the Palestinian’s right to justice under the U.N. resolution 242, 338 and 194 and made the envisaged Palestinian State an Israeli stooge in the Arab world.

The cartographic depiction of the Palestinian State envisaged in the “Clinton Proposals” was very vague, according to Arab sources. The borders were to be firmed up after Israel had recognised them. According to Bill Clinton, the Palestinian State would have included Gaza and nearly 95% of the West Bank. What about the remaining 5%? Would Israel gobble it up? How would East Jerusalem, having symbolic Arab Palestinian sovereignty, be linked with the Palestinian State? Its rulers would not have been permitted to undertake any construction in East Jerusalem (to be declared an Open City with foreign policing). Bill Clinton’s plan reportedly placed the so-called Wailing Wall under Israeli sovereignty.

“Such ticklish issues as the sharing of waters, control over access roads and the Israeli protection of Jewish settlements in Palestine were glossed over in the Clinton Proposals”. Information has now surfaced that Clinton as the US President contributed unjustly to the sabotaging of a resolution in the UN Security Council for the despatching of a UN force of military and police officers to the territories occupied by Israel in Palestine since 1967 to help end the violence there. The resolution failed because only 8 UNSC members voted in favour, one short of the nine needed to pass it. Seven others, including the USA, UK, France and Russia abstained. The Israelis, it is reported, had extracted an assurance from Bill Clinton that the USA would veto it if per chance it received the required nine votes. The US representative in the UN, James Cunningham admitted that the US would have vetoed it.

In spite of Mr. Clinton’s weakness for Israel, the global Muslim community may feel grateful to him for the respect he has shown to Islam during his Presidency, for being helpful to the hapless Bosnian Muslims in their resistance to the Serb aggressors and for sending US troops to Kosovo to save the Albanian Muslims from Yugoslav butchery. He took some interest in the cause of peace in the Subcontinent; he helped prevent an escalation of armed conflict between India and Pakistan over Kargil in Kashmir in the summer of 1999 but his tilt towards India was noted during his March 2000 visit to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. In foreign affairs, the Middle East Peace process, which was begun during the Presidency of George Bush (Senior), Mr. Clinton’s obsession with Osama Bin Laden, his bombing of Afghan territory and his motivation of the UN sanctions against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan will not be considered by many as acts of statesmanship or wisdom. Hopefully, President Bush may give American foreign policy an even-handed direction.