12.2.05
“Sharm-al-Sheikh, We
Have Come Back Again…”
Nobody called it the “Ophira Conference”.
Not even the papers of the extreme right. Who today even remembers the name
Ophira, which was given to Sharm-al-Sheikh during the Israeli occupation, as a
first step to its annexation?
Who wants to remember the famous saying of
Moshe Dayan that “Sharm-al-Sheikh is more important than peace”? A few years
later, the same Dayan took part in the peace negotiations with
While the conference went on, I could not clear
my head of a song that was haunting me: “Sharm-al-Sheikh, we have come back
again…” It was sung with gusto in the days of the stupid euphoria after the
Six-Day war. It reminded people at the time that we had already conquered the
place during the 1956 Sinai war but were compelled by the Eisenhower-Bulganin
ultimatum to withdraw. So here we were again.
I was there in 1956. A
beautiful gulf (“Sharm-al-Sheikh means “the bay of the old man”), a few small
houses and a distinctive mosque. Before our army withdrew, a few months
later, it blew up the mosque in a fit of pique.
Now,
22 years after leaving Ophira for the last time (nobody sang then
“Sharm-al-Sheikh, we have left you again…”) all of us are treating the place as
an Egyptian resort, as Egyptian as Cairo and Alexandria. The past has been
erased. The occupation has been wiped from our collective memory.
That is the first optimistic lesson from
the conference. One can withdraw. One can put an end to occupation. One can
even forget that it ever took place.
The spirits of two people who were not
there hovered over the proceedings.
One of them was George W. Bush. Neither he
nor any other American sat at the large round table. But all the four who were
sitting there knew that they are completely dependent on him. Husni Mubarak relies
on the two billion dollars he gets every year from the United States, under the
auspices of a Congress dominated by the pro-Israeli lobby. King Abdallah of
Jordan gets much less, but his regime, too, depends on US support.
Ariel
So why did the Americans not come to
Sharm? Because they are not ready to risk taking part in a
process that might fail. They will come when success is assured. And today
it is not.
The second absentee was Yasser Arafat.
The
conference would not have taken place without his mysterious death. It deprived
Abu Mazen succeeded in slipping the name
of Arafat into his speech, but only in an indirect way. But he – like every
Palestinian – knows that it was the 45 years of Arafat’s work that laid the
foundations on which Abu Mazen is now building his new strategy. Without the
first intifada there would have been no
The Israeli army knows by now that it
cannot stamp out the insurgency by military means. The Palestinians have
recovered their self-respect, much like the Egyptians after Yom Kippur. Many of
them also believe that in his second term of office, Bush will impose
withdrawal on
Incidentally, the demonization of Arafat
has by no means stopped after his death. On the contrary, it goes on with great
fervor. The Left and the Right in
The game played by Condoleezza Rice was
especially amusing. She visited the Mukata’ah, where every stone shouts the
name of Arafat. She did not lay a wreath on his grave – a minimal gesture of
courtesy that would have won the hearts of the Palestinians. However, as a
diplomatic compromise, she agreed to have her handshake with Abu Mazen photographed
under the picture of Arafat.
Arafat smiled his canny smile. He surely
understood.
So what was achieved at this conference?
Easier to say what was not.
The
That was a recipe for failure. And the
very next day the quarrelling about every single paragraph began.
At Sharm-al-Sheikh the resolution of the
conflict was not mentioned at all. Abu Mazen succeeded in slipping in some
words, but Sharon did not react. This omission is very significant. It must be
emphasized:
The same goes for the timetable. In
That was a fatal mistake. Quite literally
– it killed Rabin. The postponement of the solution allowed the opponents of
peace the time to regain their strength, to regroup and mount the
counter-attack that culminated in the assassination of Rabin. In vain did we
quote to Rabin the dictum of Lloyd-George: “You cannot cross an abyss in two jumps.”
Abu Mazen said at Sharm-al-Sheikh that
this is the first step on a long road. A long road is a dangerous road. All
along it the saboteurs of peace, Israelis and Palestinians, are lurking.
Moreover, one of the basic conditions for
a real peace process – and perhaps the most important one – is the truthful representation
of reality. If one listened to all the speeches, one could get the impression
that the root problem is “Palestinian terrorism”, and
that if this stops, everything will be alright. In the following sequence: (a) The
Palestinians end their “violence”, (b) Israel stops military actions, (c)
security cooperation is established and (d) G*d and/or Allah will take care of
the rest.
Pessimists will say: Nothing came from of
the conference. The cease-fire is fragile. In the best case,
Optimists will say: This is a good
beginning. The cessation of “Palestinian terrorism” will create a new
atmosphere in
Who is right?