Opinion makers on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide welcomed on Thursday the US-driven Aqaba summit as a possible turning point on the road to peace.
But they all recalled that the ways was strewn with wrecked peace plans, and at least one Arab commentator expressed fear that Israel’s hard line prime minister, Ariel Sharon, had hopped aboard just to play for time.
Yet in the afterglow of Wednesday’s summit on the shores of Jordan’s Red Sea resort at Aqaba, the Saudi-owned newspaper Al-Hayat basked in a warm optimism, shared in part by Egyptian, Jordanian and other Arab dailies.
”The Middle East seems on the verge of a big shakeup after the Aqaba summit managed to achieve a breakthrough surpassing the importance of the 1993 Oslo accords,” Al-Hayat said.
The accords led to limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip until negotiations for a final settlement broke down and massive violence erupted in September 2000, triggering Israel’s re-occupation of many areas.
”President George Bush managed to push his two partners at the summit to pledge to take painful decisions, which could cause divisions and confrontation within the Israeli and Palestinian camps,” it added.
The daily was referring to Sharon’s pledge to dismantle wildcat settlements and to his Palestinian counterpart Mahmud Abbas’s commitment to stop the 32-month armed intifada, or uprising.
Both are key points highlighted on the international peace ”roadmap,” for which Bush secured Arab and Israeli backing at his summits this week in Egypt and Jordan.
The roadmap calls for such steps to be taken ahead of the creation by 2005 of a Palestinian state that lives side by side and in peace with Israel.
”In Aqaba, the state of Palestine was created,” ran a headline in Israel’s top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily.
Yediot had joined the Maariv and Haaretz papers in carrying Bush’s statement that the ”Holy Land must be shared” by Israel and the Palestinians.
The sentence had a special ring to it as it was published on the anniversary of the 1967 war, which saw Israel seize the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as a capital to any future state.
”On the 36th anniversary of the Six Day war, the leaders have committed themselves to solving the bloody conflict,” the Yediot wrote.
Maariv complimented Bush for a firm hand.
Bush ”squeezed two lemons soured on each other and extracted” from both the Israeli and Palestinian premiers ”big promises, unprecedented commitments, words engraved in stone, from perhaps which there is no return”, it said.
Several Israeli newspapers said that at the summit in Aqaba, Sharon had officially given up his old ambitions to keep the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of biblical Israel.
”Nothing could have been as difficult for Sharon to swallow as Bush’s statement about dividing the Holy Land,” Herb Keinon wrote in the Jerusalem Post.
”What the president said to Sharon, with the world at his witness, was that the jig is up, and the ideal to which Sharon had devoted the last 36 years — keeping the territories a part of Israel — was now spent.”
The Haaretz daily adopted a more sobering tone, however, reminding its readers of the countless failed peace initiatives both sides had seen in the past few years.
And several Arab newspapers warned of dangerous obstacles ahead.
Egypt’s government newspaper Al-Akhbar said the Aqaba summit and Bush’s meeting with Arab leaders on Tuesday stirred hopes, but that ”success is linked to how much US pressure will be exerted on” Sharon to end the occupation.
The Jordanian government daily Al-Rai said the summit had ”opened a breach in the wall of a bloody conflict” but that ”all eyes were now riveted” on the roadmap’s implementation.
As the only two Arab countries to have signed peace treaties with Israel, Egypt and Jordan are strong promoters of a comprehensive peace.
Tishrin, the official newspaper of hard line Syria, which was not invited to either summit, said Sharon remained ”hostile to peace” but wanted to appear in ”Aqaba as a man of peace to play for time.” – Sapa-AFP