President George Bush hosted a Palestinian prime minister at the White House for the first time in his presidency yesterday in a visit designed to quicken a sluggish peace process and shore up the authority of his guest.
The visit by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, marks the second round of diplomacy since Bush launched his road map for a Palestinian state at a meeting in Jordan last month. The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, a frequent caller at the White House, arrives in Washington next Tuesday.
The renewed effort comes at a critical time for Abbas, who is known as Abu Mazen. Nearly one month after he coaxed militant groups to stop attacks on Israel, he is under pressure to demonstrate that the ceasefire has achieved concrete results for the Palestinians.
However, yesterday he emerged from his White House meeting with little beyond promises of more US aid to the Palestinian Authority.
Bush announced that two members of his cabinet will travel to Israel later this year to begin work on bringing jobs and development to Palestinian areas. He said he told Abbas that the US would ”strive to see that promises are kept,” and monitor the progress toward creating a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel.
”This is the time of possibility in the Middle East,” Bush said. ”People in the region are counting on the leaders to seize opportunities for peace and progress.”
For the US administration, yesterday’s lunch at the White House for Abbas and Bush was a chance to redirect European and Arab attention away from its widely condemned policy on Iraq, and to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Palestinian leader.
Abu Mazen became prime minister after Bush announced last summer that he would not meet the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
However, despite Bush’s personal attentions to the road map since last month, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, admitted this week that the plan had stalled. ”You can’t go faster than circumstances permit,” he said.
Abbas has urged Washington to use its influence to ensure that Israel honours its commitments. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, he said Israel had delayed its obligations in the road map. ”This pattern of hesitant implementation has characterised Israel’s approach,” he said.
He called for Israel to release some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners it holds, freeze the building of a security wall between the West Bank and Israel proper that will consume several more miles of Palestinian territory, and freeze the expansion of Jewish settlements.
To Abbas’s mind, the release of prisoners was crucial in the maintenance of the ceasefire, which has held since July 29, although there have been isolated attacks on Israel.
”Prisoners are one of the main constituencies for peace and an active player in the conclusion and maintenance of the ceasefire,” he said. ”Releasing them would strengthen the moderate elements among the various groups and create a sense of inclusion for these groups.”
There has been little progress on the first phase of the road map, which was to have been completed last May, and is part of a three-stage plan for a Palestinian state by the end of 2005.
Although Israel has pulled its troops out of the Gaza Strip and Bethlehem, it has refused to undertake further withdrawals until Abbas begins disarming militant groups responsible for suicide bombings. US officials are dismayed that Israel has started new outposts at the same time that it has evacuated a handful of settlements.
The Israeli prime minister’s office yesterday announced a meeting of defence officials next week to discuss the handover of two further West Bank towns to Palestinian control.
An Israeli soldier shot and killed a four year-old Palestinian boy, and wounded his two young sisters, the day after a report by Defence for Children International said that 192 children died at the hands of the military or Jewish settlers in 2002, nearly double the number of the previous year. – Guardian Unlimited Â