Whose truce is it in West Asia?

A `COMPLETE CESSATION' of all potential acts of anti-Jewish violence by the Palestinians is the latest definitive demand from the Israeli side. In the opinion of Israel's ultra-nationalist Prime Minister, Mr. Ariel Sharon, a demonstrably decisive stoppage of such violence can alone persuade him to consider peace talks of any kind with the Palestinians. With a U.S.- brokered truce, effective from June 13, gradually gaining a notional acceptance by both the prime adversaries in West Asia, the present Bush administration is beginning to face its first major diplomatic test as a peace facilitator in that region which has long been a byword for instability. Mr. Sharon, who has met the U.S. President this week, wants to invoke Israel's time- tested strategic friendship with the U.S. to pressure him to rein in the Palestinian leadership in a way that could tilt the scales in favour of the Jewish state even during the current period of a `truce'. The U.S. is keen to avoid consigning to the scrap heap of history a very significant truce accord which the head of the Central Intelligence Agency has recently helped the Israelis and the Palestinians to put together. Spearheading the salvage mission, the U.S. Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, has called upon the Palestinian leader, Mr. Yasser Arafat, to make ``a 100 per cent effort'' to restrain the radicals on his side in their campaign against the perceived oppression by the Jewish state. Whether or not this signals a certain distance between the U.S.' compulsions of neutrality as a peace facilitator and the Israeli leader's partisan inclinations, Gen. Powell's latest pledge for a ``complete engagement'' with Mr. Arafat will indicate some new vigour in Washington's diplomatic endeavours over the basic Palestinian issue. Mr. Sharon, on his part, has taken upon himself the task of engaging the U.S. exhaustively so as to gain its understanding of his current plans to marginalise the Arab hawks on the Palestinian side.

If the durability of the latest truce should be determined by such tactical considerations of Israel and the U.S., the reason simply is the complexity of Mr. Arafat's task within his Palestinian constituency and on the larger Arab stage. The fundamental issues dividing the Israelis and the Palestinians have remained unchanged for long. No new ideas have also been envisioned by either of these disputants or even the U.S. in recent months. In a sense, the parties seem to suffer from a strange fatigue of the soul and also the mind in their separate and collective efforts to address the puzzle of Palestinian statehood. While Mr. Sharon may often seem to lead or orchestrate Jewish extremism of the anti-Arab kind, Mr. Arafat contends with the hawkishness of the Hamas and others who see Israel as the bastion of evil.

While the larger international opinion remains favourable to the Arab cause concerning the right of the Palestinians to some form of negotiated statehood within defined boundaries, Mr. Arafat knows that his diplomatic options are severely circumscribed by the ongoing powerplay in West Asia. Despite some recent signs of a possibly proactive role in West Asia by post-Soviet Russia, the fact remains that Moscow's own diminished global status is holding it back. The Palestinian leaders, who accepted the overwhelming primacy of America's diplomatic role in West Asia in the early 1990s, appear to be learning the hard way that their best hope is to sustain the U.S.' goodwill in the face of what they see as an increasingly intransigent Israel. For the present, the U.S. has set its heart on the copybook of the Mitchell Commission, which recently recommended the sequential steps of a truce, a cool-off period for the implementation of confidence- building measures and eventually the `final status' talks on the Palestinians' political future. The truce itself is largely a mirage still.

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