The so-called Geneva Accord, initialled in Amman last Sunday but still awaiting full disclosure next month in Geneva, gives a glimmer of hope to those who still believe, and they are many, that a negotiated settlement can still be worked out between the two feuding parties who share the same land, despite the bloody record of the past three years.
The ominous other side
But the other side of the Israeli coin remains ominous. To start with, and as expected, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was livid about the surprise agreement.
The unofficial negotiators were Palestinian ministers, who are close to the Palestinian leadership, and former Israeli minister Yossi Beilin, who headed the negotiating team that included the former head of the Labor Party Amram Mitzna and ex-Speaker Avraham Burg, all members of the Knesset.
Sharon described it as "the greatest historical mistake since Oslo", an agreement that he had opposed as well.
And his predecessor was equally withering, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it. Former prime minister Ehud Barak, who left office in early 2001, several months after the Intifada broke out, said it was unfortunate that the Labor Party had permitted some of its members to formulate such a "delusional" peace plan.
But the most alarming revelation over the weekend has been the reported ability of Israel to modify American-supplied missiles to carry nuclear warheads on submarines, "giving the Middle East's only nuclear power the ability to launch atomic weapons from land, air and beneath the sea", reported The Los Angeles Times exclusively.
The paper attributed its news report to two unnamed senior Bush administration sources and an Israeli official.
This macabre development comes in the wake of criticism last month by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria voiced against the US and UN at the UN General Assembly for ignoring Israel's weapons of mass destruction while pressuring Iran.
Israel, India and Pakistan are the only countries with nuclear facilities that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Iran and the Arab states have signed the accords aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons through inspections and sanctions.
And now word comes from the German magazine, Der Spiegel, that the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, has drawn a pre-emptive plan to attack six nuclear sites in Iran, just as Israel did in 1981 when its US-supplied jets destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor.
The Tehran regime is at present facing an October 31 deadline imposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency to prove it is not secretly developing nuclear weapons and also to suspend enriching uranium, which the United States claims could be used to make nuclear bombs.
US administrations have for more than two decades turned a blind eye to Israel's nuclear arsenal. In fact, The Los Angeles Times reported that US intelligence agencies "routinely omit Israel from semi-annual reports to Congress identifying countries developing weapons of mass destruction" in order to avoid triggering American economic and military sanctions.
Similarly, the Bush administration remains mum while Israeli troops are for the second time in a week raiding the Palestinian town of Rafah and the nearby refugee camp straddling the Egyptian border where Israel said it found tunnels for smuggling weapons from Egypt.
About 1500 Palestinians were left homeless and over 200 houses were demolished, a UN official reported.
Improving US image
This comes at a time when the Bush administration was recently told by a Public Policy Advisory Commission, authorised by Congress, of steps, mostly tried beforehand, on how to improve the US image among Arabs and Muslims.
While retired Ambassador William Rugh, author of Arab Mass Media, thought the commission's report, if implemented, will "ameliorate some of the rough edges of the American behaviour abroad", he stressed to me in a recent interview that if US policy "is not improved, then I fear, a lot of this effort will be window-dressing."
But this American "disengagement" may have been fortuitous if not instrumental in proving what Yossi Beilin said of his behind-the-scenes talks in Amman and elsewhere that they proved that there is a partner for a peace agreement. What chances there are of the agreement's success lies in the details or, more correctly, the concessions of either party.
The writer can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
Gulf News
