Please read the following editorial from England's Guardian newspaper:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,676775,00.html

March 31: The US's pro-Israeli bias must be tempered by European
pressure to ensure a just peace agreement in Israel, writes Ian Gilmour:

Sunday March 31, 2002
The Observer

Let there be justice for all, Mr Bush

The appalling events in the Middle East are the predictable results of
the negligence and prejudice of the Bush administration. The Passover
massacre in Netanya was an abominable crime. Indeed, all suicide
bombings in Israel proper are terrorist atrocities, unspeakable and also
self-defeating. But while such crimes cannot be excused, they can be
explained. As Israel's most influential journalist Nahum Barnea told his
readers: 'The terrorism of suicide bombings was borne of despair and there
is no military solution to despair.'
That despair has been induced by the Israeli army killing more than
1,400 Palestinians in 18 months, Israel's continued building of illegal
settlements on Palestinian land, military occupation, daily humiliation
and economic suffering. When, as the Israelis have done, you make life
not worth living for thousands of Palestinians, there will be no
shortage of suicide bombers.

The Bush administration has long known that for it to remain largely
passive while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew steadily worse would
sooner or later ensure an explosion. It also knew that Ariel Sharon has
never wanted peace with the Palestinians and never will - he only wants
their surrender and expulsion. As the speaker of the Knesset said a few
weeks ago, Israel now has 'a violent government out to destroy the
Palestinian authority to avoid giving up the settlements'. Yet because the
US believed that the Israelis would eventually win the conflict, they
gave Sharon a green light to be as brutal as he liked, short of killing
Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. And despite Sharon's record,
Bush happily hobnobbed with him, while refusing to meet Arafat.

If Bush and Cheney hoped that Sharon's treatment of Arafat would bring
him to heel, they badly mistook their man, as I saw for myself in
Ramallah a few days ago. Arafat has long thrived on adversity, of which he
has known a great deal. When I met him after he had been imprisoned for
months in his headquarters at Ramallah, with Israeli tanks only a few
yards away, and he had been shelled and bombed, he was notably
unintimidated and, though depressed by suicide bombings, surprisingly ebullient.

He had no intention of sacrificing Palestinian interests or dignity
simply to be given Sharon's gracious permission to attend the Arab summit
in Beirut, which he knew he would not be given, or to be granted an
audience with Vice President Cheney. As the peace activist and former
Knesset member Uri Avnery said of Cheney: 'When an overbearing Vice
President dictates humiliating terms for a meeting with Arafat he pours oil on
the flames... persons who lack empathy for the suffering of the
occupied people would be well advised to shut up.'

Arafat, who has made some serious mistakes, was relaxed but defiant.
Needing a document, he was anxious to exhibit his 'infallible filing
system', which consists of bulky piles of documents in his battledress
pockets. His files, as he showed us, even extend to large wads of paper in
both hip pockets which, one would have thought, must be exceedingly
uncomfortable. He was particularly scathing about the Israeli claim that
justice for the Palestinian refugees would entail Israel being swamped
by millions of Palestinians.

Is it likely, he demanded, that they would want to go back to being
ruled by Israel? He was convinced that the problem could be solved justly
without the Jewishness of Israeli being threatened. Sharon may well
kill Arafat, but he won't frighten him.

As Michael Ben-Yair, Israel's attorney general between 1993 and 1996,
wrote in Haaretz earlier this month: 'The intifada is the Palestinian
people's war of national liberation. We enthusiastically chose to become
a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating
lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories,
engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities...
we established an apartheid regime.'

Israeli organisation Peace Now has spotted 34 new settlements started
since Sharon became Prime Minister. When I was driving round the West
Bank last week and seeing both these new settlements and the growth of
the old ones, that seemed, if anything, an underestimate.

Yet while Bush has constantly told Arafat to stop the Palestinian
violence, which Sharon's purposeful destruction of the Palestinian
infrastructure and police stations has rendered him incapable of doing under
present conditions, he has made no effort to make Sharon cease all
settlement activity and enter peace talks. Since even the American Secretary
of State said last November that the occupation must end, it is
presumably the pro-Israeli bias of the dominant members of the Bush
administration which is responsible for that administration determinedly shutting
its eyes to the basic fact of the Palestinian struggle - that Israel is
fighting a colonial war to subjugate the Palestinians, while the
Palestinians are fighting to end 35 years of occupation of their land.

As Michael Lind, an Israeli journalist, puts it, Bush's 'reflections on
the conflict seem to have been written by the Israeli lobby' in the US.
In an illuminating article in Prospect magazine, he points out that the
Israeli lobby distorts US foreign policy and makes anything more than
the mildest criticism of Israeli taboo in the mainstream media. 'Until
Americans have ended this corruption of our democratic process,' Lind
concludes, 'our allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East will continue
to view our Middle East policy with trepidation.'

Of course, that is not a new development, but the current Bush
administration looks like being even more pro- Israeli than all its
predecessors. Until now, President Bush has seemed more intent on securing
Republican majorities in Congress in November and getting his brother
re-elected as governor of Florida than on securing decency and justice in the
Middle East.

America's need to gain some Arab support or, at least, acquiescence to
its intended attack on Iraq has necessitated some adjustment to its
attitude on Palestine, but only a small and inadequate one. Much more is
now needed. On Wednesday, at the insistence of Crown Prince Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia, the Arab League offered its historic and long overdue
vision for peace: Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in
exchange for full peace with the entire Arab world.

Sharon's reaction to this peace offer and to Palestinian violence has
been to launch a massive assault on the Palestinian Authority's civilian
institutions and effectively to declare war. The situation is so grave
that an imposed solution on the basis of the Saudi peace initiative is
now the only hope. One of the imposers will have to be the United
States because America is the only country that can deliver Israel. The
other imposer must be Europe to ensure that at last the Palestinians get a
fair deal.

A postscript on Arab perceptions of Britain. A Lebanese newspaper wrote
during the Beirut summit that 'the British Cabinet remains set in its
course to Americanise its positions in foreign policy, sounding more and
more like an offshoot of Voice of America'. If we join the US in
pulverising Iraq, while remaining silent as America's ally pulverises the
Palestinians, the damage to Britain's interests in the entire region may
take a generation to repair.
 
 

· Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar is a former Secretary of State for
Defence

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,676775,00.html