The Palestinian leadership in total disregard of their people's pulse strictly adhered to disengagement from a Hizbullah-led resistance to the U.S.-backed Israeli 33-day bombardment of Lebanon, betting on an Israeli overwhelming victory, thus missing an opportunity to end Israel's six-year old war on the Palestinian people and free some of their detainees in the Israeli jails.
The families of the Jordanian POWs in Israeli jails are still lamenting their government's similar decision to disengage from a Hizbullah-Israeli deal two years ago.
By linking to the Lebanese wagon heading for the United Nations Security Council the Palestinian leadership could have made up for failing to clinch a UN resolution to stop the Israeli war on the Palestinian Authority, government and people, thanks to the U.S. veto, and for failing to convene an Arab League summit to help stop the Israeli onslaught and break the eight-month military, economic, financial and diplomatic siege imposed on the Palestinian people early in 2006.
Time also is not on the Palestinians' side to give them hope that their salvation is on the horizon, let alone being imminent. The campaign for the upcoming U.S. elections has already begun and Israelis have become experts in exploiting this waste of time of inactive U.S. foreign diplomacy as much as Arab officialdom have become experts in waiting for the U.S. diplomacy to become active again.
However the Palestinians still have one opening out of their captivity: Linking to the Syrian peace option, at least to be in harmony with their recent repeated calls for an international conference to work out a comprehensive regional solution.
This doesn't necessarily mean joining the U.S. - termed Syrian-Iranian "axis of terror," nor a break with their peace allies in Egypt and Jordan.
The Syrian option could be developed into an Arab peace front including Egypt and Jordan to pursue peace with Israel collectively, backed politically by the Arab League and the majority of the United Nations members and defensively by the resistance movements to the ongoing Israeli military adventures that have been for years pushing a sustainable and lasting peace out of the regional outreach.
This option could create a united Arab peace front, in an overdue response to an old demand by the sympathizing world community.
Such an Arab collective approach to a comprehensive regional peace was tested by the late Saudi Arabian king Fahad early in the eighties of the last century to be updated and upgraded by a Saudi initiative that was adopted by the Arab League summit meeting in Beirut, Lebanon, in March 2002, an effort that was swiftly and vehemently aborted by the Israeli and U.S. strategic allies.
The U.S. has historically vetoed the United Nations out of the Arab-Israeli conflict and blocked the implementation of dozens of UN resolutions to resolve it.
Outside the UN resolutions, the successive U.S. administrations and their western allies have proposed more than two dozens of the so-called "peace plans" since Israel was conditionally admitted to the U.N. in 1949, all of them dealt with and accepted by the Arabs including the Palestinians, but all were aborted by Israel because none of them obliged it to commit to the UN resolutions and international law.
The U.S.-only approach has not delivered, but prolonged the Palestinian plight.
A third option should be sought, not to rule the United States out of the regional peace-making, but to involve it, help it balance its regional policy to be evenhanded, weigh in to make peace instead of its 60-year old policy of just managing a peace process in the region.
*Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank. He is the editor of the English Web site of the Palestine Media Centre (PMC).
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