US SECRETARY of state Hillary Clinton attempted to assuage Arab anger yesterday by telling Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak that the US does not accept the legitimacy of Israeli settlements and seeks to halt their construction “forever”.
She stated, “Our policy on settlement has not changed . . . Ending all settlement activity current and future would be preferable” to its continuation. She said that no issues can be excluded from the negotiations, notably Jerusalem, and tried to reassure Mr Mubarak by saying “our goal is a real [Palestinian] state, with real sovereignty.
“Nothing can interfere with our commitment and our resolve to move forward, and there are impediments, yes, but we cannot let anything deter us.”
However, she reiterated her insistence that an Israeli proposal to restrain settlement amounts to “positive movement forward”.
Mrs Clinton went to Cairo to explain a remark she made last weekend in Jerusalem that the Israeli government had made an “unprecedented” commitment to restrain West Bank settlement activity over the next nine to 12 months by completing only 3,000 housing units although the annual average is 1,400 units a year.
The Arabs regarded her words as a reversal of her May declaration that there should be a “stop to [all] settlement – not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions”.
She hurried to Egypt after angry Arab foreign ministers questioned her at a closed meeting during a conference in Morocco.
Egyptian foreign minister Ahmad Aboul Gheit said her comments were “very useful” and indicated Cairo no longer requires an end to settlement activity as a precondition for talks by joining her call for resumption of negotiation.
“The Egyptian vision is that we have to concentrate on the end game and we must not waste time stuck on this issue or that as a precondition for negotiations.”
Egypt’s shift leaves Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas under pressure to resume talks although his Fatah movement and most Palestinians will condemn him if he drops his demand for a total freeze ahead of negotiations.
In order to protect itself from criticism over a change of policy, Cairo is demanding US guarantees that negotiations will be substantive and not “time-wasting”.
Egypt is caught between the rock of financial and diplomatic dependence on the US and the hard place of Israel’s policies.
For the country’s leaders, the popular option is a hard line against Israel. At last weekend’s conference, the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) sought to boost its electability ahead of next year’s parliamentary poll by attacking its chief rival, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is sharply critical of government policy on Palestine and is the parent organisation of the Hamas movement which rules Gaza.
The NDP is also trying to choose a successor to Mr Mubarak, who has ruled for nearly 30 years.
