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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (111790)	8/17/2003 6:05:46 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I seem to recall a certain Saudi prince who offered a peace plan which, on the surface was "interesting" but got shot down a few weeks later by Israel and the US. So? Did he actually offer it? I seem to remember him leaking it to Tom Friedman as something he might have offered, if only... And consider the timing - at the height of I2, when the Saudis were being scrutinized as the source of the 9/11 plot (which they were still denying) and just as the Bush administration was starting to turn its attention to Iraq. Can you say 'distraction'? I can. Now, if Prince Abdullah had actually deigned to send an actual Saudi to meet an actual Israeli somewhere with the plan, that would have been something new. The Israelis would have taken that seriously, just as they took Sadat seriously when he flew to Jerusalem. (There were one or two things the Israelis had to overlook about Sadat too, like his Nazi past.) But actually meeting a live Israeli was too much like recognition of the Zionist entity for the Saudis to contemplate. They expect to be paid off big-time for 'recognition'; they're hardly going to give pieces of it away for free. Now it's true that the Saudis did take the plan to Arab Conference in Beirut, which did declare that if the Israelis withdrew to the 67 borders first, they would give some sort of quasi recognition, not normal relations, mind you. And oh yes, the Israeli had to take back all the Palestinian refugees, all 5 million or however many there are now (nobody has a census). Naturally, this proposal was not of great interest to either the US or Israel, at a time when I2 was at its height. You can call this "shooting down" if you like. Say, I have an idea. Why don't you give me all your money? If you don't reply, I'll say I made a proposal and you shot it down.