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

To: neolib who wrote (225626)	3/29/2007 9:38:15 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

One must be able to talk without preconditions. You might recall that Israel has used that as a longstanding stall tactic as well: violence must stop before we talk That's not the nature of the Arab "peace" plan.

To: neolib who wrote (225626)	3/29/2007 10:51:19 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Dore Gold (former Israeli govt. spokesman) has some good comments about the Saudi peace plan and the Saudi situation: The paramount problem of Saudi Arabia is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite King Abdullah's strong ideological identification with the Palestinian cause in the past. What is shaping Saudi Arabia's new diplomatic activism is the rapidly expanding Iranian threat and the weakness of the Western response. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had committed himself to a second Iranian revolution: that means a revival of Iranian efforts to export revolutionary Shi'ism, wherever possible. In some Sunni-dominated countries, like Sudan and Syria, the Iranians hope to convert Sunnis to Shi'ism. In the Gulf, there are already substantial Shi'ite populations. Indeed, Saudi Arabia's main vulnerability is in its oil-rich Eastern Province, which has nearly a majority of Shi'ites. Neighboring Bahrain, now connected to Saudi Arabia by a bridge, has an 80% Shi'ite majority. The potential for revolutionary subversion is enormous. According to US court documents, already the 1996 attack on Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia was conducted by Hizballah al-Hijaz, a Shi'ite terrorist group under the direct control of Iranian officials. What can the West do? It needs to assure its Gulf allies by being more assertive about countering Iranian power. Rice's instincts to seize the moment of a shared threat that both Israel and the Sunni Arab states perceive are essentially correct, but must be directed in totally different channels. When Saudi Arabia is facing its own Sunni Islamist threat from within and a Shi'ite threat from without, it is not surprising that the last thing it needs are planeloads of Israeli negotiators and journalists in Riyadh. And with Hamas in power among the Palestinians and building its military strength daily in Gaza, Israel does not need to experiment with new withdrawals. Under such circumstances, quiet contacts between Israel and its neighbors make far more sense than grandiose public diplomacy. In peacemaking, timing is everything. jpost.com