CNI Visits Palestine During Elections
Washington Report, April 2006, pages 76-77
Waging Peace
CNI Visits Palestine During Elections |  |
CNI delegation members (l-r) Elizabeth Viering, Ambassador Robert Keeley, Ambassador Edward Peck, Eugene Bird and Peter Viering (Staff photo D. Hanley). | |
“THE Hamas Victory: What It Means and How U.S. Policy Can Change to Meet the Challenge” was the topic of a Council for the National Interest (CNI) hearing on Feb. 9 at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill. The CNI delegation reported on its trip to six Middle East countries and its monitoring of the recent Palestinian elections. Upon their return, delegation members Eugene Bird, CNI president, Ambassadors Robert Keeley and Edward Peck, Dr. Hassan Fouda, a retired scientist, Elizabeth and Peter Viering, activists who live in Stonington, CT, and videographer Christopher Belcher wrote an open letter to President George W. Bush. The letter calls for his administration to deal honestly and openly with the new Islamist partiesthat have been brought to power by democratic means in several Middle East countries.
The delegation members were among the first retired U.S. foreign service officers to meet with Hamas leaders Mahmoud al-Zahar and Khaled Meshal, whom they described as eager to talk to American officials, and even to reach a peace with Israel.
“There seems to be a lack of dialogue with leaders in the Middle East,” noted Bird. “Many U.S. diplomats are not talking to people they should be, and this has been shocking for us to see.”
“Our officials in the Middle East are not listening to the people,” Elizabeth Viering added. “They are isolated and cut off.”
Ambassador Keeley, chairman of CNI, said, “People everywhere we went have admiration for the U.S. and its democratic procedures. There should be free and fair elections; winners need to take power; but then after they take power, we can’t impose conditions on the parties that are democratically elected.”
The delegation also met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Mousa, and with Islamist and other opposition leaders in Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. “We heard from many people insisting that the U.S. must put its weight behind a fair and just solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” reported Keeley.
“Our policy in the Middle East is stupid, to be blunt,” Ambassador Peck said. “We are not advancing Israel’s interests. Its security will come from good relations with its neighbors.” Peck said he was concerned that current policy is being “shaped by arrogance and a low level of understanding.”
In Keeley’s opinion, neither Camp David nor the Oslo accords had delivered on promises made to the Palestinian people. It was time, he argued, to revisit the Arab Peace Plan, advanced in 2002 by then-Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. “This is a generous offer—to paraphrase what was said about Ehud Barak’s suggested terms of peace to Yasser Arafat—and it is balanced and humane,” Keeley said. “Regrettably, no response has come from either the U.S. or Israel.”
According to Peter Viering, a family law lawyer, even Israelis were saying that they needed to deal with Hamas if peace were to be achieved. “But the U.S. Congress doesn’t seem to have received this message,” he pointed out. Instead, it is supporting Israel’s continued expansion of settlements and its military occupation of Palestinian territory, and the U.S. is paying the cost.
“Israel needs to confront its past if peace is to be achieved,” said Viering. “Israel needs to face up to its responsibilities to the Palestinian people,” and propose ways in which they can be compensated for the loss of their lands and livelihoods.
For more information see CNI’s Web site: <www.cnionline.org>
—Delinda C. Hanley
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