Europe's role in Mideast peacemaking

The recent involvement of (German) Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in the Middle East crisis, with two visits earlier this month and his bids to arrange a face-to-face meeting between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, signals a new level of maturity in Germany's approach to the Middle East.

Germany has also contributed greatly, bilaterally and together with the other 14 member states of the European Union, to lay the foundations of what will be an independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, and to the survival of the Palestinian National Authority until today.

Let us not forget that, for many long months from the beginning of the intifada, the only money that was regularly reaching Palestinian coffers, before the summit of the Arab League devised mechanisms to help the uprising, was European. Moreover, Europe has been the PNA's largest donor since the onset of an independent Palestinian administrative entity.

Certainly, it is not out of kind heart that Brussels has invested so much in a Palestinian state: Europeans have learnt since the formation of the nation states that, in order for a country to prosper, its neighbors have to prosper as well.

-- The Jordan Times, Amman