Saudi peace plan, a quietly great event?

David Hirst, Guardian News Service, Beirut

Great events sometimes have the most casual, even accidental, beginnings. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia's now celebrated peace initiative began -- as an interview with the New York Times revealed -- as inconspicuously as that first, seminal breakthrough of its kind: The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979.

Yet it has swiftly developed a momentum of its own, which, if carried to a successful conclusion, would make it no less important than its historic predecessor -- the completion, in fact, of what Anwar Sadat began. And it simply must succeed, Arab commentators warn, because with the Israeli-Palestinian struggle assuming such dramatic proportions, the consequences of its not doing so would be disastrous -- to the point, even, of destroying what Sadat did and all that, in the ensuing peace process, was built on it.

There is little substantively new about the crown prince's proposal for full Arab "normalization" with Israel in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and the establishment thereon of a Palestinian state. A vision more than a plan, it leaves vague or unmentioned such crucial possible stumbling blocks as who has sovereignty over the holy places and the refugees' "right of return".

It simply lays out, more authoritatively than ever before, what the end of the peace process would bring: The fulfillment of what Israel has in essence been striving for since it came into being; its acceptance by, and full and final integration into, the Arab region -- a portion of whose territory it conquered and occupied and whose inhabitants it drove out.

No one is better qualified to promote his own initiative than Prince Abdullah, both because of the reputation he has earned as a strong, straightforward and uncorrupted leader, and because of the weight, in religious, economic, and strategic terms, of the kingdom he effectively rules.

His initiative is a wholly Arab one, not only because it is the exclusive brainchild of an Arab leader, but because the whole point of it is that it should be collectively endorsed by the Arab world, with the forthcoming Arab summit in Beirut at the end of the month as his launching-pad.

But, above all, it comes at a time of looming emergency, not only for the direct protagonists, Palestinians and Israelis, but for the region. Since the intifada began, the Arab regimes, apparently fearful of Israeli retaliation or U.S. wrath, have done next to nothing to honor what their people regard as their obligation to support their fellow Arabs in Palestine. In a typically scathing comment on their performance, Basil Aql, a Palestinian national council member, wrote this week: "It seems that the Arab will is brain dead, and Arab impotence an inherent characteristic of this nation."

Yet such weakness and inaction cannot, the critics also say, protect them for ever. Doing nothing will eventually prove far more dangerous than doing something. "We have no idea," wrote a columnist in the Beirut newspaper al-Nahar, "how the Arab nation can suffer the endless moral humiliations and insults that have been hurled at it for a year and a half, day in day out, but anger in this part of the world is boiling over like a volcano, even though appearances at the level of the Arab regimes and their official policies may suggest otherwise."

Despite themselves, the regimes will be drawn into the fray. The circumstances in which it happens, and the forms it takes -- planned or involuntary, diplomatic or military, an action by Hizbullah said to be massively preparing itself on the Lebanese frontier or the outcome of political upheaval in Palestinian- dominated Jordan -- are hard to foresee; but relentless escalation in the territories can only hasten the day when it does.

It was often said that without Arab backing the intifada would fizzle out, and that was precisely why some regimes, notably Jordan and Egypt, withheld it. But even without Arab backing the Palestinians are giving almost as good as they get in a struggle which, on the face of it, is hopelessly unequal. Their ability to inflict casualties, and in a variety of ways, has risen dramatically. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, in the past two weeks, they have not merely achieved a kind of balance with their enemy, but struck a heavy blow at the whole system of deterrence on which its security is based.

This is unprecedented, deeply ominous -- and a great failure for Sharon. What remains, for this champion of violent solutions, other than yet more violence? And -- if that does not work -- the toppling of the Palestine Authority, the complete reconquest of the territories, or even (that dream surreptitiously envisioned by more than just the far right), the "transfer" of Palestinians to neighboring Arab countries? Those are solutions to which his constituents, and his own instincts, are pushing him.

Yet if they came to pass they would surely be as disastrous, in the end, for Israel as they would be, immediately, for the Arab world, dragging it into a struggle with the whole region -- if not the world -- that is beyond its resources to sustain. Suddenly, at this critical juncture, and out of the heart of this Arab inaction and disarray, comes Crown Prince Abdullah's peace offering, an offer, if ever there was one, to save Israel from itself.

Sharon, of course, is congenitally incapable of taking it up. But, the Saudis make clear, it is not to him or his government that it is addressed, rather to the Israeli public, and those within it who grasp what a failure Sharon's Greater-Israel designs -- the real agenda behind his "war on terror" -- already are and what greater failure, and peril, they portend. At a time when Arab popular hostility towards Israel is at its height and no Arab leader has shown himself more cognizant of it than he, Abdullah offers the Israeli people a platform -- that pledge of Arab acceptance -- from which to turn their catastrophic leader out of office. Some have got the message. The diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli daily paper, Ha'aretz, wrote: "This is precisely the time when a responsible opposition should pick up the Arab gauntlet and place it, trumpets blaring, at the top of the political agenda."

Abdullah's initiative has garnered widespread Palestinian and Arab support; among the key Arab players even President Bashar Assad of Syria, the likeliest potential spoiler, appears to have rallied to it. Palestine threatens them all, and it may be collective helplessness and fear that inspires them, but it is a long time since Arab regimes have exhibited such a community of purpose.

The Europeans like it, and President Bush has declared it a new "opening" for his own re-engagement in the deepening crisis. But what it requires, above all, is a positive response from the Israelis; and that, in turn, requires a swift and decisive resolution of that conflict, a conflict for the nation's very soul, that has remained unresolved since peacemaking began, between those who are ready to embrace the historic compromise Palestinians and Arabs are offering them, and those who, rejecting it, are ready for endless, but, in the end, self- destructive war.