The Middle East peace process

Who says that summit meetings have had their day? Six plus two and three plus four, and now three plus one. All met in Cairo. The common denominator of all these sums is peace, or to be more precise, peace talks.

The two overriding concerns of the talks were a peaceful resolution of long-standing, inter-Arab conflicts and the ironing out of outstanding knots in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The three Arab leaders who met with the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Cairo last week were trying to puzzle out the meaning of peaceful coexistence.

President Hosni Mubarak has increasingly come to play the role of mediator in inter-Arab disputes and his efforts at mediating between Israel and the Palestinians have been internationally acclaimed.

The tangle that the Palestinian leadership finds itself caught in is largely of Israel's making. The Israelis hold the key to easing tensions in the region.

"You cannot build a second story if you don't have the first story. What we are trying to build is the first story of peace and we have told our Egyptian friends that we intend to build a two-story building, not a one-story building," Israeli Foreign minister Shimon Peres stated soon after the four-way Arab-Israeli summit meeting in Cairo recently.

But to cut a long story short, the point is: no firm foundation for peace can be secured without explicit Israeli acknowledgement of the right of the Palestinian people to determine their own destiny.

Moreover, the 22 Arab League states cannot possibly accept as a foregone conclusion Israeli nuclear privilege.

In the words of Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, "the first story will be peace and the second will be a region free of nuclear weapons".

-- Al-Ahram, Cairo