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November 7, 2003/Cheshvan 12 5764, Vol. 56, No. 7
Wolfowitz backs grass-roots petition
RON KAMPEAS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON - A grass-roots petition for Israeli-Palestinian peace, chugging along slowly for months, took off last week when a powerful and surprising name was attached to it.
Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. deputy secretary of defense who is a close advisor to President Bush, voiced strong support for a plan formulated by former Israeli Shin Bet security chief Ami Ayalon and Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh.
"There are thousands of Israelis and Palestinians who feel the same way" that President Bush does, Wolf-owitz told a Georgetown University audience, referring to Bush's support for side-by-side Israeli and Palestinian states under the "road map" peace plan.
"How do I know?" he said. "Well, right now there is a significant grassroots move-ment that has already gotten some 90,000 Israeli signatures and some 60,000 Palestinian signatures in support of principles that look very much like the road map favoring a two-state solution."
Wolfowitz's com-ments, buried in a lengthy prepared speech, surprised Israeli, American Jewish and Pal-estinian officials.
Wolfowitz has a reputation as a hawk, having built his career on arguing that a failure to deal decisively with terror and tyranny can be fatal. That is pre-cisely Israel's argu-ment in its current dealings with ter-rorist groups and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's landslide election in February 2001, and his closeness to Bush, supposedly had buried notions of an Israeli withdrawal from vir-tually the entire West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, which had informed peace talks at the Egyptian resort of Taba in the previous government's dying days.
The Ayalon-Nusseibeh plan appears to be modeled closely on the Taba talks.
"Everyone in Israel is reading this very carefully," an Israeli official said. "If it comes from Wolfowitz, it's serious."
Wolfowitz's support could mark a sea change for the Bush administration. Until now, the hallmark of Bush's Middle East policy has been to avoid the talk of theoretical endgames that marked the Clinton administration's final months, other than a com-mitment to vague notions of Palestinian statehood and an end to terrorism.
Instead, Bush has insisted that Israel and the Pal-estinians come to an ac-commodation before the United States steps in.
By contrast, the one-page document Wolfowitz praised envisions a division of land along the pre-1967 armistice lines, uproots Israeli settlers from a future Palestinian state, establishes a physical connection between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, divides Jerusalem and quashes Palestinian refugees' hopes for a "right of return" to Israel.
The Ayalon-Nusseibeh proposal still lacks the specifics of the "Geneva accord," which was negotiated much more publicly by leading Israeli doves and Palestinian moderates.
Part of the reason for the duo's sympathetic hearing is that they are less confrontational than the Geneva negotiators, and they have unassailable credentials.
Ayalon shepherded the Shin Bet through one of its most difficult periods after it failed to protect Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from ass-assination in 1995.
Nusseibeh has pressed for accommodation despite derision from Arafat and others, and even has been beaten by Palestinians angered by his willingness to compromise.
Ayalon has said they hope to garner some quarter million signatures from each side before taking the petition to the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
"Our hope is to take this single page and put it inside the road map," Nusseibeh said.
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