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December 17, 2004/Tevet 5 5765, Vol. 57, No.16
U.S. cash aims to ease P.A. reform, elections
RON KAMPEAS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON - Anyone who has been through a messy divorce and then reconciliation can tell you: Money makes it all so much easier.
That's been the thinking this week as the United States dumped cash wherever it could to grease the wheels of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
Everyone is getting stocking stuffers: Israel, the Palestinians, Egypt and Jordan.
Examples of recent munificence were the adminis-tration's extension last week of loan guarantees to Israel; discussion of new investment opportunities when Jordan's King Abdullah II visited Washington last week; and the recently announced U.S.-Israel-Egypt trade agreement which could send $150 million to Israel and create up to 250,000 jobs for Egyptians in the next year.
"It's a very important development, it's something we've been working on for some time," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said of the agreement.
As is typical of any rocky reconciliation process, not everyone is happy with the distribution of the wealth - leading the United States to find novel ways to try to rectify the situation.
Faced with congressional pressure to keep $20 million the administration had promised to the Palestinians from going directly to the Palestinian Authority, which Israel fears would use it to finance terrorism, the Bush administration agreed - but then found an extra $3.5 million to go directly to the Palestinian Authority to facilitate Jan. 9 elections.
The money is rollover cash from last year's U.S. Agency for International Development budget, an administration official said, and therefore isn't subject to further congressional review.
The extra cash - $2.5 million for the elections and $1 million for foreign observers - caught Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon off guard. He made clear to a top-level U.S. congressional delegation that he was not happy.
"Prime Minister Sharon said that the Americans must focus on investments in economic projects in the Palestinian Authority and transfer funds for this purpose only, and not for economic budgets, since such funds will either disappear or be used to finance terrorism," an Israeli statement said Dec. 13, after Sharon met with Reps. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), their parties' respective whips.
In the past, Israel could count on friends on Capitol Hill to stymie such efforts, but the flurry of recent Congressional visits - Hoyer and Blunt were the third top-drawer delegation to visit the region since P.A. President Yasser Arafat died Nov. 11 - suggest that a president buoyed by his re-election last month and his party's control of both houses of Congress isn't about to brook opposition.
The Bush administration is eager to get Mahmoud Abbas, the likely winner of the P.A. presidency and a relative moderate who has "clicked" with Bush in the past, in place for future peace talks.
U.S. officials now speak in glowing terms about reform in a Palestinian Authority they were going out of their way to shun just months ago. But that was before the death of Arafat, who was seen in Washington as the principle obstacle to peace in the region.
The administration is so eager to make sure Palestinian elections go smoothly that it's sending one of its toughest critics on Middle East policy - former President Jimmy Carter - to monitor the voting.
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