Saudi ARABIA'S reaction to US President Barack Obama's call for support from Arab countries to assist in making peace with Israel is a legitimate one. Israel has clearly been a major impediment to any success of the peace process and its policy today does seem “schizophrenic”, the term used by Saudi foreign ministry spokesman, Osama Nugali, to describe Israeli policy. Israel claims it is interested in pursuing peace while at the same time engaging in such activities as settlement expansion and the founding of new settlements that are clearly counter-productive to any peace process. There is no doubt that Israel must stop the establishment of settlements and crack down hard on those settlers – or colonists – who illegally break ground for new “outposts” with the goal of seeding new settlements for the future. But the Israeli government, headed by Netanyahu, has rebuffed all calls for settlement freeze, let alone dismantling and vacating the occupied lands. It has infuriated the Arab world further by declaring all of Jerusalem as its unified capital. Moreover, the settlers already ensconced illegally on Palestinian land are some of the most extremist of Zionists and are not likely to obey peacefully their government's mandate, if at all there is one, to remove settlements. An article in The New York Times reported on settlers who were rushing to establish outposts this week while American officials are in Israel and the Middle East promoting negotiations to restart the peace process. It was apparent by the hardheaded statements made by many of the settlers that reasonable negotiation is out of the question. Their stances are extreme and their understanding that they are a part of a wider world part of whose interests have greater moral legitimacy than their own is non-existent. So, yes, a hard response from Mr Nugali was an appropriate one. Nevertheless, faced with such small-minded extremism on part of the Israeli government, it is vital that the Arab states show themselves to be smarter and superior to such nose-thumbing reasoning. Arab countries must unite in a cause that is truly right and do so in such a way that the world will see who is truly impeding the establishment of a lasting peace in Palestine. __
