Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel has agreed with his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas at Aqaba, a Jordanian seaport in the Red Sea, that the state of Palestine would come into being by the end of 2005 and their two countries would live peacefully side by side. They did so at a three-way summit with U.S. President George W. Bush, whose road map charts a lasting peace in the Middle East. Their promise may remain just a promise, like many of those Israel and its Arab neighbors have made in the past.

Israel may have made arrangements for 200,000 of its citizens to resettle away from the West Bank and the Gaza strip, which it occupied in the 1967 war, but the feud between the Jews and the Arabs that has lasted since the Bible time cannot be wished away in a couple of years. About one million Palestinian Arabs were dislocated in that war, and most of them want to return to their homeland as soon as they possibly can. In fact, most of the suicidal terrorists came from the decrepit refugee camps for Palestinian Arabs. There is no lack of second-generation refugees who will be, with the slightest of demagogy, persuaded to give up their lives for service to the Allah. Israeli retaliation against terrorist attacks has only deepened the hatred between the two peoples, who claim Abraham as their common ancestor.

The truth is that both Israelis and Arabs want peace. Both Sharon and Abbas, who replaced Yasser Arafat in time for the launching of President Bush’s road map master plan for peace in the Middle East, know it full well. Arafat knows it, too. But he could not restrain Palestinians, particularly Hamas Islamic Jihad followers. And all of them know a lasting peace will not come to the strife-torn holy land, probably during their lifetime. However, Arafat dutifully signed an agreement with Yitzhak Rabin at the White House at the prodding of President Bill Clinton only a few years ago. Rabin was later assassinated by an Israeli extremist. At the insistence of President Jimmy Carter, Manehem Begin and Anwar Sadat signed a treaty of peace between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978. All three of them won Nobel Peace prizes, Jimmy Carter being awarded belatedly last year. Sadat was shot down by Islamic fundamentalists. Peace, however, did not return. Israel and Egypt, the most populous Arab country, have since remained in a fragile state of no war/no peace at best.

American efforts to bring peace to the Middle East, which started with the administration of President Harry S. Truman, are laudable - heroic but futile. Truman tried to keep the promise British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made during the First World War. Balfour, in an attempt to win the Jewish support in the war against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire, promised a homeland for Diaspora Jews in Palestine, which the Jewish people believe Yahweh has promised them. Palestine was placed under British mandate after the Paris peace conference of 1919, and the rise of Adolph Hitler and the genocide in Europe swelled the Jewish ranks in Palestine - so much so that after World War II Truman had to have the United Nations partition the holy land and create modern Israel in 1947. The birth of Israel, which touched off the first Israeli-Arab war, has exacerbated the strife over Palestine, which started with the first crusade at the end of the eleventh century and Saladin’s counterattack and conquest of Jerusalem in 1187, though with a brief respite during the reign of the Ottoman caliphs.

In the ensuing centuries, the Jews were treated much better by Moslem Arabs than by the Christians. In Palestine, the Arabs displayed toward the Jews not only tolerance but kindness because the latter looked upon the former as deliverers from the Christians and Zoroastrians. Things began to change only after the massive illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine before the Second World War.

The task facing President Bush is even more arduous than those of his predecessors. He carries the burden of intense Arab hostility which none of the former presidents did. The U.S. armed forces, by his order, invaded Iraq. The brief war in Iraq was a preemptive one, aimed at ousting Saddam Hussein who was believed to have ordered the production of weapons of mass destruction. The United States did not get a U.N. mandate to attack Iraq but went it alone, with the help of the United Kingdom. And so far no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein certainly was no idol of the Iraqis and the rest of the Arab nation. As a matter of fact, his removal was celebrated in many Arab capitals, though not ostensibly, but so long as the American peace-keeping force remains in Iraq, all the Arabs will not forgive the United States for waging a war of aggression on their brother state and occupying it. And the U.S. peace-keepers have to stay - nobody knows for how long. The situation is totally different from the one George W. Bush, Sr. faced after the Gulf War of 1990. That war was fought to drive Saddam Hussein’s invasion army out of Kuwait.

There is reason to believe the Sharon-Abbas agreement may be enforced as promised. After 2006 Israel and Palestine may peacefully co-exist in name. Then, will Abbas be able to control both the West Bank and Gaza, which Sharon will obligingly surrender? Can Abbas restrain Palestinian extremists from attacking Israelis? Will Israel refrain from violent reprisal against any such attacks? If Northern Ireland is a guide, none of these problems can be solved anytime soon. Nobody seems able to control the Irish Republican Army that after countless promises to keep a truce has continued to disturb peace in Northern Ireland despite decades of hard efforts on the part of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland to end the sectarian war. A lasting peace in the Middle East in general and Palestine in particular is hard to come by.

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