Stardate 20020716.1542

(On Screen): The new American policy with respect to the Palestinians is having the effect of changing the playing field. Powell is meeting in New York with representatives of various other nations, trying to hammer out a new answer.

Unfortunately, it may not have changed enough, yet. The Europeans are still clinging to their fantasies about Arafat, and still have the unrealistic hope that somehow this struggle which has been going on for the last fifty years will be settled within the next three. And Powell is starting to go wobbly, always a bad sign.

The US is continuing to provide substantial aid to the Palestinians and will increase that. But all the aid is being funneled in through non-governmental agencies; none of it is going through the Palestinian Authority.

The PA is notoriously corrupt, and the Israelis captured documents proving that some PA money was being diverted to support terrorism. But the Europeans continue to give some of their money to the PA directly. Javier Solana indignantly denied that any EU money was being diverted.

EU diplomat Javier Solana indirectly challenged the Bush administration's assertion of corruption within Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Solana said no international assistance program works better than European aid to the Palestinians, which is channeled through the authority.

Solana appears to be as much motivated by trying to avoid admitting to mistake as anything else. He'd do well to consult with investigative reporters for Die Zeit, who discovered that large amounts of aid from the EU were being skimmed off within the PA.

The Europeans and Russians are also still holding onto the talisman of Arafat as "essential elected leader of the Palestinians" who must, somehow, still be involved in any deal. But there's only been one election, and it didn't remotely resemble what we in the west would consider "free and fair".

"We all have our respective positions. The U.N. still recognizes Chairman Arafat and we will continue to deal with him until the Palestinians decide otherwise," Annan said.

"It is only for the Palestinians to decide who they want to have as their leaders. It is the sovereign right of the Palestinian people," said Ivanov.

"As for Chairman Arafat, he is the legitimately elected leader of Palestine and while he is in this capacity we will continue to maintain our relations with him," he added.

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said, "Now they (the Palestinians) are having elections and then we will see who will become leader after the election but whoever is leader is the person the European Union will be talking to."

Kofi Annan has a strange idea of what "legitimately elected" means. Or perhaps he doesn't, since in practice the majority of the world's leaders with whom he deals were selected by equivalently flawed elections.

The good news is that Powell is standing firm on several important points. First, he told the Europeans that the US would not pressure Israel for a pullout or, in fact, for anything at all. Second is the fact that he's trying to deprive the Palestinian Authority of as much international money as possible by getting that money redirected to the Palestinian people through agencies that Arafat doesn't control.

On the other hand, he's already showing his lack of comfort with Bush's hard line about Arafat himself, and he's dropping hints about the idea of letting Arafat keep a title and public office as long as it was symbolic and powerless.

I think this is a mistake. The US has to stand firm on this. If there were some way to really be sure that Arafat wasn't still pulling the strings, it might be reasonable. But there's no way to assure that, so the actual effect would be to gut the most important aspect of the new Bush policy towards the Palestinians.

Still, it's also promising that Powell seems to have stood firm on the idea that the first move must be a Palestinian halt to violence. The others tried to pressure, yet again, for a timetable and for external pressure on both sides (i.e. on Israel, since the Palestinians don't respond to pressure worth a damn). The others tried, yet again, to make the argument that these attacks were motivated by hopelessness and that the only way to stop them was to provide hope.

This point of view represents a major failure of imagination on the part of the Europeans, who continue to assume that the Palestinians will react like Europeans would. But within the Arab culture strength is respected and weakness is held in contempt, and concessions from the other side are taken as a sign of weakness and result in redoubling of effort. They do not treat concessions as a sign that compromise is possible, but as a signal that complete victory is within reach.

What's needed now is to present a strong front to the Palestinians, and to absolutely make clear that they will gain no reward whatever as long as the struggle continues. The Palestinians can't be bought off, but they can be rewarded for acting the way we want.

30 years of diplomacy based on trying to buy the Palestinians off has failed. As Bush correctly recognized, the Palestinians are no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and must prove their worthiness to be negotiating partners.