In White House meetings beginning Monday, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is expected to tell the Obama administration that Arab nations want peace, but are unwilling to abide Mr. Obama’s call to make good-faith concessions to Israel until Israel takes tangible steps like freezing settlements, an Egyptian official said.
As part of its effort to resuscitate the peace process, the Obama administration has asked Arab countries to make small but symbolic gestures to normalize relations with Israel, like allowing planes to fly through their airspace or improving cultural ties. The administration has also asked Israel to freeze all growth in settlements.
So far, neither side has agreed to Mr. Obama’s proposed first steps, and so the president is expected to look to Mr. Mubarak for help in breaking the latest Middle East deadlock, regional analysts said.
Mr. Mubarak flew from Cairo to Washington on Saturday for his first American visit in five years, accompanied by Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Gen. Omar Suleiman, chief of Egypt’s intelligence service. He was scheduled to meet Monday with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other officials, and is to meet with Mr. Obama on Tuesday.
Mr. Mubarak will tell Mr. Obama that from the Arab perspective, the best way to build confidence is to press Israel to freeze settlements, implement an economic plan to improve life in the West Bank, ease pressure on Gaza and agree to negotiate with all issues on the table, including the status of Jerusalem and refugees, said Ambassador Hossam Zaki, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry.
“If they do this and engage immediately in negotiations with Abu Mazen, this is a recipe for openness and the Arabs will make the gestures needed,” Mr. Zaki said, referring to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. “But they don’t want to make this first step. They are demanding the Arabs make the first step. The Arabs should not make the first step. They are the occupying power. The occupation must end.”
In many ways, Mr. Mubarak’s visit to Washington signals a new beginning to an old script, as Arabs and Israelis argue which side should go first, Arab states revert to their old roles in the region, and the United States tempers its criticism of Egypt’s political and human rights record in return for Egypt’s regional cooperation.
During the Bush years, the region’s more radical forces, those against the peace process, had the upper hand, including Iran, Syria and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that now controls the Gaza Strip.
But while the dynamics of the region are always fluid, the tone, at the moment, appears to favor those in the peace camp, regional analysts said. That shift has been attributed in part to Iran being distracted by the internal political tumult over its disputed presidential election, and Mr. Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world, especially his speech in Cairo, which has won the president, if not the United States, popular good will.
“The extremist forces now in the region are to some extent receding,” said Abdel Raouf al-Reedy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States and chairman of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs. “If you notice for instance Hamas, Hamas’s discourse has begun to soften a bit. If you notice Syria, now Syria is actually cooperating with the United States.”
Mr. Mubarak’s visit also signals an effort to re-establish Egypt as the United States’ chief strategic Arab ally after years of tension and animosity between Washington and Cairo. Mr. Mubarak had refused to visit Washington in protest over President Bush’s Middle East policies, the invasion of Iraq and the public criticism of Egypt’s political and human rights record.
The Bush administration effectively sidelined Egypt, turning more to Saudi Arabia as a regional force to counter the growing influence of Iran and push forward a peace initiative that the Saudi king initially sponsored, political analysts here said. But today, the Saudis have stepped back.
Political analysts said that Mr. Obama was pressing Saudi Arabia to take the lead in offering so-called confidence-building measures to Israel, but the Saudis flatly refused, saying they had already produced a peace initiative endorsed by all 22 members of the Arab League.
“Saudi Arabia will not accept to take any steps before Israel shows that it wants peace to be its first choice,” said Anwar Majid Eshki, chairman of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, a research center in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. “President Mubarak will listen to the demands of the United States and then present the Arab point of view in this regard.”
Egypt remains weighed down by domestic problems, including high unemployment, widespread poverty and uncertainty over who will replace Mr. Mubarak, who is 81 and in his 28th year in office. But the White House appears to have calculated that Egypt, as the largest Arab nation with regional goals similar to Washington’s, remains the best place to turn.
“The United States has to have a regional power to coordinate its policies with and Egypt cannot be a regional power without the United States,” said Mr. Reedy, the former Egyptian ambassador. “So there is some kind of a complementary relationship.”
Mordechai Kedar, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and now a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said that the meeting between Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Obama was important, but that their discussion should focus on what Israel insists is the primary problem in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and its regional ambitions.
“The issue is Iran and what seems to be an American reluctance to take care of this problem, which is much more meaningful for Mubarak than Israel,” he said.
Ambassador Zaki, of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, said that the presidents would address many issues besides the peace process, including Iran, Sudan and extremism.
But on the peace process, he said, Egypt’s opinion is unshakable.
“We think this huge gap of confidence requires movement from the Israelis first,” he said. “Then the Arabs are willing to make gestures. This is the way Arabs see it.”
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