Arab Nations See U.S. as Sole Hope for Peace

When Egyptian security forces rounded up 11 members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood recently, the arrests seemed a curious contradiction to the prevailing mood across the Arab world: The activists were thrown into jail for trying to rally support for the Palestinian people.

Even as Arab leaders line up squarely behind the Palestinian cause, prosecutors in the port city of Alexandria charge that Islamic hard-liners are using the intifada to destabilize the Egyptian government, which signed a peace treaty with Israel two decades ago.

As the level of violence between Arabs and Israelis increases, a deep sense of foreboding has multiplied calls among many Arab leaders for the United States to resume an active role in jump-starting peace talks.

The pressures are most evident in Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab nations that have made peace with Israel.

Hoping to resuscitate peace talks with a diplomatic initiative in April, the two relatively moderate voices instead came away frustrated and convinced that the only way to stop the violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is for President Bush to abandon what is seen here as a hands-off policy. The perception is that Israel will never sit down to serious negotiations without U.S. persuasion.

“The feeling is widespread in the Arab world that the situation is most dangerous, explosive,” said Osama al Baz, an advisor to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “It might be very difficult to contain it or to bring it back to the level where reason can prevail and where one can hope for a new beginning for the peace process.

“The feeling is widespread, and under this consensus it is an absolute must for the United States to activate its role and get busy with the situation.”

U.S. Defends Its Handling of Crisis

In Washington, officials have consistently defended their handling of the Middle East crisis, saying that the United States is playing an active role through its ambassadors in the region. In addition, they say that Bush has met with most of the leaders of the region, from Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and others, including Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

“We are engaged, and the conversations that are taking place now at a couple of levels are U.S.-sponsored, U.S.-hosted, U.S.-arranged, U.S.-monitored meetings, and we are following it very, very closely,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last month in testimony before Congress.

In Washington on Tuesday, Powell discussed the beleaguered peace process with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s top deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, better known as Abu Maazen.

It was the first time that a top Bush administration official welcomed a Palestinian leader to Washington, a tiny warming of the administration’s cold shoulder to Arafat.

Powell also rejected a call by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the chairman of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, for a sharp cut in U.S. economic aid to Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.

“They play an important role in the region,” Powell said.

No one has said that the governments of Egypt or Jordan are in imminent danger. But pressures are growing. Opposition members in the Egyptian parliament, for instance, recently pointed to the death of a Palestinian child as a reason to push the government to reconsider its relations with Israel.

In Jordan, where more than half the 5 million population is Palestinian, riot police in the capital, Amman, used batons and water cannons last week to break up an anti-Israel rally.

Political analysts throughout the region said that leaders in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia are also watching unfolding events with concern.

“It is not simply the fighting that has these regimes concerned,” said Farid Khazen, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut. “It is the fact you cannot envisage a scheme that will bring all parties to the table at a time when the United States has said clearly, ‘We will not be involved.’ No doubt this is increasing pressure on these regimes.”

Former President Clinton focused intensely on trying to bring about a comprehensive and lasting Middle East peace, only to see his efforts unravel in September, when the most recent conflict exploded.

In October, Egypt hosted a failed peace summit at the resort of Sharm el Sheik. For the next several months, Egypt--the de facto leader of the Arab world--in effect sat on the sidelines.

It was only last month that Egypt--the only Arab country with strong enough ties to the West and Israel to pursue a peace plan--initiated a regional proposal.

Moustafa Fikky, a former diplomat who now serves in parliament, said that Egypt couldn’t wait any longer.

“We were waiting for the Israeli government to realize what they are doing,” he said. “Now it is more than seven months [since Sharm el Sheik], and things are deteriorating. We think that peace is threatened in the whole region.”

When Mubarak visited the White House in April, he decided to raise the prospect of a joint peace initiative. To give the plan a pan-Arab approach, he signed on Jordan, clearly the junior partner in the relationship.

The initiative was well received, if not endorsed, by the U.S. and received plaudits from Russia, the European Union and the Palestinians. Some officials in Israel accepted the talk of peace as a positive step, although they rejected the call to freeze expansion of Jewish settlements.

Egypt’s Proposal Makes No Progress on Ground

But the initiative made no progress on the ground. And, after an embarrassing news conference following an April visit with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Mubarak lowered his profile.

At the news conference, Mubarak announced to reporters that the Israelis and Palestinians had agreed on a cease-fire--only to be contradicted later by Peres, and events.

“I was surprised to hear from Arafat that there has been no agreement. . . . They [the Israelis] have played tricks with me so that I give a statement saying we reached an agreement,” Mubarak announced to his nation in his annual Labor Day speech. Peres later blamed the mix-up on a translation error.

In what was seen here as an advance of sorts, the Bush administration recently endorsed in principle the findings of a panel headed by former Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine). The report is similar to the Egyptian-Jordanian proposal in that it calls for an end to the violence--and, among other things, for Israel to stop settlement construction.

Officials in Egypt said that they were heartened by the attention but that they want action.

“What is needed is a high-profile rather than a low-profile role that will get the blessing of the president,” said Baz, the Mubarak advisor. “We had hoped that the submission of the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative would help put the peace process back on track. And for this to happen there must be some persuasion, not pressure, to be used in the Israeli government, which does not seem to be listening to the voice of reason coming from the Arab world.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.