European powers seeks to benefit from Bush’s Middle East setbacks

Their aim is to take advantage of the weakening of the US’s world position in order to assert their own interests in the Middle East and to advance an alternative to the Bush administration’s pro-Israeli stance, which they believe has destabilised the entire region.

To this end, Spain, Italy and France launched a new five-point Israel-Palestine peace initiative with the stated aim of calming tensions across the Middle East. It marks a significant break with the common front represented by the European Union’s participation in the US-led “Quartet” alongside Russia and the United Nations. This was based on President Bush’s “Road Map” for peace in the Middle East, which promised a negotiated settlement establishing a Palestinian state.

However, with Washington supporting every military provocation against the Palestinians by Israel and endorsing every demand Jerusalem has made in order to reject negotiations, the three countries have concluded that the road map is effectively defunct. The US now tacitly endorses the Israeli government’s plan to unilaterally set the borders of a Palestinian state and in so doing permanently annex much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The concerns this has aroused were amplified by the politically disastrous Israeli offensive against Lebanon—a country with close ties to Europe, particularly France. This left Lebanon economically ruined and strengthened Hezbollah. It ended with the despatch of a UN military force, to which the three countries all contribute, under conditions in which Lebanon remains the focus of bitter geopolitical conflicts between the US, Iran and Syria.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/euro-n27.shtml