by Chris Wright
MADRID - Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is key to the wider issue of global peace and security, but mistrust of the United States is hamstringing the process in the Arab world, a conference on tackling terrorism in Madrid heard Wednesday.
Experts from more than 50 countries are attending the conference, which culminates with Friday's first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings.
Wednesday saw the intractable issue of the Middle East take centre stage, with Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat and Israel's former Mossad head, Efraim Halevy, jousting over the issue.
Erakat insisted the existing 'roadmap' for peace had to be a prelude to a wider settlement.
"Let's get to the endgame. All issues are do-able," Erakat said.
"But don't tie my hands, tie my legs, throw me to the sea and ask me to swim," he pleaded, adding that the unilateral nature of the decision by the Israeli government to leave Gaza had "changed negotiations to dictations."
Erakat said as long as the Israeli occupation existed, regardless of the impending withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians would feel excluded and humiliated.
He added that the United States, a key sponsor of the road map, should look beyond Gaza if it wanted to see a real Israel-Palestinian settlement.
"I hope (US) President (George W.) Bush will find it in his heart to say Gaza is the end of phase one of the roadmap," Erakat told the panel.
In response, Halevy, now head of the Centre for Strategic and Political Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told him that "Israel must take painful decisions -- and you must take painful decisions.
"We must make sure that terrorism does not dictate the political agenda," he said.
"Once the genie was out of the bottle it was no longer possible to control it," Halevy added.
"Terrorism has become an issue inside society and is a cancerous threat to society -- it is a much wider issue than just the Palestinians and Israel," he said.
The moderator of the panel they were on, Rob Malley, director of a US Middle East think tank, suggested that while the United States wanted to foster Arab democracy generally, it had an image problem.
"Our job would have been much easier if our image had been better," he said.
"I give credit to the Bush administration for putting the spotlight on (democratic) reform."
But he warned that terrorism and democracy could progress simultaneously in theatres such as Iraq and it was up to Washington to prove it could be even-handed in the region.
"The United States is still associated in the minds of so many Arabs with a plot to do its bidding.
Malley concluded that if the United States "has to be seen as acting not in self interest but for the good of the Arabs."
By that, Malley said, Washington had also to concentrate on promoting democracy and freedom in countries regarded as regional allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
03/09/2005 13:16 GMT