CAIRO (AFP) – Key players in the search for Middle East peace have reached understanding on a plan that could lead to a comprehensive settlement.
“An important understanding, that could constitute an agreement in principle, has been reached by Egypt, Israel, the Palestinians and the significant international parties — the United States and the European Union — on a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the official news agency MENA quoted senior Egyptian sources as saying Tuesday.
As we can plainly see, it contains actually nothing. Not only are there no on-the-record sources, but basically it talks about an “understanding.” Pretty vague. Subsequent stories based on the MENA report (do a Google News search on Egypt and you’ll see at least twenty of them) all started with an optimistic tone about the impending breakthrough and then actually saw that no one else knew about this. Still, they kept pretending that something had actually happened. It finally took someone getting an Israeli official saying that there was nothing happening for people to die. In other words, MENA managed to manufacture a story when there was actually nothing there and got the world’s major news outlets to play along with it. And no one along the way thought it might be a little strange that an “understanding” had been agreed to so soon after Arafat’s death and while Sharon is facing a political crisis.
I wonder, though, if this might not belong in the “never believe anything until it’s officially denied” category. Assume for a minute that an agreement actually was reached. Both Israel and the PA would have excellent reasons to hush it up – Sharon wouldn’t want to compromise his coalition negotiations, and Abbas wouldn’t want to take the risk that voters would view it as a capitulation. On the other hand, Egypt would want to hype it up in order to accentuate its role as a regional mediator. In other words, I’d expect the result to be more or less what actually happened – and, in case you didn’t notice, the Israeli and Palestinian “denials” were very half-hearted.
At the same time, I agree that this is a non-story, because the alleged “agreement” was purely procedural and didn’t address any of the underlying political issues. Process without substance leads only to more process, and eventually to breakdown. Sooner or later, the two sides will have to tackle the issues of Jerusalem and the refugees, and I won’t be declaring any breakthroughs until they do.