Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 20-22

The MENA Summit Conference in Doha: Two Views

The Party's Over For Israeli Economic Integration Into the Middle East

By Colin MacKinnon

On Nov. 14 the fourth of the so-called Middle East North Africa Economic Summits met in Doha. Thanks to Israel's Netanyahu government, it was a bust. The economic peace process these summits were supposed to foster is so close to death it's barely breathing. Even the term "summit" is inappropriate these days, since most Arab states stayed away from Doha and no one except the U.S. sent a delegation at a level high enough to justify using the term anyway.

The MENA conferences began in Casablanca in 1994 in the afterglow of the Oslo agreement. A brainchild of the Clinton administration, the conferences were to be annual meetings among regional political and business leaders. The idea was to create economic interdependencies between Israel and the Arab states, promote personal contacts between the two sides and foster trade, investment and development.

The first meeting in Casablanca in 1994 and the second in Amman in 1995 seemed to go well enough. Arab delegations at the ministerial level, including delegations from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council states, duly arrived as did blue-ribbon private-sector delegations. Bechtel, GE, the Olayan Group from Saudi Arabia, Koor of Israel and the Arab Banking Corporation of Bahrain sent high-level delegations and all did what they were supposed to do—exchange business cards and pleasantries, shop for projects and sales possibilities.

In the buzz of PR surrounding Casablanca and Amman, there was much talk of major projects in the offing—Israel would link its national electrical grid with that of its neighbors, there would be water-sharing agreements, cooperation in tourism, shared use of air and seaports. An ambitious regional development bank, along the lines of the Asian Development Bank, was mooted.

None of this has happened. The one major deal to come out of previous conferences—a $4 billion liquid natural gas project signed at Amman that would have supplied Qatari LNG to Israel—has been put on ice despite strong pressure from Washington to keep it going. So has the so-called "peace pipeline" project that would have supplied Egyptian natural gas to Israel (the gas will be sold to Turkey instead). The regional development bank is but a distant dream.

Trouble Brewing

That there was trouble brewing and plenty of it was apparent last year in the run up to the summit—it was still something of a summit then—to be held in Cairo in November. A pan-Arab summit had met in June in the wake of Likud's victory in the Israeli elections that spring and had issued a communiqué linking improved relations to progress in Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations. Thereafter a number of Arab countries urged President Hosni Mubarak to call it off because of Israeli policy. Arab critics cited the new Israeli government's resistance to a Palestinian state, its maximalist claim to all Jerusalem with no Palestinian presence, and its intention to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Mubarak refused to call off the meeting, though, holding that such a step was premature. The Likud government, being new, was untested, Mubarak said, and might not actually do what it threatened to do. A year later Mubarak was among the boycotters.

As he put it when explaining to parliament in November why Egypt was staying away from Doha, "The aim of an economic conference is to build cooperation between Israel and the Arab community and this is linked to progress towards peace. But so far no progress has been achieved."

Too true. In the intervening year, Netanyahu did what he said he would do. In the spring of 1997 he decided to build homes for 30,000 Jews in Arab East Jerusalem, refused to carry out withdrawals from the West Bank that had been agreed on and, after terrorist bombings in Israel, imposed tough-guy collective punishments on the Palestinian territories. After a year and a half of Netanyahu, Oslo seems dead. If it is, so are the economic summits that grew out of it. Hence the boycott.

The Boycott

Only five Arab governments—Yemen, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait and Tunisia—sent delegations, and those were low-level (Kuwait was represented by an undersecretary from the finance ministry). Some Arab states like Syria and Lebanon had never attended; Libya and Iraq had never been invited. But Algeria, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and the pivotal countries Egypt and Saudi Arabia, once eager to send delegations to these affairs, all stayed away. Morocco, like Egypt, be it noted, had been host of a previous conference.

Netanyahu seems to have decided that integration into the region is not worth the price, that Israel already does as much trade with the region as it needs to.

He may be right, though it's hard to figure out how much trade Israel really does with its neighbors. According to Judy Dempsey, a talented reporter for the British daily Financial Times, Israel's trade with the region is much larger than the Israelis are willing to admit. Israel's Manufacturing Association, for example, a group representing Israeli industry, claims that for the first nine months of 1997 Israeli trade with MENA totaled a mere $60 million.

But, as Ms. Dempsey points out, if you examine data from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics you get a very different picture. Exclude trade with Europe, the U.S., the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and you're left with a category called "other countries"—which is to say, Israel's neighbors—that Israeli statisticians lump together with no national breakdown. Last year trade with "other countries" reached $4.8 billion, a tenth of Israel's total and rather more than the $60 million the Manufacturers Association owns up to.

Much of what Israel imports from the region is oil, of course, which it either buys through intermediaries or on the open market. It exports finished goods, sometimes with "Made in Israel" stamped on them, sometimes not. In any case, Israel's trade with the region is substantial, a fact Israel presumably downplays for fear of having the trade cut off. From the Likud perspective, economic conferences may not offer much, particularly if withdrawal from the West Bank is the price for keeping them going.

Nevertheless, the boycott was a major slap at Netanyahu as well as at the Clinton administration. If anything good comes out of Doha, that slap may be it.

Final Declaration

Most speakers at the conference, including Madeleine Albright and others from the U.S., took the opportunity to criticize current Israeli policy. Shimon Peres, who attended, was lionized.

The conference's concluding declaration, which had American support, is unusually frank in its treatment of Israel. It calls on Israel to observe U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of trading land for peace. Previous declarations had not done so.

Israel tried hard to get the phrase "land for peace" scissored out of the document, but failed and in the end signed it along with the other attendees.

The declaration also notes that the Palestinian economy has "deteriorated dramatically in the past year" and demands "the immediate removal" of the "restrictions and closures which hinder the daily movement of Palestinian labor and trade."

Statements like this have not been made before at these conferences.

And if Likudniks aren't listening, other Israelis probably are. X

A Win for Egypt, Saudis and UAE, Qatar Breaks Even, U.S. and Israel Lose

By Richard H. Curtiss

"The empty Arab seats at next week's U.S.-backed Middle East economic conference in Qatar will contrast starkly with the massed ranks of Arab leaders expected to attend an Islamic summit next month in Iran, America's nemesis in the region. Arab diplomats say the message to Washington is that their governments are so exasperated with what they see as one-sided American policy that they would rather embrace ayatollahs in Tehran than sit down with Israeli businessmen in Doha."

–Paul Taylor, Reuters News Agency, London, Nov. 13, 1997.

In late October a colleague and I were guests of one of America's most prominent Palestinian intellectuals at the Georgetown University Faculty Club. Other guests were an Arab-American department head at another nearby university and a Syrian journalist. Because my colleague and I were about to travel to Qatar, the subject of the Middle East North Africa economic conference (MENA) scheduled in Doha for Nov. 16 to 18 arose.

"If the Qataris don't cancel the conference because of what Binyamin Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians and the peace process in general, how can anyone take the Arabs seriously?" asked one of the participants.

"Well, I feel quite certain the Qataris will keep their commitment to hold the conference," said my colleague, a former U.S. ambassador to the small Gulf state

"Then no one will listen to the opinions of any Arabs for the rest of this century," said another of our Arab companions.

"And maybe the next one," the third chimed in.

As things, turned out, however, the conference had totally different results. It provided proof to the Israeli public that Binyamin Netanyahu's destruction of the peace process has killed Shimon Peres' dream of the economic integration of Israel into the Middle East. That point was made clear when the Qatari hosts warmly welcomed Peres to the conference, but flatly turned down Netanyahu's request to attend as well. The conference also became more a demonstration of Arab unity than otherwise. And it certainly must have completed the education of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on how low American influence in the Middle East has sunk during the five years Bill Clinton has been president of the United States.

A few days after our lunch and two weeks before the scheduled conference, my colleague and I found Qatar bustling with preparations to receive up to 2,600 guests for the meeting, making it not just the biggest such event in Qatar's history, but perhaps the biggest such international political meeting in any of the small Arab states of the Gulf.

Since the number of invitees exceeded the 1,100-room capability of the country's 10 hotels, three cruise ships had been contracted to tie up in Qatar to serve as floating hostels during the three-day duration of the conference. But by the time we arrived, who would be occupying those hotel rooms, and how many would actually be needed, had become a matter of concern.

Martin Indyk, the newly appointed U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, was crisscrossing the area in a U.S. military plane on a series of "get-acquainted calls" in which he was trying to corral delegates. He netted Yemen, which agreed to attend, but not at a high level, and Kuwait. The end result was that besides those two countries and the Qatari hosts, Jordan (host to the 1995 MENA conference), Tunisia and Oman were the only major Arab participants, along with delegates from Arab League member states Mauritania, Somalia, Djibouti and the Comoros Islands.

Notable absentees among the 22 members of the League of Arab States, including its chairman, were virtually all of the other Arab "moderates," upon which the administration of George Bush had based its Middle East policies, including Morocco, which hosted the first MENA conference in 1994, Egypt which hosted the 1996 MENA conference, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, all of which allow U.S. forces to use their military bases under certain conditions, and Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.

The fact that only 64 of the 90 invited nations showed up stunned U.S. observers, including New York Times roving foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, who as recently as Oct. 27 had predicted flatly that Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain would send at least low-level representation.

With three of the six members of the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council, to which Qatar belongs, missing, the AGCC's Saudi secretary-general, Jamil Al Houjailan, told the Saudi newspaper Al Bilad that "fraternal relations between the AGCC countries will not be affected" by the boycott by half its members "which is not directed against Qatar, as our Qatari brothers well know."

The conference was to be held in a center built for the occasion as an annex to the hotel in which we were staying, the Doha Sheraton, one of the finest hotels in the world. The new center already had been sealed off by security police, and Qatar quietly ceased issuing visas for visitors not associated with the conference for the period in which it was to be held.

In the hotel, always a center for business people and diplomats from all over the world, Hebrew was one of the languages we heard being spoken in the hotel dining room. In the hotel coffee shop, when we asked a Western diplomat how, since the breakdown in the peace process, the Qataris regarded Israeli visitors and the Israeli diplomats who staff a permanent trade office in the same hotel, he pointed to a man bustling past our table.

"That's the head of security for the Israeli delegation," he said. "With Netanyahu not invited, it looks like the delegation will be headed by Foreign Minister David Levy."

After our departure and in the final days before the conference, however, with the few Arab countries that had accepted the invitation lowering the size and level of their representation, even Madeleine Albright, who would be heading the largest delegation, let it be known that her visit to Qatar would be shortened. The Israelis adapted, designating Trade Minister Natan Sharansky to head their delegation and treating the conference primarily as an economic rather than a political event.

It was at the opening session, with Madeleine Albright seated beside him, that Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, unleashed what Gulf and British newspapers described as a "scathing attack" and a "blast" at Israel.

"The peace process," he said, "is, unfortunately, now passing through a critical phase where it is impeded by the intransigence of the Israeli government and its unjustifiable backing away from the peace accords it has concluded."

As for Qatar's decision not to cancel the meeting, the emir explained: "We wanted to prove to the world that we honor our international commitments."

In her remarks, Albright focused on a four-part U.S. agenda for the Israel-Palestine dispute concentrating on security, further Israeli pullbacks from the West Bank, a time-out on Jewish settlement activity and accelerated negotiations on a permanent settlement.

However, she attracted thunderous applause almost equal to the applause that greeted Sheikh Hamad's criticism of Israel when she unleashed what a Financial Times correspondent called a "sharp attack on Israel," blaming it for "dire" economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza.

"Partners have obligations—to make their partners stronger, not weaker," she continued. "To act in the spirit of peace. To take into account the needs and views of others. To focus not on creating but on removing obstacles to peace. And to contribute to an atmosphere in which the violent extremes are marginalized and the roots of trust may grow."

Her pointedly critical remarks elicited a startled reaction from Sharansky. "Perhaps they reflect her frustration with the peace process," the Israeli delegation leader said. "But I'm not sure this is the right place to do so." Israeli-Arab differences also were reflected in wrangling over the final communiqué, which conspicuously failed to designate a host country for a fifth annual MENA conference.

Although she originally was scheduled to remain in Doha throughout the conference, Albright departed only four hours after she arrived, saying that since she had planned to discuss the U.S. position on Iraq with some of her Arab opposite numbers at the conference, their absence necessitated unscheduled visits to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain before she continued on for a scheduled visit to Pakistan.

In fact, the absence of ministerial-level delegates from the Arab countries with whom she wished to meet was only a part of her embarrassment. Because the Pakistanis were undergoing a constitutional crisis, they had postponed her visit with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif by one day, leaving her, as the old saying goes, "all dressed up with no place to go."

With unexpected time on her hands, Albright had time to consider the manner in which she had been rebuffed in a meeting in London with Netanyahu the day before her arrival in Doha. The two were scheduled to hold a press conference at the end of the meeting and, for a full hour, CNN kept its world-wide audience waiting while promising that the two leaders would appear at any moment. When they finally emerged from what obviously had been an acrimonious session, Albright, uncharacteristically, had virtually nothing to say. Netanyahu, in his usual good television form, also said nothing, but at greater length.

Albright had proceeded from London to Switzerland, for a scheduled meeting with Yasser Arafat, and then flew directly to Doha for her MENA appearance, with no sleep except on the airplane.

In her previous assignment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Albright, a European expert, played a major role in persuading a reluctant Clinton to intervene to halt the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia.Whether Albright's just-completed crash course in Middle East affairs will have any such effect remains to be seen.

British journalist Paul Taylor, quoted at the beginning of this article, was pessimistic. He wrote:

"'Israel's supporters are so powerful in the Congress that they are calling the shots in Middle East policy with very little opposition,' a European foreign ministry policy analyst said. 'That policy may not reflect Washington's wider strategic and economic interests...but despite warnings from the policy think tanks, there is no sign of a change.'"