US has always wanted fair settlement of Israeli-Arab conflict

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, several press articles have stated that the policy of the United States towards the Israeli-Arab conflict is the root cause behind these atrocities, or that the 'dispossession' of the Palestinian Arabs by the creation of Israel in 1948, is the main factor behind this conflict.

These views ignore some key historical facts:

Osama bin Laden is a Saudi, whose hatred of the US stems from his views that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia since the 1991 Gulf War is an affront to his brand of fundamentalist Islam. He is also violently opposed to any moderate Islamic or secular Arab regime. All this has very little to do with the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The US has consistently supported a fair settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict. US diplomatic efforts were behind virtually every ceasefire and peace initiative for the past 30 years. During the 1990s, the US invested tremendous efforts to equitably resolve this conflict, resulting in Israel's generous peace proposals to Yasser Arafat last year that could have led to a Palestinian Arab state for the first time in history. Mr Arafat not only rejected this offer, but also launched a campaign of terror to improve his negotiating position through violence, in direct violation of the pledges he made under the Oslo Agreements to settle the conflict by peaceful means.

The origin of the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the 'dispossession' of the Palestinian Arabs, but is rooted in Arab attempts to use terror and violence to block the creation of a Jewish state in the historic Jewish homeland of Israel. The United Nations voted in 1947 to partition British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish community of Palestine accepted this proposal. The Arab community, backed by the surrounding Arab states, rejected it. Had the Arabs accepted this proposal there would have been no war, no refugees, and a Palestinian Arab state could have come into existence more than 50 years ago alongside Israel. When the British withdrew in May 1948, five Arab armies invaded with the express purpose of wiping out the newly-created state of Israel. The resulting conflict, including the Arab refugees, is a direct consequence of the Arab rejection of the UN partition resolution, and of the subsequent war started by the Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab countries.

Attempting to rationalise terrorist atrocities with faulty history only serves to divert attention from what needs to be done now, which is for all decent countries to work together to put an end to the murderers who carried out these acts, and the regimes that support them.

RAPHAEL M. LERNER