How to please the Arab League

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
14 March '10

Right from the beginning of his administration, President Obama made it a priority to win over the Arab and Muslim world. So here's a thought: while you struggle to keep up with the flood of commentary about the "new low" in US-Israeli relations, it's perhaps worthwhile to keep in mind that the next Arab League summit is scheduled for the end of March.

The summit will be held in Tripoli, Libya's capital, where the Arab League representatives will be hosted by Muammar Gaddafi, who just last month called for a "jihad" against Switzerland - well, actually, not just Switzerland, because he reportedly added: "Let us fight against Switzerland, Zionism and foreign aggression."

A quip about this call for "jihad" from a State Department spokesman required an official apology that apparently seemed warranted after the head of Libya's state oil company summoned executives from US energy companies Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, Hess and Marathon and warned them that "the dispute could hurt US businesses in Libya."

Arab commentators don't seem to expect much from the meeting in Tripoli: "Another lame summit" was the dismissive headline in a recent issue of Al-Ahram. Nevertheless, the related article offered a lot of advice on how to overcome the "lameness", and unsurprisingly, Israel was an important issue in this context. One piece of advice was that the Arab League should consider revoking any support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; instead, the Arab League was urged to endorse the so-called "one-state solution" resulting in "a single state covering the whole of historic Palestine in which all inhabitants would be guaranteed full and equal rights as citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation." Another piece of advice was that the Arabs should realize that with regard to the tensions with Iran, "Israel is the chief instigator."

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