EU challenges US over Israel

Frustrated EU governments are starting to speak out more bluntly about the violence in the Middle East - and America's failure to intervene, Ian Black reports from Madrid

Spain's foreign minister, Josep Pique, did not mince his words this week when he led his European Union colleagues in issuing a stern reminder that they were deeply worried about the deteriorating situation in Middle East - and American policy towards it.

Just a month into his country's turn at the helm of the union's rotating presidency, the suave Catalan drew up a sharp statement observing that, if the bloody, escalating conflict in Europe's backyard was going to be controlled, Israelis and Palestinians urgently needed to get back to the negotiating table.

Yasser Arafat, the EU ministers declared, was a partner who was needed to control terrorism and talk peace - neither of which he could easily do under siege by Israeli tanks in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

The Americans, by contrast, seemed to be backing the argument of the hawkish Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon: that the time had come for the veteran Palestinian leader - unable or unwilling to stop a spate of horrific suicide bombings against Israeli civilians - to step down.

Anna Lindh, Pique's feisty Swedish colleague, called it "just madness" for Washington to suggest it would sever relations with Arafat, scorned as behaving in a "mafia-like" way by Anthony Zinni, the US envoy to the region. No diplomatic niceties there.

And not many either when the Europeans sent a strongly-worded note to the Israelis, "reserving the right" to demand reparations for damage done to EU-funded infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories. Or when Pique "deplored" Sharon's public regret that Arafat had not been killed when he was briefly in an Israeli sniper's sights during the siege of Beirut in 1982.

It was thus hard to conceal the widening transatlantic divergence over the world's most intractable conflict, in which the EU has worked hard and paid generously to carve out a role but so far failed to wield much influence.

That has made it all the more frustrating for the Europeans that the US president, George Bush, has refused to use America's far greater leverage to press the Jewish state to revive the long-stalled Oslo peace talks with the Palestinians.

September 11 had briefly seemed to change that. Under pressure from Tony Blair, Bush listened to his more cool-headed advisers and built a broad international coalition instead of lashing out after the suicide attacks. Re-engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, widely seen as one of the root causes of Muslim resentment of the US and the west, suddenly seemed on the agenda.

Bush did pay lip service to the idea of Palestinian self-determination, but quickly disappointed those who hoped he would go further. With the military campaign in Afghanistan effectively won without the collective help of America's Nato European allies, so called "continental drift" seemed to be resuming.

Instead of the cooperative multilateralism the EU wants, the US was standing back from the bloodshed in Gaza and Jerusalem and again picking and choosing the policies - and enemies - that suited it. And in a way that made many Europeans squirm.

No more so then when they listened to Bush's state of the union address this week, when he described three countries - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - as forming an "axis of evil" which posed a growing threat to the US because of their support for terrorism and their efforts to build or acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Pique and his EU colleagues were privately dismayed: Iraq has divided Europe from America for a decade, with only Britain loyally participating in airborne patrols over the country's "no-fly zones," while France has led the campaign to end sanctions and resume lucrative oil contracts.

No surprise then that it was Alan Richard, the French defence minister, who spoke out first, hinting at a backlash if Washington attacked Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.

"Whatever the outcome," he warned, "the United States would have to weigh possible changes in its alignments with many other countries."

Bush's comments on Iran also posed a difficulty for the EU, which has tried hard to shore up the moderate reformist regime of the president, Mohamed Khatami, against clerical hardliners and is now looking at signing a fully-fledged trade and cooperation agreement.

EU ministers, including Britain's Jack Straw, flew to Tehran after September 11 to enlist its support in the war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban - though they were troubled by an Iranian arms shipment destined for the Palestinian and intercepted by Israel earlier this month.

Similarly, the EU has sought to actively engage North Korea's isolated and impoverished "hermit kingdom," complementing the policy initiated by the Clinton administration but abandoned when Bush took office.

"In this globalised world," said Javier Solana, the union's foreign policy supremo, in a mild but unmistakable rebuke to the White House, "coalition-building and consensus-building are absolutely essential."

Europeans have been left wondering what to do. Spain's response, the prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, explained to visiting Brussels-based correspondents, is this: if Washington cannot stop the unrelenting violence in the Middle East, the EU will not fill the void by a high-profile attempt to get Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

"We take a dim view of the Middle East situation," said the Spanish conservative, but he argued that conditions were simply not right for a repeat of the dramatic Madrid conference of 1991, which two years later led to the Oslo breakthrough.

It is all a depressing reminder that the EU of 2002 may be an economic giant with its own currency and ambitious plans to enlarge; but that its search for an effective global role will be a long and difficult one. And that it still plays second fiddle to a truly indispensable America.