• by IPS Correspondents (cairo)
• Tuesday, November 22, 1994
• Inter Press Service

CAIRO, Nov 22 (IPS) - Republican Party control over the U.S. Congress is threatening the chances of achieving a lasting peace in the Middle East because of reluctance to provide former Arab enemies of Israel with economic aid, analysts said here Tuesday.

Worries over aid emerged in the United States on Monday during a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when Republican leaders said they did not feel the United States should bankroll the Middle East peace process.

The Clinton administration reaffirmed aid to Israel at three billion dollars-a-year. But right-wing opposition leaders said the United States should not necessarily provide economic aid to the Palestinians with which Israel signed an outline peace deal last year.

While the Jewish state receives three billion dollars, Palestinians in self-rule areas in Gaza and the West Bank are taking a fraction of the 2.4 billion dollars in international aid promised to them after the 1993 deal.

With little money to fund economic regeneration in Gaza and the West Bank, political tension among the Palestinians has been rising exploding last week in clashes in which at least 12 people were killed.

However, analysts believe that following the clashes the international community will be more willing to hand over the cash than before.

Eytan Gilboa, an Israeli specialist on Jerusalem's relations with the United States, says donor countries are more likely to give now because the clashes demonstrated that with no economic aid the chances of the peace process failing are high.

Until now, the international community, which for 1994 pledged 700 million dollars, has been reluctant to disburse funds without ensuring they will reach their intended target.

They believe Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whose reputation for good book-keeping is poor, has yet to set in place an adequate auditing and accounting system to handle the aid.

Now that the Republicans control Congress that reluctance, as far as U.S. aid is concerned, has grown dangerously, says Gilboa.

"The Republicans are very suspicious of Arafat," says the professor of International and American Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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