The “first steps” towards peace in the Middle East, after the approval of the “road map”, are the main foreign policy issue tackled by the leading international dailies over the last few days. The Herald Tribune (29/5) speaks of the “important changes” that have taken place in Israel, whose government “has for the first time given its support to a Palestinian State, and accepted the ‘road map’ for peace in the Middle East”. Yet “Sharon, the prime minister and the father of Jewish expansion in the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”, explains the American daily, “has not abandoned his support” for the many Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories: “He seems to feel that the majority of them could continue to exist, on the land that Israel could obtain, and that they would not form part of any Palestinian State”. “No Israeli has spent more time on the battlefield than Sharon, or has earned a worthier reputation for intransigent patriotism”, comments the Herald Tribune, and it adds: “Anyone who has spent any time with the prime minister knows him as a person who has a deep attachment to the biblical lands that he calls Judaea and Samaria. Renouncing them or a large portion of them in the name of Israel’s security, will not be easy for him”. Commenting on the impending “adventure” of George W. Bush in the Middle East, Jean-Christophe Ploquin ( LaCroix, 27/5) argues that the role of the USA in the region, especially after the war in Iraq, has become a “threatening presence“, in spite of the approval of the “road map”, drawn up jointly by the USA, the European Union, Russia and the UNO. In an article published in Le Monde (29/9), Patrick Jarreau reflects, in turn, on the preponderant role played by America in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on the eve of two important US appointments in the Middle East after the G8. “For a President who, during the first months of his term of office, preferred to distance himself from the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the change is spectacular”, comments the author of the article, according to whom “what’s striking about Bush’s steering of this new attempt to find a peaceful solution is the role played by Condoleeza Rice and her associates in the Security Council”; it transforms, in the view of the French paper, the “road map” into a “challenge of American domestic policy”. The Italian Catholic daily, Avvenire (29/5), calls the diplomatic mission of the US President to the Middle East “decisive”; on 3 June he is due to meet the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco at Sharm el-Sheik “to explain to the leaders of the moderate Arab world the new regional settlement planned by the White House”; the day after it will be the turn for the President’s meeting with Sharon and Abu Mazen at Aqaba, in Jordan. Wide coverage is devoted in the German press to the first ecumenical Kirchentag, which opened in Berlin on 28 May, and will end there on 1st June. “ Tiny ecumenical steps the Vatican is speaking with the Orthodox but is allergic to the Evangelicals” is the headline of the article published in the FAZ (27/05/03) and signed by Heinz-Joachim Fischer, who writes that “ the dialogue with the Orthodox is favoured from a Vatican point of view by the vital strength and persevering stability of the faith, to be felt perhaps in the timeless beauty of the eastern liturgy.” Another article in the same paper is signed by Metchild Küpper under the title “ Corpus Domini procession in the human piazza“, which notes: “ If some 200,000 participants arrive in Berlin on the Wednesday before Ascension for the first ecumenical Kirchentag, they will see a city of the diaspora“, and again: “ The time has ended in which Catholics felt themselves to be ‘a little flame in a big city’, and in which they had to have the courage of the disciple to allow themselves be recognized as such“. The Spanish press has devoted some comment to the possible British entry into the euro. El País ( 25/5) writes: “The British government is facing the not easy decision of its incorporation in the final phase of the monetary unification of Europe, which would lead among other things to the surrender to the controversial Central European Bank of the responsibility for monetary policy which the respectable Bank of England now holds. The integration of the pound sterling in the euro would complete a favourable process for Europe and, undoubtedly, for the Spanish economy”. ———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1209 N.ro relativo : 39 Data pubblicazione : 31/05/2003
