Center for International Policy

{Highlight}6/8/03

Mary McGrory, Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist. Her commentary appears in the Washington Post every Thursday and Sunday and is syndicated to some six hundred newspapers. Click here for a list of her recent columns.

November 1, 2001

Excerpt | Whole column, "Straight Shooters"

. . . Former ambassador Robert E. White (he was our envoy in El Salvador at the time of the nuns' murders) thinks there could be no better moment to show that diplomacy can stop terrorism: The topic is on the table and the United State is focused on holding together a coalition that has significant Arab participation.

"Solving the Israel-Palestine dispute will not abolish terrorism," says White, head of the Center for International Policy, "but it is an indispensable start. The obvious injustice to Palestine is the one issue that unites all Arabs in the Middle East."

White convened a meeting at the Brookings Institution with three prominent experts on the Middle East—Philip Wilcox, former consul general in Jerusalem, Mary Ann Stein, president of the Moriah Fund, and Landrum Bolling, the legendary Quaker Middle East authority. It was a low-key meeting, most notable for the complete agreement among the speakers. All advocate an end to violence, an end—that is the elimination—of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the founding of a Palestinian state with geographical and political dominion . . .

Landrum Bolling thinks we should put aside worries that attempts to make peace would be seen as appeasement of Saudi Arabia and other new best Arab friends. "We should do it because it's right, for Israel and Palestine and the rest of the world."

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