SWITZERLAND: Two signs on either side of the stage in Geneva clearly stated the message of the ceremony. "There Is A Partner," said the first, in a rebuke to the Israeli Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon, who claims he has found no Palestinian with whom he can make peace.
"There Is A Plan," the second sign announced.
Otherwise the stage was empty, save for an olive tree, symbol of peace and of the lands of Israel and Palestine.
Seven hundred guests were packed into the conference hall for the 2½-hour ceremony. There was no signing - the 50-page plan was signed in Jordan on October 12th - and the document's chief architects, the former Israeli and Palestinian cabinet ministers Mr Yossi Beilin and Mr Yasser Abed Rabbo, were the first to admit it was not a binding treaty.
Yet the Geneva Initiative inspired an outpouring of international support unseen since the 1993 Oslo Accords. Three Nobel Peace Prize-winners - Jimmy Carter, Lech Walesa and John Hume - gave speeches, and a fourth, Nelson Mandela, addressed the audience by video link.
The British Prime Minister Tony Blair dispatched Lord Michael Levy to read a message of support. Lord Levy's son Daniel is Mr Beilin's closest aide and helped to negotiate the Geneva accord over the past two years in secret.
The US film star Richard Dreyfuss read a message from the former US President Bill Clinton, who noted how close Palestinians and Israelis came to making just such an agreement in the last days of his presidency.
More than one commentator has lamented that a peace treaty along the lines of the Geneva document was not reached three years ago. In the intervening period, 3,500 people, two-thirds of them Palestinians and one third of them Israelis, have been killed. Four more Palestinians, including a nine-year-old child, were killed by the Israeli army in Ramallah yesterday.
Before the ceremony, the Palestinian academic Camille Mansour warned that the celebration in Geneva could ease Europe's conscience. "The danger is that everyone will be praising the accord, and they'll forget about Sharon's wall, his policy of colonisation and strangulation," he said.
Mr Carter, who oversaw the treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979, said, "The only alternative to this initiative is sustained and growing violence." Under the Geneva plan, Israel would pull out from most of the Occupied Territories and the Palestinians would receive land to compensate for those West Bank settlements annexed to Israel. Jerusalem would be the capital of both states, and Palestinians would in effect renounce their "right of return".
President Jacques Chirac of France chose the Holocaust survivor and former cabinet minister Simone Weil to be his envoy to the Geneva ceremony. The EU's foreign policy representative Javier Solana said the initiative was "a powerful example of how civil society ... can help bring back a political perspective."
Some 58 prominent political figures, including the former Secretary General of the UN Boutros Boutros Ghali, the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, signed a statement of support. "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken far too great a toll already," they said. "Both peoples have paid dearly in lives and livelihoods in a war both are losing."
Two ageing warriors, the former Israeli Chief of Staff Gen Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Gen Zuheir Manasra, told the audience why they supported the Geneva Initiative. Gen Lipkin-Shahak once banned Gen Manasra, who was an officer in Yasser Arafat's Fatah, from the Occupied Territories.
Closing speeches by Mr Beilin and Mr Abed Rabbo were the high point of the ceremony. Both men have received death threats and Mr Abed Rabbo's house was machine-gunned at the weekend. "Extremists on both sides have made this conflict a way of life," said Mr Beilin, a former justice minister.
Mr Abed Rabbo addressed critics who say those who hold no public office had no right to negotiate a peace plan. "We agree," he said. "But what should we do when our leaders fail? ... This is the simple solution to a complicated conflict. And it is the only solution. There was no other solution in the past, and there will be no other in the future. Why spill more blood to arrive at the same conclusion later?"
