It is hard to explain why so many outsiders to the conflict think the Israel-Palestine dispute to be so central to Middle East problems or even amenable to solutions. Even harder is to fathom how advocates of renewed diplomatic engagement on the issue might achieve success through recycled solutions that have already abjectly failed in the past. The attempts of such analysts are often commendable, their idealism admirable. But their solutions fall well short of understanding the conflict and the underlying regional issues; and such clarity is desperately needed if good news is to emerge from the Middle East any time soon.
It is of course understandable that Israelis and Palestinians themselves would view their conflict as the core Middle East problem. They are after all the prime victims of their mutual hatred and cannot be blamed for making that case. That the Christian west believes the same may largely be ascribed to the redemptive biblical tradition on which western narrative is founded. But to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and to hope and strive for it is neither a guarantee of success nor a cogent policy argument.
Palestine as symbol and reality
Steven Everts is one of those observers who believes that regional challenges would be more easily met if the Israel-Palestine dispute was solved. This fails to see that the region largely suffers from self-inflicted wounds. Everts surmises a causal correlation between conflict in Palestine and regional problems such as religious radicalism, the democratic deficit, the youth bulge caused by uncontrolled demography and the resulting poverty.
Simple facts fly in the face of this argument: those who support this view are hard pressed to explain why countries like Algeria and Sudan blessed by natural riches, lacking a border with Israel and drawn into the conflict by Arab solidarity and little else are also beset by these problems. The hundreds of thousands who perished in those countries civil wars met their tragic fate regardless of Palestine.
Would the current onslaught of radical Islam on the Saudi dynasty lose its teeth and bearings if Israel and Palestine were to peacefully coexist? It would undoubtedly be politically convenient but hardly compelling, to suggest that Afghanistan was torn by civil war and raped by Islamic radicalism because of Palestine. Or did the Taliban massacre thousands of Shia to promote that cause?
It would be likewise hard to cogently argue that Saddam Hussein the one veritable weapon of mass destruction already discovered in Iraq and his brutal regime terrorised the Iraqi people for over twenty years, gassed the Kurds, launched a war of aggression against Iran and occupied Kuwait to help the Palestinians.
A region suffering from problems that are largely its own making may use a diversionary cause as cover up. But as Michael Scott Doran recently suggested (Foreign Affairs 82.1, January/February 2003 ), Palestine-the-symbol which regimes use as an excuse not to change and their opponents wave as evidence of the regimes corruption and ineptness needs not be confused with the real relevance of Palestine-the-place, which is marginal to the substance of Arab politics.
The absence of political will
Despite three years of the Palestinian intifada and Israeli harsh counter-terrorism tactics the region has remained silently, if angrily, on the sidelines of the conflict. Like it or not (and Israelis and Palestinians alike might understandably resent this) the conflict is being successfully contained. Israel and Palestines steady slide into the abyss affects only them. The region was already in a desperate condition, and would remain so even in the unlikely event of Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation.
Operation Iraqi Freedom should have reinforced this view. The Arab street fell short of being a local manifestation of the angry general will: shockingly, 280 million Arabs spread over 22 countries different in their social, cultural, political, economic and institutional set-up proved that they do not think and act like one (as Orientalist opinion-makers in the west condescendingly presume). As for the war, the desert failed to become a quicksand for coalition forces; and the projected thousands of angry Arab youth supposed to turn up in Iraq to fight the infidel failed to make any difference. That old-time cherished assumption that the region will go up in flames lest Palestine is solved should have been discredited. That is not is in itself an obstacle to promoting the cause of peace.
Steven Everts is convinced that more diplomacy is needed in order to induce a domino effect of sorts. This is a flop-sided neo-conservative argument which assumes that solving Palestine would facilitate the solution of other problems, whereas lack of a solution stands in the way of tackling other regional ills. But why would that be the case, given that peace has proven all too elusive for so long?
There have after all been seven decades of western peace initiatives. Since the Arab refusal of partition in 1937 (the Peel Commission) and then 1947 (the UN partition plan), western powers have come up with an array of solutions and stopgap measures, none of which has yielded much solace.
Those who presume that more diplomatic engagement (American or European) would produce what so much diplomatic engagement failed to deliver forget that all the major diplomatic breakthroughs in the region (the Israel-Egypt peace treaty and the Oslo process) happened as a result of direct bilateral secret contacts between the belligerents. American mediation followed rather than preceded engagement, and helped refine the details of an agreement; but the premise for success in both instances was the readiness of the parties involved to move ahead on the road to compromise.
Both the Israel-Egypt peace treaty and the Oslo accords could only have happened with the political will of the two sides and the existence of a unique overlapping of national interests, which alone promoted détente and which crucially pre-existed American mediation.
The needed political will today is decisively missing because the last round of negotiations and the ensuing violence has dramatically shown that the gap between the two sides is too broad. Public perceptions of the conflict similarly show how the two sides see this gap as unbridgeable.
Some still fantasise success through a new diplomatic effort along the lines of an updated version of Oslo for that is what the roadmap is. They either ignore the existence of this gap or presume that somehow three years of violence that has left nearly 3,000 dead and thousands more wounded and maimed did not broaden it.
Calling for more American engagement is an old mantra with little substance, given that the present predicament materialised at the tail end of the most intense American diplomatic effort to date; while presuming that Europe has a bigger role to play ignores that to play carrot and stick in the big game of world politics, the powers that be must have both. Europe has carrots aplenty, but it hardly has a stick. And even if it did, the Iraqi crisis exposed how ineffective that stick would be once divided in fifteen pieces and convulsively shaken in fifteen different directions. Such advocacy is a fantasy of power, not a viable alternative to America. Europes absence at both the recent Sharm-el-Sheikh and Aqaba summits was matched only by Arafats absence. That European envoys still insist on meeting him only keeps them out of the real game.
The problems of a protectorate
Tony Klugs proposal for an international protectorate is interesting, if not new. But while it seems to make a solid case as to why Israel should accept it, the proposal ignores the Palestinian side by not addressing a crucial challenge as all previous such proposals did. What will happen once the international mandates troops be they American, British, Australian, Egyptian or Fijians and their civil administrators become targets of a suicide bombing campaign?
After all, this occurrence must be factored into any plan involving an international force: it happened in Lebanon in the 1980s, in Somalia in the early 1990s, it is happening in Afghanistan today and it is poised to continue in Iraq as well. Therefore there is no reason to believe that it will not happen in Palestine where the technique was perfected. Nor will working with a reformed Palestinian Authority guarantee success against terrorism. Arafats decision to forgo the monopoly of force to ride the wave of the intifada very early on in the game produced an anarchy that will not easily submit to well-meaning cosmocrats and their peacekeepers.
Any formulation of a protectorate for Palestine must determine the scope of repressive measures the mandate is prepared to adopt to keep the peace. As Stuart Cohen has written, it must sanction the extent to which Israel would be allowed to engage in hot pursuit if terror would continue on its territory and how willing and ready international forces would be to do Israels bidding if the IDF is not to retaliate. Peacekeepers have not left Afghanistan yet and America is bound to stay in Iraq for now. But US marines quickly packed and left both Lebanon and Somalia, leaving behind the mess they had come to sort.
What guarantee, besides the understandable longing for peace inherent in all goodwill proposals like Tony Klugs, does trusteeship offer that international intervention will work this time? Klug seems to believe that a transitional period armed with good implementation monitoring and enforcement mechanisms would guarantee success. Kosovo and Bosnia are no doubt examples of success so far. But if these examples teach anything, it is that the transition period is much longer than the three years optimistically offered by the roadmap and the three-to-five-year time frame Klug more cautiously suggests.
Moreover, they ignore one more crucial factor. American troops on Saudi soil enraged Osama bin Laden and his like; now the crusaders occupy that other great symbol of Islam, the ancient seat of the Caliphate, Baghdad. How would the additional presence of infidel troops near Jerusalem, Islams third holiest place, endear the hearts of extremists, given that they see little difference between Zionists and Crusaders?
A time for imagination
So what, if any, course of action is both viable and desirable today?
It is time to reject the time-honoured western assumption that every problem has a solution. The Israel-Palestine dispute defies this conceptual offspring of the Enlightenment. The Palestine crisis is a problem that currently lacks a solution. The main obstacles on the road to peace are not lack of diplomacy (for there is perhaps too much of it), nor is the problem that not enough of a role has been given to Europe (for Europe can offer inducement but not much-needed authority). Nor is the elusive solution going to pave the way for freedom and prosperity to a region that could have had both long ago on its own strengths and chose to elude them out of its own weaknesses instead.
The real challenge today is to bring freedom to the region a long, costly and perilous journey.
Only once the region can stand politically, culturally, socially, and economically on its own, will there be no pretexts, no excuses, and no alibis for the enemies of compromise.
Only when local leaders can take responsibility for their own blunders, past and future, and be prepared to pay the price, can a diplomatic initiative have a chance.
Until then, the victimisation so frequently waved by Arab and Palestinian leaders as an excuse not to do their part will stand in the way of any plan.
Only if the belligerents are able, in a supreme act of shared political imagination, to understand that the future of the region and its chances of a peaceful settlement are their own responsibility and then act accordingly will the present impasse be overcome and the pattern of failure of seven decades be broken.
Unless this complete overhaul is first achieved, diplomatic engagement will condemn the belligerents and their western mediators to repeat recent failures. Nor, as the old adage goes, would the repetition of history be a farce: it would be doubly tragic, and supremely futile.
