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Ray · 04-05-2006, 15:18 PM

Quote:

Peace won’t come this way

By Mahir Ali

THE vast majority of western commentators are convinced that last week’s Israeli election signifies a crucial break from the past: for the first time most voters rejected Eretz Israel, the long-nurtured notion that one day the territory of Israel proper would stretch across the lands occupied in the 1967 war.

Hardly anyone has dared to claim that this development will somehow magically lead to a resolution of the conflict with Palestinians. Nonetheless, the implication is that by crossing a crucial psychological barrier — by at least tacitly admitting that the occupation cannot indefinitely be sustained — Israeli voters have cleared the way for the disengagement process proposed by the Kadima party. And that, in turn, is considered likely to lead to a settlement of some sort in the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, much of this optimism appears to be grounded in little more than wishful thinking. The election result, on the face of it, presents a picture of a thoroughly divided Israel. Kadima, the supposedly centrist party founded last year by Ariel Sharon just months before he lapsed into a coma, will have 29 seats in the new Knesset — less than one-fourth of the parliament’s total strength of 120. Labour, the second-largest party, can add only 19 to that tally. Thus, the two largest parties, deemed to be the likeliest components of the next coalition government, cannot govern on their own.

They will, by the looks of it, require at least three further partners, quite possibly including a couple of ultra-Orthodox organizations such as Shas or Torah Judaism. They cannot afford to embrace the Arab parties, which together hold 10 seats. Nor are they likely to willingly seek a partnership with Israel Beitenu (which won 11 seats on the basis of fascist platform supported chiefly by Russian imigris) or Binyamin Netanyahu’s once dominant Likud, whose relegation to minor-party status was arguably the best news on election night.

Once the contours of a coalition emerge, it will become easier to judge whether anything will come of Kadima leader Ehud Olmert’s plan for a unilateral withdrawal from much — but not all — of the West Bank. Olmert has been somewhat more forthcoming about his intentions than Sharon, who played his cards incredibly close to his chest after last year’s Israeli’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The problem, however, is that Kadima’s strategy is geared exclusively towards a somewhat expanded Israel: it appears to have given little consideration to the matter of whether the chunks of the West Bank that it plans to abandon, along with Gaza, can be constituted into a coherent Palestinian state. On the basis of Olmert’s revealed intentions, that would appear to be an extraordinarily unlikely outcome. He plans to dismantle a few far-flung Jewish settlements, displacing about 60,000 settlers. Another 350,000, however, will stay put, the settlement blocks they inhabit being incorporated into Israel.

Some of these blocks have spread alongside Israel’s international boundary. Others extend much further into the West Bank. The plan, as it stands, could lead to the West Bank being divided into three or four zones, separated from each other by land that will remain under Israeli control. Olmert also intends the border between the West Bank and Jordan to be patrolled by his troops. Under such circumstances, a viable independent state is out of the question.

Were such conditions to be achieved, they would be tantamount to continued occupation under a different guise. In the event, it could almost be guaranteed that the conflict, too, would go on. Endlessly.

A negotiated settlement would obviously make far greater sense. Notwithstanding their illegality, it would not necessarily entail the dismantling of all settlements, provided Israel was willing to cede equivalent territory of its own to the Palestinians — along with geographical coherence and political sovereignty. However, prospects for talks appear to be no brighter than they were under Sharon, who enjoyed pretending there was no one to talk to on the other side. That undermined Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas, enabling Hamas to surface as the popular choice of Palestinians.

Has that democratically achieved outcome led to the resumption of a dialogue? Anything but. Predictably, the new mantra is that contacts with an organization sworn to the destruction of Israel are out of the question — despite indications that Hamas effectively accepts the 1967 borders. Israeli contempt is generously reciprocated by Hamas, but the mutual antipathy needn’t necessarily be a barrier to negotiations and even a deal, provided both sides could be prodded in the right direction.

That appears extremely unlikely for the time being. The US has never come close to being an honest broker in the Middle East, but over the past couple of decades it has wedded itself so firmly to the Israeli position that even the fiction of even-handedness has become impossible to maintain. In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Condoleezza Rice has given her blessing in advance to the idea of a unilateral partial withdrawal.

Based on a mixture of known facts and conjecture, it has long been accepted in much of the Arab world that the American stance on the Middle East is determined to a considerable extent by the ruthless efficacy of the Israel lobby in the US. That assumption hasn’t prevented a variety of Arab dictatorships from aligning themselves as closely as possible with Washington, knowing only too well the futility of aspiring to the uniquely special relationship the US maintains with Israel.

Perhaps more remarkable than that sordid tale is the fact that exploring the nature of that special relationship is more or less taboo in the mainstream American media. When a pair of conservative US academics were invited by The Atlantic Monthly to examine the power of the Israel lobby, they took the task seriously. The Monthly treated the product of their labour as if it were a hot potato: it refused to touch it. The paper by John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at Chicago University, and Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, finally appeared last month in The London Review of Books (an unedited version can be found on the Harvard website http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Researc...rwp/RWP06-011).

Although it might be something of an exaggeration to describe the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis as an exposi, given that much of what it points is based on publicly available sources of information (the web version includes a vast amount of footnotes), it certainly serves as a useful collation of facts, building a far-from-pretty picture. As a consequence of the lobby’s stranglehold over Congress, say the writers, “US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.”

“The lobby,” the say, “doesn’t want an open debate, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide.” They suggest that even the majority of American Jews would tend to disagree with the lobby’s views, which played a significant role in persuading the Bush administration to invade Iraq, and have been equally instrumental in ratcheting up the pressure against Syria and Iran.

The academics say the ability of the tail to wag the dog is not only inimical to the US national interest, it has also been “bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities ... that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists.”

Mearsheimer and Walt also noted that “the lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-Semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.” Inevitably, they themselves have attracted that charge from a variety of lobbyists and neo-conservatives, who generally chose to employ invective rather than arguments.

A more pertinent critique of Mearsheimer and Walt has been advanced by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Columbia University academic Joseph Massad, who suggest that by overstating their case, the writers implicitly exonerate successive US administrations of responsibility for their own actions. Chomsky and Massad both point out that US policies, initiatives and interventions in the Middle East are consistent with the American approach in other parts of the world, where its role is unaffected by the Israel lobby’s machinations.

Insofar as it prevents a debate, it could even be said that the lobby’s inordinate influence also serves what Washington perceives to be its own interests. If it didn’t, the lobby would soon find itself unwelcome in the corridors of power. By the same token, should the US even today take it upon itself to play a constructive role in the Middle East, it wouldn’t find it impossible to override the lobby’s objections — and achieve results.

In the meantime, it could do worse than heed the perceptions behind a quotation from Israel’s first president, David Ben-Gurion, cited by Mearsheimer and Walt: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country ... We come from Israel, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com
http://www.dawn.com/2006/04/05/ed.htm#1

This editorial from DAWN, the largest English newspaper of Pakistan, makes interesting commentary.

It opines that it is wishful thinking that this election indicates "for the first time most voters rejected Eretz Israel" and that "the implication is that by crossing a crucial psychological barrier — by at least tacitly admitting that the occupation cannot indefinitely be sustained — Israeli voters have cleared the way for the disengagement process proposed by the Kadima party".

The editorial is more concerned if the areas planned to be vacated by Israel from the West Bank could constitute a coherent Palestinian State since Palestine would be in separate blocks and the are in between patrolled and controlled by Israel and hence it wonders of there will be an independent country called Palestine!

In short, the editorial dashes the optimism that the election result had generated!

Notwithstanding, I am of the opinion that there is hope and the final shape of the Palestinian State is still to be drawn up.