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How Israel and the United States Aim toward Disaster
by Patrick Seale
 What would it take to persuade Israel to rethink its attitude towards its Arab neighbours -- and primarily towards the Palestinians? The Hamas victory in Gaza is surely a clear signal that an Israeli change of direction is urgently needed.
All Israel’s efforts to break the democratically-elected Hamas government have failed. Its policies of boycott, siege and starvation, of bombing and shelling, of extra-judicial murder, of withholding tax revenues, of the systematic destruction of Palestinian institutions have served only to create a time-bomb of hunger, despair and defiance on Israel’s flank.
Yet Israel appears to have learned nothing. Instead of seeking peace with the Arabs -- instead of seizing their outstretched hand -- it persists in rejecting all peace overtures, preferring to rely on force and still more force, and on its ability to manipulate its American ally.
"The Middle East today is like Europe on the eve of the Great
War of 1914-18. It needs only a spark to set the whole region on fire." -- comment of an acute observer to Patrick Seale
How Israel and the United States
Aim toward Disaster
by Patrick Seale
[Republished at PFP with Agence Global permission]
In Washington this week, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert managed to abort a tentative American initiative to restart
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He persuaded George W. Bush -- a
President painfully out of his depth in Middle East politics -- that
this was not the time for peace talks with either the Palestinians or
the Syrians.
The appointment as Israel’s new defence
minister of Ehud Barak, a former prime minister and chief of staff, who
defines his primary task as restoring Israel’s deterrent capability, is
another ominous sign that wars rather than peace talks lie ahead.
Israeli
sources report that Barak will not admit, even in private, that he made
some mistakes in 1999-2000 when, as prime minister, he missed the
chance of peace with both the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the
Syrian leader Hafiz al-Asad. This is a bad start for a man who is
likely to play a prominent role in Israeli politics in the months and
years ahead.
Condoleezza Rice, the unfortunate U.S.
Secretary of State whom some had thought was planning a new push for
Arab-Israeli talks, has clearly been outgunned by pro-Israeli hawks,
such as Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council.
The
word from Washington is that combating ‘terror’ remains the
U.S.-Israeli priority. President Mahmud Abbas, who rules courtesy of
the IDF and the settlers over three or four beleaguered Bantustans on
the West Bank, has been instructed to join the war against his
Palestinian brothers, if he is to earn a few crumbs from the rich man’s
table.
To most independent observers it seems plain that
Israel’s cruel, aggressive and expansionist policies have resulted in a
steady deterioration in its strategic environment. It has acquired, or
rather created, enemies on several fronts -- Hizbullah in Lebanon,
Hamas in Gaza, large numbers of dispossessed, brutalized and
radicalized Palestinians eking out a living in refugee camps, Syria to
the north, Iran not much further away, and radical groups such as
Al-Qaida in many other places reflecting the angry mood of much of the
Arab and Muslim world.
Some other trends should cause
Israeli alarm bells to ring. Educated European opinion is increasingly
outraged by Israel’s behavior; meanwhile the Arabs are getting better
educated, better armed, and far, far richer than ever before; and
soaring Arab demographics are producing tens of thousands, perhaps
hundreds of thousands, of potential recruits for the asymmetric wars
which Israel is ill-prepared to fight but which seem to be the pattern
of the future.
If this were not enough, the trend to which
Israel should perhaps pay the greatest attention is that its main ally,
the United States, is bogged down in an unwinnable war, waged in large
part because Israel’s American friends, the Washington
neo-conservatives, thought that if America smashed Iraq, Israel would
no longer have anything to fear from the east. It could then continue
its West Bank land-grab and its destruction of Palestinian society
without risking any serous Arab reaction.
The neo-cons are
now pressing hard for a U.S. war against Iran, as if unaware that the
long-suffering American public is increasingly uneasy about their
country being dragged into distant and costly wars on Israel’s behalf.
So,
is Israel rethinking its strategies? There is no sign of it. It refuses
to see that the regional balance of power may be changing. It continues
to believe that it can uproot Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza,
and defeat Syria and Iran -- or get the U.S. to do the job on its
behalf.
To avoid peace talks, which might involve ceding
territory, it continues to depict Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’
bent on Israel’s destruction, thereby resorting to the well-worn trick
of saying, "How can you negotiate with someone who wants to kill you?"
Is
Hamas, in fact, a terrorist organization or is it a legitimate
resistance movement to occupation and oppression? The Americans have
swallowed the terrorist line and so has the timid and cowardly European
Union, although several of its members now regret it.
Hamas
certainly carried out suicide attacks against Israeli civilians during
the second intifada beginning in 2000, which would qualify it for the
terrorist label. But then, during that intifada, Israel killed more
than four times as many Palestinians as Hamas and other groups killed
Israelis.
More recently, in the 16 months from Hamas’
election victory in January 2006 to April 2007, Israel killed 712
Palestinians, including many children, while in the same period the
Palestinians killed 29 Israelis (IDF and civilians). If terrorism is
defined as the killing of innocent civilians for political ends, which
of the two qualifies as the bigger terrorist?
Does Hamas
want to destroy Israel? No doubt it would like to, in much the same way
as Israel would like to destroy it. But emotions are one thing,
policies are another. Hamas is now busy restoring law and order in
Gaza. It is disarming the gangs that lived on extortion and blackmail
(such as the Daghmush gang which is holding the BBC correspondent Alan
Johnston). And it is seeing to the immediate needs of the sorely-tried
population of 1.4m, densely-packed in a small territory which Israel
has turned into the world’s largest outdoor prison.
This
is what Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister and now the effective
ruler of Gaza, told the French newspaper Le Figaro last weekend:
"Our
programme is clear. We seek the creation of a Palestinian state within
the frontiers of 1967: that is to say in Gaza and the West Bank, with
East Jerusalem as its capital. The PLO remains in charge of
negotiations on this point. We undertake to respect all past agreements
signed by the Palestinian Authority. We would like to see the
introduction of a reciprocal, global and simultaneous truce with
Israel."
Would that Ehud Olmert or any of his colleagues
said anything as sensible. Instead, Israel is planning to continue,
even to intensify, its policy of sealing off the Gaza strip. As Tsipi
Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, told EU foreign ministers in
Luxembourg last Monday, "We should take advantage of the [West
Bank-Gaza] split to the end. It differentiates between the moderates
and the extremists." She urged the ministers to continue to isolate
Hamas while easing the pressure on Fatah by ending the 15-month
financial boycott of the West Bank. But will this be enough to save
Mahmud Abbas? Can a policy of feeding the West Bank while starving Gaza
succeed?
It does not seem likely. Israel’s security
establishment will not agree to remove the hundreds of road blocks
which make Palestinian life a misery. Israel’s powerful settler
movement will not agree to freeze settlements, let alone remove them.
And Israel’s political leaders will move heaven and earth to avoid
negotiating peace with the Arabs on the basis of the 1967 borders.
As
a result, Mahmud Abbas will move into ever greater illegitimacy and
will be seen more and more as a Quisling; Fatah will continue its
terminal decline; and Israel and its neighbours will be doomed to
decades more of violence and war. As an acute observer remarked to me
this week, "The Middle East today is like Europe on the eve of the
Great War of 1914-18. It needs only a spark to set the whole region on
fire."
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on
the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad
of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for
Hire.
Copyright © 2007 Patrick Seale
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Released: 21 June 2007
Word Count: 1,341
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Agence
Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, Le Monde
diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mark
Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Peter Kwong,Tom Porteous, Patrick Seale and
Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Advisory Release: 21 June 2007
Word Count: 1,341
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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