Hope for Mideast peace: really?

Maswood Alam Khan
When an important bilateral or trilateral negotiation fails newsmen often observe “They have agreed to disagree” and the people are apt to take the result easy when they can guess the outcome of such a negotiation at its onset, given the history of failure of similar negotiations on similar topics.

Such have been the rounds of negotiations going on for what seems like an eternity between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the topic “peace”. Mideast peace has always been a dream in the making.

Nevertheless, a glimmer of hope was visible in the resumption of direct talks between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Washington on Thursday after about 20 months, with both sides pledging to negotiate earnestly to reach a comprehensive settlement within one year. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, is the peace-broker this time. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have also agreed to meet again on September 14 and 15 in the Middle East and then roughly every two weeks thereafter.

The glimmer of hope in the Mideast peace negotiations was a little more palpable this time than in the past in the voices and the body language of the two leaders while they reiterated their mutual support for the goal of “two states for two peoples” as part of a resolution of “all core issues” at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their speeches telecast live by BBC on Thursday night.

Bored with hearing words of peace in the Middle East I rather took a pleasure in viewing a real warm handshake by the two leaders still sitting in their chairs and extending their hands with a smiling Hillary Clinton sitting in between. I imagined how — if this direct talk between Israeli prime minister and Palestinian president leads, God willing, ultimately to effective peace — this photograph of their handshakes would perhaps become a rare piece of history and a rare treasure for Hillary Clinton whose husband had tried but failed to deliver a comprehensive deal between theses two rivals. When you are tired and bored splurging on imagining about something impossible is a good pastime.

The first terrible blow to the present peace talk did come from Hamas: a grisly shooting on the West Bank only a few days before the talks began killing four Israeli civilians dead as a means of exposing, as Hamas declared while claiming the credit of shooting, “the collusion between the Palestinian Authority and the occupying forces of Israel”. And the first heartening hint that evoked a glimmer of hope in peace was at a dinner at the White House on the eve of the talks, when Mr. Netanyahu said that he sought a peace that would “end the conflict” with the Palestinians “once and for all.”

There are 101 reasons one may point to for probable failure in the ongoing peace talks. The most important reason is an unfair balance of power between these two negotiators. In the negotiation, Israel starts from a position of strength and dominance, both military and economic, plus the unwavering support it enjoys from the USA and the advantage it is now deriving from the divisions in the Palestinian ranks. On the other hand, the starting-point for the Palestinian side is a position of weakness, both economically and militarily. Palestinians are divided and Abbas cannot control Hamas and cannot essentially speak on behalf of all the Palestinians.

Sadat and Begin had achieved a settlement at a time, it may be recalled, when both Egypt and Israel had a fair balance of power, when neither side was too weak. Egypt had succeeded in launching a major military assault on Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Although Israel managed to respond and seize positions across the canal into Egypt, the balance of power was much more even between the two nation-states. Otherwise, surrendering the Sinai desert back to Egypt in return for securing Israel’s southern flank would not have been possible.

The main reasons why the present peace talk between Israel and Palestine may fail are: 01) Netanyahu isn’t free to talk. He has a fragile Knesset and 70 years of “historical” fiction to preserve, 02) President Barack Obama has a US “baby Jesus” cult to overcome, and 03) Palestinians inside Gaza continue to struggle for water and other basic needs.

Until Israel returns land stolen in the Golan Heights and tears down all the settlements in Gaza, there will never be peace in the Middle East. Until Palestine and Israel agree to a ‘two-state solution’, no chance is there for peace. Until Israel admits that it has nuclear weapons in its arsenal and allows international inspectors to verify such weapons, there will be no peace. Peace cannot come unless the Palestinians believe they have been treated with justice. And if the Arabs sincerely want peace, they should stop dreaming about living in the story books of ancient history and just accept Israel as a reality and coexist with it in peace.

e-mail : maswood@hotmail.com

thefinancialexpress

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