Even when many of us were celebrating the Makkah accord for having been instrumental in creating a Palestinian government of national unity and for its clear potential for reviving the moribund Middle East peace process on the basis of the Arab peace initiative, there were strong skeptical voices pointing to factors militating against its success. These factors were intrinsic to Palestinian politics and, more significantly, rooted in Israel’s undiminished ability to manipulate the so-called international community. In the context of the Middle East, the international community is not a concert of the peace loving nations of the world that have upheld the Palestinian right to freedom and liberty for decades but a much smaller but influential group that allows Israel to wreck all peace moves with impunity.
It must be conceded that the situation prevailing at the moment proves the skeptics right. Gaza is hostage to the gunmen of Fatah and Hamas who are killing one another in a battle of turf — a turf that is notional and by no means real. If Israel has succeeded in turning the strip into a veritable prison, the intra-Palestinian fighting has the air of a futile prison riot. At the same time, Israel’s internal political tussle is beginning to produce changes that will in all probability harden its attitude toward a two-state solution.
These events coincide with the publication by the British daily, The Guardian, of a highly revealing end-of-the-mission report by the Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto who gave up his job of the UN coordinator for Middle East in May in utter frustration. The report confirms what many people had feared all along: Israel has effectively used the American connection to drain all substance from the efforts of the “international community”, including its important manifestation, the Quartet, to find an equitable solution.
The Palestinians have failed to find the quality of statesmanship that was required to fill the void left by the passing away of Yasser Arafat. Israel’s focus on destroying him has paid a rich dividend. Once he was gone, Fatah lost the support of a majority of the electors but was not willing to give up its grip on levers of power. It has struggled more against the winners of that fateful election than against the Israeli occupiers. On its part, Hamas failed to ensure that an election held under the dark shadow of a 40-year-old foreign occupation should not split a far more sacred liberation movement. The entire Muslim world has watched with growing despair that Fatah and Hamas have conducted themselves as if the occupation had already come to an end and they were free to fight their internal political battles as in a normal, independent state. The impending collapse of the efforts made by Saudi Arabia and Egypt to prevent such a crisis raises some very disturbing questions about the ability of the Palestinian leadership to cope with what is admittedly an extremely difficult situation.
As Israel’s president, Shimon Peres will probably do what he is particularly good at i.e. present a deceptive face to the world while wearing his signature mask of Jewish suffering. His main thrust would be that Palestinians have no interlocutors that Israel could negotiate with. Behind this smokescreen, Ehud Barak, first as defense minister and later as a possible prime minister, would upgrade Israel’s military capability for bloodier interventions in Gaza and the West Bank and a showdown with Syria. The Arab states have only a limited time to forestall such an aggravation in Israel’s policy. Alvaro de Soto’s report shows how challenging the task of the Arab states would be in the present phase of Western policy toward the region.
He is unambiguous about the devastating consequences of the international boycott of the freely elected government led by Hamas. Even in far-away Pakistan, people know how valid is his fear that “erroneous treatment of Hamas could have repercussions far beyond the Palestinian territories because of its links to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose millions of supporters might conclude that peace and democratic means are not the way to go”.
It is a chilling thought for millions of Muslims across the globe but not necessarily for those ideologues in the West and their sword arm — the State of Israel — who have planned a war to reconstitute the world of Islam for at least one generation.
The UN diplomat warns that if the Palestinian Authority passes into irrelevance or collapses, the calls for a one-state solution to the conflict will come out of the shadows and enter the mainstream.
Once again, it would a great setback for the supporters of the Arab initiative based on two sovereign states living side by side in peace and amity but, sadly enough, a welcome casus belli for the proponents of a thirty-year war. With an almost divine flourish of hand, they had declared way back in 2003 that a creative chaos would be a prerequisite for the rebirth of a new Middle East. Difficult though it may be, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan should continue to enlist the support of all the regional states to prevent the extinction of the Makkah spirit.
At the same time, they have to convince the West that chaos could well be self-perpetuating and become an end in itself as in Iraq. The flotsam and jetsam of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should alert the world that it has already become too dangerous to navigate to safety and that it needs calmer waters.
— Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former foreign secretary and ambassador of Pakistan.
