To What Avail?
The fabled road map to MidEast peace. Is there such a road map? Might there be such an event as peace reigning finally in that agonized geography? Much depends upon peace. Yes indeed it does. But is it achievable? What other geography of the world is as tormented by its inhabitants' inability to bring accord to human relations other than the Middle East? Well, yes, there is always the sad and ever-failing example of Africa.But then, much of Africa too is embroiled in conflict brought forward by the seeming incapacity of Islam and those who practise a particularly malignant form of Islam, to succumb to peaceful relations with their neighbours, near or far. Clan structure and tribal conditioning are much to fault in both, to a good degree. Militantly aggressive societies with a long cultural tradition of war and conquest.
One looks in vain throughout the Middle East for examples of governments or those who purport to govern, practising the Golden Mean. Instead, the spectre of gross violations of human rights in its most pedestrian guise comes to the fore. In a society that refuses to move itself away from its Bedouin past of tribal hostilities linked to competitive advantage and the scarcity of resources, both land and water.
Alliances are made for the convenience of hanging on to the status quo, but those very alliances are readily shifted when they become an encumbrance toward momentum of achieving goals favourable to advantaging one signatory over the other. Once an enemy, always an enemy, and enemies are not singular in nature but rather tribal and clan in character. The worship of clan cliques is second only to that accorded Allah.
Not much has changed over the centuries in the Arab/Muslim world of hegemony, power politics and the eternal blaming of external sources for disadvantaging the Arab/Muslim world, of the external world interfering and hobbling progress in Allah's domain. Thus we have the interloper presence of Israel charged with the responsibility and the risks inherent in that responsibility, to take it onto itself to make peace with an avowed enemy that refuses peace.
The just-convened meeting between Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Abdullah, Israel's Ehud Olmert and that champion of Palestinian rights, Mahmoud Abbas, adjourned with little sign of progress. Mostly because Mr. Olmert refused to bow under pressure from the other three to assume full responsibility for settling the "crisis" that has seen Hamas take Gaza, and Fatah left with the West Bank.
The Sunday prior to the Monday meeting of the quartet had Jordan's King Abdullah II berate, cajole, bully and implore Israel's Prime Minister to see his way clear to commit unequivocally for negotiations leading to a final settlement on the peace front. It was necessary, he warned, for Israel to accept that Gaza and the West Bank be re-united, for Abbas and Haniyeh to speak as one in the peace accords.
For Israel to free up funds, ease travel restrictions, remove security checkpoints and roadblocks, and accept the 2002 Arab League settlement proposal for peace which Saudi Arabia grandly re-introduced to the Middle East agenda. Israel, the point they stress, has peace to gain out of these concessions. Israel, knowing the cesspool in which their state resides, understands differently.
That she cannot in good faith bargain for peace with an adamantly-terrorist organization dedicated as a first principle, to her destruction. That to free up border crossings is to invite further suicide and bombing attacks. That to accept the Arab League proposal is to accept a self-suicidal mission; to give up Jerusalem to the Palestinian determination to make that city its capital; to accept Palestinian demands for "return" would be to dilute the Jewish presence of Israel to an intolerable-leading-to-dysfunctional degree.
What the Arabs could not accomplish through the determined medium of armed might, they seek to accomplish through the crafty diversion of population diminishment of the Jewish presence, completely engulfed by a Palestinian "return" of original refugees and their children and their grandchildren, to swallow the Jewish presence and present a fait accompli - yet another Arab state.
But the premise also behind all of this is that Israel has no one else to bargain with, other than the tolerantly "moderate" Abbas. Who has not been averse in the recent past to declaring that he will not make any attempts to police his population, to rein in his armed militia, as they have a right to "resist" (equating resistance with suicide missions). Even if a tentative, hopeful peace accord was somehow to be reached with Abbas, even extended to Haniyeh, who would then be responsible for controlling the extra-governmental militias?
Those who, even while Fatah and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire with Israel, continued to rain down rockets upon Israel and its inhabitants? The Palestinian Authority, whether controlled by Mahmoud Abbas or Ismail Haniyeh would have no intention of militating to their more "extreme" brethren that they cease and desist, even beyond the eventual creation of a Palestinian State.
There has been no Palestinian State in the past for many reasons, not the least of which was that Egypt and Jordan deemed the land theirs, to be disposed of and used as they wished, the Palestinians being but those who lived on the land, not owners of it. In the many decades since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Palestinian population made no effort to represent itself, to establish a governable presence, to bring into existence the building blocks of statehood.
This fabled, elusive goal that the Palestinians themselves have dislodged from potential time and again through intransigence, suspicion, greed, envy and passionate resentment, aided by an unwillingness to assume responsibility for themselves and their future, choosing instead to remain an existential basket case, the world's premium international welfare target. They have never attempted to lift themselves out of the refugee label, nor to function capably, nor to invest in needed civil infrastructure.
Should they eventually attain to autonomous statehood, the world stands ready to continue its investment in this state welfare model of indolent disability and constant complaints against their unfortunate lot in life.
Labels: Middle East, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 27, 2007
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