 |
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
Egypt Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Is peace dead?
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
A controversial book I wrote a quarter of a century ago, under the title After the Guns Fall Silent, projected a post-war scenario in which the Arabs and Israel were living together in peace. At the time, to talk of peace and Israel in the same breath was absolutely taboo, and the thesis of the book was violently criticised by many in the Arab world. Some time later, however, the critics conceded that my prediction may have been right. Indeed, the Arab regimes went as far as to adopt peace as their "strategic objective." But the events of the past few weeks are leading me to question whether the critics were not right all along, and to wonder whether, as Barak warned on the eve of this week's Arab summit, it is time to reassess the entire peace process and its ability to bring about a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The late president Sadat was the first Arab leader to adopt the peace option. Events have since proved him right in assuming that without Egypt's participation the Arabs could not wage war against Israel. But he was wrong to assume that Egypt could bring about a stable and enduring peace without the other Arabs, particularly the Palestinians. Indeed, cutting through the wall of resistance to the peace option and generalising the results achieved in Sadat's Camp David summit with Carter and Begin in 1978 throughout the region was far from a foregone conclusion. We must remember that the peace process unfolded thanks to extraneous factors not organically linked to the mechanisms of the process itself.
The first of these factors was that many Arab regimes, particularly those of the oil-rich Gulf states, were only persuaded to join the peace process following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. US diplomacy succeeded in convincing these regimes that an Arab state could pose a more immediate threat than their traditional enemy and that they should consequently try to "neutralise" that enemy through a peace process in order to devote all available energies to countering Saddam Hussein. And so an Arab-Arab contradiction took precedence over Arab contradictions with Israel and, for over a decade, prevented the convening of a full Arab summit (the 1996 Arab summit met without Iraq).
It thus appears that, from the viewpoint of the logic of confrontation with Israel, inter-Arab wars and Arab wars with Israel, though distinct incidences, are not without interaction between them. True, the Iraq-Kuwait war was preceded by a civil war in Lebanon and before that by the Yemen war, proving that internecine Arab wars were not an exception. But when Arab infighting reached a climax with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, it was an "external" factor not intrinsically linked to the peace process that paved the way to the Madrid conference and contributed to its convocation in 1992.
Another factor that artificially extended the life span of the peace process was the procedural approach used. It was decided to address the less contentious issues first in the logic that whatever results thus achieved would create a dynamic that could help solve the more intractable problems, which were deferred to the final stage of the negotiations. In the meantime, the amenability of these problems to a solution was never tested, and the parties deliberately avoided addressing such potentially explosive issues as Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory. The realisation that the dynamic created by the successful conclusion of partial agreements did not bring a solution of these problems any closer generated an atmosphere of pessimism. At the Camp David summit between Clinton, Arafat and Barak, 13 days were devoted to the easier problems and the partial agreements reached in their regard offered hopes of a breakthrough. But these agreements became null and void when an overall agreement including Jerusalem failed to materialise, exposing the fragility of the entire problem-solving approach adopted by the peace process.
A third factor which kept the peace process limping along was the determination of its sponsor to bring it to a successful conclusion, again for extraneous considerations having nothing to do with the peace process itself. Fired by a desire to clean up his image for posterity, Clinton believed that if he managed to broker an agreement between the age-old enemies in the Middle East conflict, history would judge him less harshly for the peccadilloes that marred his presidency. Indeed, pulling off such a spectacular feat might even earn him the Nobel peace prize. No one can deny that he devoted a great deal of time and energy to the Middle East problem, but the fact that his agenda did not always coincide with the extent to which this or that aspect of the conflict was ripe for a solution may have made Clinton's sometimes overly forceful intervention more of a complicating factor than the opposite.
Thus the peace process owed its longevity to a number of extraneous and impermanent factors which, by their very nature, could not assure its success and, indeed, can be said to have affected it negatively. The question now is whether there are external factors acting in the opposite direction and making the search for peace unavoidable. One such factor is the process of globalisation, built on the ruins of the bipolar world order, at least in its East-West expression. For the protagonists in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the confrontation between the US and the USSR at the global level helped perpetuate their confrontation at the regional level. That is no longer the case following the demise of the Soviet Union. However, the globalisation process has ensured that Israel will continue to enjoy crushing military superiority over all the Arab states taken together, which is hardly conducive to a peace settlement based on equity and justice.
Another factor is the common will of the protagonists not to allow matters to reach the point of no return. None wish to see the spiral of violence spin out of control to plunge the entire region into chaos. There are already signs that the political and ideological confrontation between Zionism and pan-Arabism is degenerating into a religious confrontation between Jews and Muslims. And if the religious dimension takes over, the conflict is bound to grow and spread.
That is why the Arab states were so keen to convene an Arab summit. With Jerusalem replacing Iraq as the key issue occupying the forefront of the political stage, a window of opportunity had appeared: if Iraq divided the Arabs, Jerusalem united them. The convening of a full Arab summit, including Iraq, became possible.
Egypt would have hoped to hold the Arab summit prior to the Sharm Al-Sheikh summit. But the rapid deterioration of the situation on the ground dictated a different timetable, and the Sharm Al-Sheikh summit was held first. Its results were inconclusive, prompting Barak to claim that Arafat had failed to bring the Intifada to an end, forcing Israel to call for a "time-out" of the peace process and a reassessment of the whole situation in the light of the subsequent Arab summit resolutions. Although the resolutions were initially hailed by Barak as "moderate" and "responsible," they did not deter him from carrying through his threat to suspend the negotiations and implement his plan to include Sharon and the Likud in an emergency government under his leadership.
This placed the Arabs in a difficult dilemma. If the Arab summit is to be given priority over the Sharm Al-Sheikh summit then, in the same logic, all Arab states would be required to give priority to inter-Arab solidarity over relations with Israel. In other words, relations with Israel would be made conditional on Israel's resumption of negotiations. The Arabs have made peace their "strategic objective," but it is a strategy that cannot be implemented without a partner for peace. And this raises a critical question: what if Israel takes advantage of its "time out" to launch a devastating blow against one or several vulnerable positions in the Arab buildup to maximise its bargaining edge when negotiations are resumed?
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
