28 March - 3 April 2002
Issue No.579
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 March - 3 April 2002 Issue No.579 |
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Arabising the struggle
Is the pre-summit consensus one of weakness and desperation? David Hirst *, in Beirut, wonders what a double war could do
Arab summits deal with any matter of common concern to the 22 member-states of the "Arab Nation." They can be "ordinary" or "emergency." But in practice, it has been the more or less permanent "emergency" of Palestine that has all but monopolised their proceedings. Only occasionally have other issues -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, for example -- taken brief precedence over it.
But when the kings and presidents convene here this week, two issues, Palestine and Iraq, will confront them. Each is a grave one in its own right. Together, they achieve an altogether higher level of malignancy. The combination was already menacing at their last gathering, in Amman last year, but with the Intifada now close to spilling over into the region as a whole, and the US setting up Saddam Hussein as the next major target of its "war on terror," they are more explosive, more interdependent, than ever.
There were serious doubts whether this "14th ordinary summit" would ever convene. Meant to be exercises of strength-through-unity, such conferences have really been more like periodic yardsticks of the opposite: of weakness, decline and disarray. King Farouk of Egypt hosted the first, in 1946, which resolved to thwart the rise of Israel, militarily if necessary.
But the new-born Jewish state came out of the first Arab-Israeli war much larger than the UN had envisaged, and turned most of the Palestinians into refugees.
That has been pretty much the story, if less dramatically, ever since. Summits were always reactive, some improvised response to some new Israeli challenge or fait accompli. They reflected an ever deteriorating balance of power. They set reduced goals to match -- only to suffer yet new defeats and setbacks.
Between Amman and now, the regimes have sunk, in their peoples' eyes, to a new low of inertia and incompetence. So much so, it came to be said, that simply to hold a summit would be a more damaging parade of impotence than not holding one. Arab commentators sarcastically wondered whether their rulers still considered Palestine an Arab cause at all. Day in and day out, satellite television beamed the Israeli-Palestinian war into every Arab home. The rulers resisted all appeals to support the Palestinians, terrified, apparently, of anything that risked developing into a confrontation with Israel, its US backer, or, most seriously perhaps, with their peoples, for whom this inaction on Palestine was but the most conspicuous and universal of a multitude of discontents. The foreign minister of diminutive Qatar caused a stir when, with his habitual candour, he said that "begging" was all that was left for much greater states than his own -- begging the US to intercede on their behalf.
But not only is the summit to take place, it could be a very important one. Certainly it is to be the most scrutinised ever, with 2,000 journalists in attendance. Yasser Arafat -- if Sharon lets him come -- will be its star, but Saudi Arabia its lynch-pin. Crown Prince Abdullah has taken the lead in both zones of crisis, with his peace initiative under which the whole Arab world will offer Israel full "normalisation" in return for full withdrawal from the occupied territories, and with his forthright opposition to any US campaign to bring down Saddam by force, or make use of Saudi territory for the purpose.
The summit -- an extravaganza to attend which "their majesties and their excellencies," and retainers in the thousands, will close down Beirut airport with their private aircraft, and half-paralyse the city -- is in itself a flagrant symptom of the decadent Arab condition, of the gulf between the ruling establishments and the ordinary man, who was always politically disenfranchised, but is now, in addition, increasingly indigent, unemployed and prospect-less in the midst of enormous wealth. And, historically, the peace plan, however sensible an achievement in itself, amounts to yet another Arab retreat, of the kind which earlier summits have endorsed. Leaving vague or unmentioned such crucial issues as the Palestinian refugees' "right of return," it goes further than any of its predecessors. That is why it has incurred reservations from such countries as Syria.
Nonetheless, it has earned an unusual degree of Arab support. For the kings and presidents know that the more convincing this pan-Arab offer the better the chance of escaping that broadening of the conflict, from the Palestinian to the Arab arena, that both they and the Israelis fear.
That things have reached the dangerous point they have, Arab commentators say, is the Palestinians' pride -- and the Arabs' shame. Left to fend for themselves, they have -- with their zeal, stamina and increasingly effective violence and terror -- brought Sharon to a crossroads: either he renounces his policy of brute force, and engages in peace-seeking diplomacy -- and diplomacy that offers serious prospect of complete withdrawal from the occupied territories -- or he escalates in radically new ways.
Who knows how far those could go? But last week, on Israeli television, President Mubarak saw fit to warn the Israelis not even to think of the "transfer" (that is, mass expulsion) of Palestinians which, according to the latest poll, 46 per cent of them would like to see. It is true that the Arab "street" is strangely quiescent; no less true, however, that Arab officialdom lives in continuous fear of an eruption of anger that would be directed as much against itself as against Israel, of some independent, popular movement or deed, that would force the Arab leaders out of their passivity.
It is from traditionally unruly, multi-confessional Lebanon that the "popular" will could make itself most devastatingly felt. There, Hizbullah has of late been growing increasingly strident about its "duty" to support the Palestinians, and its belief that Israel is now destructible; it has publicly admitted a bid to smuggle Katyusha rockets into the West Bank via Jordan. Then, two weeks ago, two unidentified assailants killed six Israelis two kilometres from the Lebanese frontier. Initially unsure, the Israelis -- having found a specially constructed ladder by which the assailants supposedly crossed the border fence -- laid the blame squarely on Hizbullah; UNIFIL officials do not cast serious doubt on the claim. If Hizbullah, an organisation renowned for its craft and calculation, did do it, it was a most ominous provocation, a qualitative jump from mere resistance to Israeli occupation to war on Israel proper. It knows full well that, if this goes on, the Israelis will have no choice, in accordance with their own, clearly enunciated security doctrine, but to strike back, against Lebanon and Syria, with devastating force. "I think," said a UNIFIL official, "that the Israelis have been so abnormally quiet about it because they know just how grave a situation they could be getting into."
The Israelis, not even Sharon, do not want such an "Arabisation" -- or, historically speaking, re- Arabisation -- of the struggle. But so long as Sharon is in charge they greatly risk getting one. That is why a full-scale Arab adoption of Abdullah's initiative would furnish all Israelis who grasp the perils to which Sharon exposes them with an incentive to drive him and his like from power.
And now add US designs on Iraq to the summiteers' predicament. It is not that most regimes would be averse to seeing Saddam go, if the business of removing him could be swift, surgical and guaranteed to succeed. But they know that, for wider Arab, as well as strictly Iraqi, reasons, it cannot. Even without the Palestine drama, the conditions in which the US is apparently preparing to go about it would be bad enough, but with it, and with the unprecedented indulgence which, under Bush, it has heaped on its Israeli ally, they would, they say, be catastrophic -- and as liable, they obviously fear, to bring their own overthrow as well as Saddam's. That is why the Arab leaders seem to have reached an even greater eve-of-summit consensus on Iraq than on Palestine. And it is America's closest friends who are most emphatic about it. King Abdullah of Jordan, the most exposed of all, has joined his Saudi namesake in telling America that "the Middle East cannot support two wars at once." Even the Kuwaitis, with the most reason to fear and hate Saddam, oppose a US adventure.
It is not clear what impression this consensus has made on the Bush administration. The whiff of a trade-off hung about Vice-President Cheney's latest tour of the region: Saddam's head for Sharon's. Though he and other administration hard-liners ostentatiously repudiate any "linkage" between Iraq and Palestine, in practice they have at least implicitly acknowledged one. For Iraq is the main reason why, with trouble-shooter Anthony Zinni now back in the region, the US has re-engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, and in a somewhat less biased fashion than before. Yet even if the Arabs accept this trade-off in principle -- and there is little sign that they do -- the US has not, and almost certainly will not, shed enough of its pro- Israeli bias to win a lasting truce, let alone a political breakthrough.
The Arab consensus is more impressive than usual. But Americans and Israelis may perceive it for what, in good measure, it undoubtedly is: the consensus of weakness and desperation. If so, Sharon is liable in due course to resume his rampage, and Bush to press on regardless against Saddam. In which case, some Arab commentators forecast, the shock to the Arab system would be so great that, if there ever is another summit, some, at least, of the Arab leaders who came to Beirut might no longer be there to attend it.
*The writer is a veteran British journalist and an expert on Middle East affairs.
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