As peace seeking becomes hell...
Is there an alternative to the escalating violence in the region, asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
The lack of momentum towards peace in any conflict does not mean that the situation will remain static. When the protagonists in a "hot" conflict fail to make any progress in the direction of peace, they will inevitably find themselves slipping in the opposite direction, that is, towards all-out war. A no-war, no-peace situation cannot be sustained indefinitely; conflicting claims must be settled one way or another.
As if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the situation in Iraq are not enough to contend with, the Middle East is facing the prospect of a new military front opening in the region following Israel's recent raid into Syrian territory. Syria is part of what President Bush has dubbed the axis of evil, a convenient catch-phrase invoked to justify attacking sovereign states, first in the case of Afghanistan, then in the case of Iraq. Is Syria next on the list? After all, it is a member of the axis of evil and, as Washington put it when commenting on Israel's air attack deep in Syrian territory, Israel has a "right to defend itself". So far, attacks against countries attributed to this axis were conducted independently from each other. Now, the accusation is generalised and such countries could be attacked collectively.
While the whole world denounced the raid as a serious escalation of tensions, Washington, having established the precedent of launching preemptive wars against suspected terrorist targets, could hardly condemn Israel for doing exactly what the United States did with its preemptive war on Iraq. In both cases, the attacks against sovereign states were presented as justified battles in the war against terrorism. Thus the only country that can prevent Israel from attacking Syria is neither willing nor able to restrain Sharon from widening the scope of his retaliatory attacks to include any and all countries he accuses of sponsoring terrorism. Does this mean the region is doomed to sink into yet another war, or is there an alternative way of avoiding this worst-case scenario?
The Syrian-Israeli front has been quiet for the past 30 years, with both sides observing the terms of the disengagement agreement they signed in 1974. Is it a coincidence that Israel should attack Syria on the 30th anniversary of the October War, or a sign that the region is in for a new round of hostilities, with confrontations generalised to target any country accused by the United States -- or Israel -- of belonging to the so-called axis of evil? What would happen if the American doctrine of launching preemptive wars against perceived threats were to become standard procedure? What if China, for example, attacked Taiwan, or Pakistan invaded Kashmir? What if developments encourage confrontations between Turks and Kurds, between Shi'ites and Sunnis, inside Iraq or beyond its frontiers? What will become of world order? Of national sovereignty?
Nowhere have the prerogatives of sovereign statehood been violated as blatantly as in the Middle East over the last few years, most recently with Israel's airstrike against Syria. The new world order has diluted the hitherto absolute nature of state sovereignty without proposing a viable alternative capable of ensuring global peace and stability. The only alternative to the eruption of war in the region today is what has come to be described as the roadmap for peace. But the roadmap is not being implemented because the Bush administration refuses to condemn Sharon's retaliatory measures, and we have thus entered a vicious cycle of ever-increasing violence. As long as despair and frustration prevail, any hopes pinned on the roadmap are purely illusory. The dangerous escalation of tensions in the region underscores the urgent need for an alternative mechanism, which must not depend for its success on the good faith of the direct protagonists. Rather, it should proceed from the assumption that external parties who are not directly involved in the conflict can work for peace more effectively than the protagonists themselves.
Such third party intervention to activate the peace process is vital, because the strongest resistance will come from the protagonists themselves, who are today informed by a logic of retaliation, not reconciliation. With the voices calling for revenge drowning out those calling for peace, external parties have become the key to getting beyond the pattern of mutual deterrence which has plunged the region into a spiral of violence. Occupation breeds resistance; the more brutal the occupation, the more violent the resistance. Israel's strong-arm tactics and its insistence on maintaining its grip over the occupied Arab territories has only strengthened the Palestinian resistance movement. Unless the vicious cycle of repression and retaliation is broken, the violence will inevitably spiral out of control.
Responsibility for the worsening situation should not be attributed to one side only. One side cannot be condemned while the other side is totally absolved of any blame. If the Arabs are required to put pressure on the Palestinians, the American administration is required to put pressure on Israel. But that is just the opposite of what is actually happening. Instead of criticising Israel for its raid on Syria, the Bush administration criticised Syria for not doing enough to clamp down on the "terrorist" Palestinian organisations it shelters! America now stands alone in unconditionally supporting every step Israel takes.
Given Washington's clear bias towards Israel, (most tellingly revealed in Bush's designation of Sharon as a "man of peace"), is it reasonable to pin any hopes on an 'imposed' solution? We have already seen the solution Washington imposed in the case of Iraq, opting for a full-scale invasion of the country without verifying that it did possess weapons of mass destruction, without a Security Council resolution authorising such a step and with the international community sharply divided over whether there was any justification to go to war. Can Iraq be held up as a precedent to justify imposing a solution on the Palestinian problem? An imposed solution would satisfy neither the Palestinians, because their state will be deprived of many of its basic prerogatives, nor the Israelis, because the Sharon government's extreme right-wing power base is not ready to see a Palestinian state set up in "Eretz Israel". The situation will remain explosive in the absence of a solution based on equity and balance.
Are there forces in Israel capable of leading the search for an equitable, contractual settlement of the conflict? The behaviour of peace activist Uri Avneri and the members of his Gush Shalom movement is significant in this respect. Following Israel's threats to remove Arafat, they volunteered to protect him with their own lives, and called on other Israelis to join them in forming a human shield around the Palestinian leader. In this way they have ensured that if Sharon insists on killing Arafat, he will first have to kill a number of Jews in cold blood. Is he ready to go that far?
Meanwhile, attention is now focussed on a new peace initiative known as the Swiss Agreement, which is scheduled to be signed next month in Geneva. Last week, a number of prominent Israelis (mainly on the Left) and Palestinians (with Arafat's knowledge) initialled the draft Agreement in Jordan, thus crowning secret talks that have gone on in Switzerland for nearly two years. The Agreement is inspired by the Clinton plan to solve the conflict, published in January 2000 and by the Beilin-Abu Mazen document, published in 1995. It seems this approach is the only possible alternative to the stalemate resulting from the domination of the far right over Israeli politics.
Still, there is no guarantee the agreement can be an effective bridge towards a political settlement of the conflict. Some aspects of the conflict are not amenable to compromise, and previous attempts to find some sort of accommodation acceptable to both sides have failed. Under Clinton's sponsorship in Camp David, negotiations stalled over the issue of Jerusalem. Accepting a Palestinian state side by side with Israel does not mean that the issues of borders, settlements and prerogatives have been solved. That is why the region is closer to war than to a breakthrough towards peace.
In any case, the notion of "axis of evil" is dangerous. It assumes that evil is not the result of circumstances but of an inbuilt attribute of given types of people. There are bad people by nature and good people by nature. This assumption is basically wrong: while attributing evil deeds to the conditions that affect people's lives and not to inbuilt traits of given individuals makes it possible to correct mistakes. Misdeeds -- including terror -- should be seen as defects in the world system that can eventually be corrected.
It is high time to stop regarding terrorism as a fatality. It is a socially manufactured aberration that can be eliminated. To uproot terrorism, not only must its symptoms be removed, but also it causes. These are embedded in the very structure of the world system itself, and among its engineers rather than among the weak and the marginalised.
