The dividends of peace

By Salama A Salama

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The Arabs have finally conceded that the peace process is dead and buried. It was nothing but a ruse in the first place, one that helped Israel carve off one piece of Arab land after another. It gave the US and the international community an excuse to shirk their responsibilities. It was a mirage that kept us all going nowhere as we alternated between hope and despair.

Arab foreign ministers, meeting to discuss the Lebanese problem, have passed their judgment. A few days earlier Hizbullah grabbed two Israeli soldiers to exchange for Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, emulating Hamas. When Arab foreign ministers met their deliberations made it clear Arab governments, unable to rein in Israel's unbridled violence, were running out of options. Meanwhile Israel continues to use disproportionate military force, with the backing of the US and other international powers we used to think of as sympathetic to our cause.

Arab governments now blame it all on Hamas and Hizbullah, the two groups which, they say, are changing the rules of the game. They are resisting without permission, breaking Arab ranks. Arab governments are more shocked by the actions of Hamas and Hizbullah than by Israel's frenzy of destruction. Our foreign ministers are angry at resistance groups because they have stripped Arab governments of the fig leaf we call the peace process.

Hamas and Hizbullah, they say, fail to appreciate the intricacies of Arab calculations, though the foreign ministers do have the grace to admit that the international community has failed to make Israel stick to a single internationally- sponsored agreement. Israel has failed to meet a single one of its commitments to Mahmoud Abbas, even before Hamas were elected.

As far as Lebanon is concerned, Washington and Europe are fixated on UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which has drowned the Lebanese people in disputes, perhaps played a part in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Al-Hariri, and complicated the country's relations with Syria. Israel's acts of aggression on the borders, its occupation of the Shebaa Farms, and its detention of Arab and Lebanese resistance fighters does not seem to matter.

Israel wants to see Lebanon on its knees. It wants to push around the Lebanese government in the same way it has been treating President Abbas in Palestine. It calls for Hizbullah to be disarmed and evicted from the south, just as it called for the Palestinian factions to be disarmed. These are impossible demands, and the Lebanese government will be no more able to implement them than Abbas. What Israel wants to see in Lebanon and Palestine is civil war.

Unable to take effective action Arab officials are accusing Iran of arming Hizbullah. Arab policy seems to assume that Iran is stirring trouble in the region to divert attention from its own crisis. But everyone knows that Iran had close ties with Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah before the Iranian crisis started. The truth of the matter is that Washington and Israel have opened the gates to a regional hell and want to blame it all on Iran, perhaps as an excuse to strike at the latter's nuclear facilities. Violence in this region can be blamed on US stupidity and Israeli arrogance. And should the proponents of extremism and violence win we ought not to be surprised, not given the way the US, Israel and Arab governments have behaved.