Wishful thinking

By Salama A Salama

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The Palestinians have failed to put together a government of national unity. They gave us the impression that they were close; then suddenly we were told all bets were off. Not to be outdone, Arab foreign ministers launched into their own show of pointless diplomacy, begging the UN Security Council to replace the US as mastermind of peace in the Middle East. In both cases, we found ourselves "back to square one", to use the words of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

President Abbas left to New York for a meeting with President Bush. Before he left, the Palestinian president had talks with Hamas that led to nothing in particular. Hamas wasn't going to meet the Quartet's terms, namely recognising Israel, disavowing violence, and accepting prior agreements. And yet we were given the impression that things would work out somehow. In New York, the Palestinian president heard encouraging words from President Bush and addressed the UN General Assembly. But even before Abbas returned home, Hamas was making no secret of its refusal to recognise Israel. So what exactly was the point?

Obviously, the dialogue between Fatah and Hamas was marred with misunderstanding, let alone bad faith. Once again, gunmen from both sides were deployed in the streets of Gaza, and the nation teetered on the brink of civil war. What exactly seems to be the trouble here? Obviously, we've been motivated more by wishful thinking than by pragmatic considerations. It's painful to watch the Palestinians and Arabs trying to break their respective deadlocks by make-believe.

The peace process is a faint memory from the past, and yet the Arabs hoped that the horrors of the Lebanon war would somehow change things. For a while, EU countries seemed sympathetic to Arab ideas. The Arabs wanted to offer Israel full normalisation in return for full peace, just as they suggested years ago in Beirut. The Bahraini foreign minister pleaded the case at the UN Security Council, but then the council adjourned without as much as a perfunctory reaction. All this talk of timetables and UN sponsorship fell on deaf ears.

What the Arabs wanted was to have the UN run the peace process, instead of the US. Tough luck. The US has gained so much out of Arab weakness, so why would it help them out? What were we thinking? So long as the Palestinians are divided over the recognition of Israel, the US is in no rush to act.

For icing on the cake, the Arabs failed to get the International Atomic Energy Agency to denounce Israel's nuclear activities or pressure the latter to join the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty. An Arab draft resolution calling for the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the region was promptly shot down by the US and Western countries. This happened although Arab countries were ready to offer the US closer cooperation in the Gulf, a sort of a united front against Iran. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, and Gulf countries to discuss the matter and nothing came out of it. Once again, our expectations were unrealistic.

Three failures within days, and they are all quite typical of Arab diplomacy. Three times we tried to change things without doing our homework first. Three times we acted on wishful thinking rather than on astute calculation, and what was the result? You tell me.