No alternative to diplomacy

Yet again both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict set off to impose a military defeat on the other. And yet again, they won't succeed, writes Abdel-Moneim Said*

---

With every new round of extreme violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict it becomes more glaringly apparent that a military solution will never work and that a negotiated political settlement is the only alternative. I realise that there is an element of the absurd in me saying this at a time when a brutal battle is raging in Gaza where the political and military wills of both sides are being put to the test. The commonly held belief is that one must take an unequivocal moral stance on the conflict, especially one that is cast in such antithetical terms as killer versus victim, right versus wrong, tyranny versus injustice. This, of course, makes the task of the Arab intellectual quite straightforward: he is duty bound to condemn Israel's ruthless and criminal belligerence, to denounce the extensive killing of defenceless civilians and destruction of their meagre infrastructure, and to deplore a state founded upon and persisting in aggression against Palestinian and Arab land through colonisation and military force.

The political analyst, however, is in a somewhat different position, one akin to a doctor faced with a patient afflicted with an ulcer -- or cancer, in this case. His task is not to condemn, denounce or deplore, but rather to figure out how to treat the disease. He must diagnose it with an eye to determining whether to use surgical intervention or to use other approaches to contain its spread and enable the patient to accommodate to it. In all cases, his ultimate objective is to keep the patient alive, fortify his immune system and sustain his will to live, against the odds if need be, but capable of making those sometimes painful decisions when contending with the balance of powers between the virus and the body's powers of resistance.

In protracted international conflicts, recourse to arms is akin to surgical intervention. It might be necessary on occasion, but the surgeon must be aware of the consequences of using the scalpel and he must know precisely what kind of incisions he must make and exactly what he needs to remove. In the conflict at hand, neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian "surgeon" has a clear idea of where their surgical interventions are supposed to lead. In a recent speech, Hassan Nasrallah predicted that current Israeli operations would fail because the Israelis do not have clear objectives. They have not determined whether their goal is to eliminate Hamas, to halt missile fire into Israel, or to reoccupy Gaza. What the Hizbullah leader fails to mention is that Palestinian objectives were equally unclear. Was their aim to end the ceasefire, to end the boycott, or to liberate Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean? When opposing sides in an armed conflict have no clear aims, they simply fall back on inflicting the greatest possible damage and attrition on the other side. The previous round of fighting in the Arab-Israeli conflict illustrates the point. After the guns fell silent in the war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the prestige of the Israeli military deterrent was left with a gaping wound and Lebanon was in economic and political tatters due to the destruction of the country's infrastructure and to the boost to Hizbullah's domestic sway, even though the Islamist movement is now at a further distance from the "enemy" than before the war, with a dense cordon of international forces in between, and has only Manar TV as its theatre of operations.

Oddly, neither side learned the lessons from the last Lebanese war. Or they learned the wrong lessons. Israel thought that it could conduct a better war against an invisible enemy through more extensive and brutal destruction. The Palestinians thought they could win a political or media victory if they could hold out through tougher strains on their endurance. If the Olmert- Livni-Barak crew in Israel felt under pressure to score a military victory before the forthcoming Israeli elections, Hamas felt pressured to score breakthroughs against the economic and political blockade, firstly through the Gazan people's breakout into Egypt at the outset of 2008 and then by calling off the ceasefire, firing missiles into Israel and lashing out politically against Egypt before that year was up.

Learning the wrong lessons may be an integral part of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It has long been universally taken for granted that the Arabs never learn from their mistakes. But perhaps it is time to realise that in this domain Israel is running a close second and that Israel has yet to learn that its incessant aggression, settlement expansion and offences to the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people will not solve its security dilemma or win it recognition of its legitimacy, even if its existence is a de facto reality. The outcome of the current battle will be no different from that of its predecessors after the various interventions of the US, UN Security Council and other international parties, apart from the fact that the patient will be wearier and its immune system weaker. Simultaneously, it will have brought new and more powerful doses of hatred and rancour, more complex and deeper side effects, and higher levels of religious and political fundamentalism.

But the most important consequence of the current war is that it underscores the absurdity of military solutions to this conflict, at least in this current age. Naturally, both sides are fired by the unlimited conviction in divine support for their causes and that God will ultimately grant them glorious victory. Israel may well believe that with its superior technology and gradual normalisation in the Arab world it will be able to dominate the Palestinians and the rest of the backward Arab world and win in the long run. The Palestinians and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world, on the other hand, may put their stock in the power of geographic and demographic realities to ultimately grant them a victory similar to the defeat of the Crusaders some 300 years from now.

All such outcomes are possible, even if only the laws of probability and historical analogy sustain them. No one can foresee what the remote future will bring. Neither the Arabs nor Israelis will remain the same. The rapidly changing 21st century has its unfathomable mysteries and demands. But what we can be sure of is that the current situation holds nothing but further attrition for both sides. With regards to the Arab world, it is exhausting untold amounts of energy and resources on a conflict that has no end in sight at the expense of its struggle for development and the acquisition of true sources of strength. The current battle will only add one more point to the lesson that there is no alternative to a peaceful settlement on the basis of the two-state solution.

All opinion polls conducted in Israel and Palestine show that the majority among both peoples support the two-state solution but feel that such a solution is impossible to reach because the other side has neither the will nor the ability to take the necessary decisions. Such doubts have been common in history's major conflicts. However, war is clearly not the way to put them to rest. The amazing thing is that there already exist sufficient frameworks, such as the Geneva Accord, the roadmap, the Arab peace initiative, and even the results of past and present Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and Syrian-Israeli negotiations, to set into motion a new and serious peace process.

It has long been said that crisis brings forth both risk and opportunity. It seems that Arabs, the Israelis and the rest of the world have always avoided risks by trying to turn the situation back to what it had been before an enormous toll was exacted. Why not do things differently for a change? Why not put our energies into seizing opportunity? Surely there is no better opportunity than when both sides reach the conviction that military solutions are hopeless.

* The writer is director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.