COVER -> DAY ONE
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It is difficult, watching the Palestinian lynch mob, encapsulating Palestinian frustration and Arafat's helplessness, but we must. Every so often during a chronic crisis it is as well to remind ourselves, lest we become completely entangled in the hysterical minutiae of relentless propaganda, of the underlying factors -- "causes" is too definite a word -- of the conflict. What was it which so divided the Montaguežs and the Capulet's?
The State of Israel was brought to a premature birth by fanatics who did not scruple to kill British soldiers who, for all they knew, had liberated concentration camps in Germany. Consequently, it had no recognised boundaries but after an unsuccessful Arab attempt to crush it at birth, it lived within its initial ceasefire lines until 1967 when another more or less concerted attempt to crush it resulted in the de facto expansion of its territory.
War resumed, again initiated by the Arabs, in 1973 with initial losses which were then reversed to such an extent that, but for the intervention of Dr. Kissinger threatening to cut off supplies, the Israelis might have chosen to march into Cairo and/or Damascus.
Whatever the reasons, some public, some private, for Israel's reticence, it is the only power in the dispute that has ever exercised any restraint.
The victorious powers of the Second World War, determined to give the Jews a home land as some recompense for the Nazi (and perhaps Stalinist) persecutions, focused on British Mandated Palestine, not troubling very greatly to ask the Palestinians, or the emerging, independent Arab states what they thought of the idea. At the time there was hardly a murmur of dissent outside the Arab world. Only later did the international community, frequently in the UN Security Council, make Israel's right to exist and right to defend itself secondary to other objectives.
Odd, this, given the fact that if the Palestinians have a grievance against anything it should be the UN rather than Israel. From Resolution 242 until that passed at the commencement of recent hostilities, the United Nations has not been an honest broker; it has always reflected the majority in the General Assembly made up of anti-American and/or pro Chinese and Soviet and/or theoretically non-aligned countries.
Israel showed considerable constraint, not to mention a little, reluctant grace, in allowing Mr Annan entry after a blatantly one-sided Security Council intervention from which the United States abstained.
On the other hand, the United States has been, except for a brief period under President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger, unaccountably pro-Israel. This can hardly be accounted for by the Jewish electorate which is not, after all, so sentimentally attached to Israel that it will go and live there, which says something instructive about electoral factors.
On the other hand, there is no explanation, other than the craving for cheap gasoline, more enslaving than heroin, for the "Land of the Free" craven behaviour towards a gaggle of the most undemocratic regimes on earth.
For here is one of the central realities of Middle Eastern politics. Only Israel, Egypt and Palestine, in descending order, have any democratic credentials whatsoever.
Israel has saddled itself with an absurdly proportionate system with a 'floor' representation of 1% which makes stable government impossible and makes accountability as fine grained as it can be.
Egypt has elections with some limits on the eligibility of candidates and the PLO has won elections, though under what circumstances of fairness is not clear. Results look alarmingly like those in former communist countries and more recently under Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Milosevic in Yugoslavia before he was overthrown.
So what we are witnessing is an ultra-accountable government in a state of war with a set of governments which, on the whole, are not accountable to anyone. This should be no reason in logic and consistency for penalising Israel because it does not always live up to the much higher standard that we set for it than the standard of behaviour we set for its opponents. Israel's behaviour, horrifyingly imitating at a state level that of an abused child, no matter how reprehensible, is much more open to view and criticism than that of any of its opponents. We do not know how many are tortured and murdered in Syria for political reasons.
The ostensible crux of the dispute is the control of that small portion of Jerusalem which contains the third most holy place for Muslims and the holiest of all, indeed the only one, for Jews. If there is limited Islamic control over the disputed ground that is nothing to Jews losing their only sacred ground.
There is, no doubt, some genuine religious feeling on the Arab side but the suspicion must be that it is extremely convenient to have a running, quasi-religious external crisis to mask the greed and indifference of self-perpetuating oligarchies at home.
It is no coincidence that the first peace was between Israel and almost democratic Egypt and that there has been some agreement with the nominally democratic Palestinian Territories. In terms of realpolitik it might well be argued that dictators, having no elections to face, can give much more ground in negotiations than democrats but in reality the opposite has turned out to be true; it is precisely Arafat's eroding legitimacy which has forced him to incite or tolerate (we do not yet know which ) the most recent outbreak of serious violence in his territories.
On these bases, nobody emerges with much credit and nobody has much room to manoeuvre.
In the very nature of things, if you are flanked by hawks and doves the reassurance of the latter does not make up for the fear of the former.
Barak and Arafat, in his better moments, are given temporary hope but their oppositions both want war at almost any cost.
The United Nations has, foolishly, hobbled itself beyond recovery and Bush has, short-sightedly, made no indication that he will follow in Clinton's footsteps, rather the opposite.
There was an opportunity, when oil fell below $20 (USD) a barrel, to tell the Arab world to sort its own camp out before telling Israel how to run its affairs and, even now, the best way to sort out the Israel/Palestine problem is to isolate it from all the other posturing and cant in the region.
The idea that there needs to be a comprehensive peace with all parties before any part of it can stick is an historical and diplomatic nonsense. A stable, more or less democratic Palestinian State and an Israel stabilised by a representational floor of %5 or even 10% are both possible at not very great expense. There might, Arafat's devotion not being conspicuous, be a sensible settlement of the issue of the Holy Places. The whole history of the region, from the declaration of the First Crusade in 1090, demonstrates that macro-jigsaw exercises are useless but that micro-structures of mutual self-interest survive remarkably well.
Eight years of peace process have come to this: The question most asked is whether the peace process has been destroyed, as if it were a piece of valuable collage. The Clinton grand Plan may have come to nothing but that was more a matter of timing than substance. Arafat was not politically strong enough to buy and then sell the offer of divided jurisdiction in Jerusalem and the flaring up of violence in his Territories is a bloody commentary on his weakness but the fundamentals have not altered.
Neither side can have total control over Jerusalem. Israel by making an offer of division has admitted this but Arafat has not yet been able to bring himself to do so. A national coalition in Israel and new leadership in the Palestinian territories will not alter that.
First a ceasefire; next, a disentanglement from the distractions of the outside world; and, finally, a limited agreement over the status of Jerusalem. Today it looks impossible, and it will never be easy; but the fundamentals have not changed since the hasty foundation of the State of Israel and nothing that has happened during the past two weeks has changed them.
