Israel's Dilemma
By Gwynne Dyer
Late last month the Arab League declared in Riyadh that all 22 Arab
countries are still ready for peace with Israel if it withdraws from all
the Arab lands that it seized in the 1967 war and agrees to a just solution
for the Palestinian refugees. It is a measure of their panic as they
calculate the psychological impact of a forthcoming US withdrawal from Iraq
(which will emerge as the first Shia-ruled Arab country in eight
centuries), and the likelihood that western Iraq will become a Sunni Arab
rump state dominated by fanatical Islamists.
The Riyadh offer essentially repeats a proposal for a comprehensive
peace settlement that the Arab League first made five years ago at a summit
in Beirut. At that time it was completely ignored by Israel, as Ariel
Sharon was the Israeli prime minister in 2002 and had no interest in
trading land for peace. He is gone now, but it is still very unusual in the
diplomatic world to make the same offer again at a later date. It looks too
much like begging. Why did they do it?
This is not a particularly good time to talk about peace to Israel,
for Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, is gravely weakened by corruption
scandals and the perceived failure of his war against Lebanon last summer.
He is in no position politically to propose returning to Israel's pre-1967
borders, i.e. giving the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem to the
Palestinians, and returning the Golan Heights to Syria, even if he were
personally inclined to do so.
Olmert is even less likely to be interested in trying to sell
Israeli voters on the Arab demand that Palestinian refugees and their
descendants be allowed to return to their original homes within what is now
Israel if they wish. No doubt he could negotiate a deal in which only token
numbers of refugees returned if he were willing to yield on those other
points, but it is as important symbolically in Israeli politics that NONE
of the Palestinians whose families were driven out of what is now Israel in
1948 be allowed to return as it is to Palestinians that they ALL be
permitted to.
The Arab League's real reason for bringing up the Beirut offer
again last month was that a number of key members are worried about the
security of their own regimes after US forces in Iraq give up and go home.
A few countries with large Shia populations worry a bit about their
loyalty, but the big concern everywhere is that Sunni Islamist extremists
have gained immensely in prestige and popular support across the Arab world
because of their performance against the American occupation forces in
Iraq.
In virtually every Arab state, the main opposition to the regime is
Sunni Islamists, and in many of them the relationship is already one of
suppressed civil war. The American invasion of Iraq utterly destabilised
the region -- as King Abdullah II of Jordan warned in July, 2002, "All of
us are saying, 'Hey, United States, we don't think this is a very good
idea'" -- and US defeat in Iraq is destabilising it even further. In Syria,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and some of the smaller Gulf states, the countries
nearest to the epicentre of the upheavals, and even in Egypt, there are
grave concerns about Islamist coups, uprisings, or even full-scale
revolutions.
So now would be a good time to win the regimes some credit by doing
a peace deal with Israel that creates a proper Palestinian state in the
Israeli-occupied territories and lets at least a few refugees go home while
compensating the rest. However, the very vulnerability that now persuades
Arab regimes to revive this proposal automatically makes it less attractive
to Israelis. How can they be sure that the Arab regimes they make the deal
with will actually survive long enough to make such a deal worthwhile?
Aluf Benn of the newspaper "Ha'aretz" put it plainly about a year
ago: "Israel could always do business with Arab dictators; (they were) a
barrier protecting it from the rage of the 'Arab street'. That was the
basis of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan (and with) Yasser
Arafat and his heirs...but those days are over. Henceforth Israel will have
to factor into its foreign policy something it has always ignored -- Arab
public opinion."
Indeed, Israel may soon have to deal with more regimes that fully
reflect the "rage of the Arab street," as it is already dealing with (or
rather, failing to deal with) the Islamists of Hamas, freely elected in the
Palestinian occupied territories over a year ago. Such governments would
not be interested in making new peace agreements with Israel, or even in
maintaining existing ones.
So the quite genuine offer of the Arab League will be ignored, not
just because the current Israeli government wants to hold onto most of the
settlements, but because no Israeli government would accept the deal the
Arab League is offering unless it could be sure that its key partners on
the other side were capable of carrying out their part of the deal. It
cannot be sure of that any more. The repercussions of the Iraq fiasco are
just beginning to unfold, and nobody knows what the Middle East will look
like five years from now. (Emphasis added by me, RN)
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