CAMP DAVID 2000
Previewing a Failure
"The end of the fight is a tombstone white
with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East." (R. Kipling)
President Clinton appears to be a man driven by a sense of insufficiency and a strong will to prove the contrary by success and acclaim these will earn him. We could find no better explanation for the unusual lengths to which he is going to hustle, drive, steamroll, bankroll the Middle East "peace process" to a televisionable agreement. We suspect he is more concerned with appearances - his own - rather than with the intractable problem of peace between the Arabs and Israel. History books have many pages on insoluble problems of peace between neighbours who are implacably hostile to one another over incompatible claims in every domain of human contact, from grazing rights to religion. (As a tail piece we shall cite an example of ancient history because of the East-West element in it). If the "peace process" soon to culminate at a tripartite meeting in or near Washington fails - as we expect it ultimately will - the lesson will be that it should never have been called. Peace making and keeping in the Orient is not a matter for rational give-and-take. Even if American stick-and-carrot tactics yield an agreement initialled or signed by Arab chairman Yasser Arafat and Israel prime minister Ehud Barak, it will be at best, we predict, short-lived, soon ignored by the passionate peoples the two leaders represent, and bypassed by the impetuous and irrepressible course of events on the ground.
Why will the peace process fail? Mainly because the three parties involved misunderstand each other, but are largely unaware of it. The most unrealistic judgments, innocent of any historic perspective, are those of the U.S. State Department, of President Clinton who is credulously taking over the basic errors of his advisers, and some of Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Both men share old, unconscious, unfounded Western assumptions about the East, all invalid there. One of these is that peace, prosperity and the rights of man, so self-evident in the West, are regarded supreme universal values and interests Everywhere. Are they? Not in all places of the globe, not in Asia and Africa and certainly not in the Middle East. To Muslim Arabs, collectively speaking, religious and ethnic self-esteem ranks higher. To most of them Islam comes first, before any other human value or asset. If they feel their dignity as Muslims or Arabs is wounded, no offer of peace, prosperity or freedom will lessen their deep hurt and resentment, or compensate for it. What matters to them is that they do feel wronged, even if no wrong and no slight are intended.
We are not talking about Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, chairman Arafat or any other prominent individual, but the Arab nation as a whole (and indeed also many non-Arab Muslim communities). Their anger at slights, real or imagined, is the reason for many conflicts, some very savage, between them and followers of other faiths in many countries. Israel is a classical case of a country towards which many Arabs feel passionately resentful. As Muslims they have always treated followers of other faiths living among them as second-class citizens. For 14 centuries Islamic regimes have not accorded equality before the law to non-Muslims, as real democracies do now as a matter of course. The return of the Jews to their old homeland annoyed the Arabs from the start hundred years ago. When in 1947 the United Nations accorded both of them a divided Palestine as sovereign states, angry Arabs felt wronged, protested, their governments vowed to crush the projected state of Israel by force of arms. The defeats of their armies in 1948, the emergence of Israel as a stable state capable of defending itself against neighbours superior in manpower and wealth, and the conclusion of peace agreements with it by Egypt and Jordan, merely intensified the resentment of the new generation of Arabs to a degree at which a rational resolution of the conflict has become unlikely.
Conflicting territorial claims by hostile neighbours, Muslim near others, are always simmering on the globe and often erupting into violence, as in Bosnia, Kashmir, Somali, Sudan, Nigeria etc. All are difficult, if at all, to settle. Common to all these conflicts is that they are strongly emotional, fuelled by religious, ethnic and territorial passions. Many have gone on for centuries. Bosnia is a typical case of a conflict sustained by self-perpetuating hatred, passed on from one generation to the next. The only way of preserving quiet in the Balkans has been restraint imposed by a superior power, like Imperial Austria, Ottoman Turkey, or a strong-willed and ruthless dictator like Tito. Mutual deterrence assured peace between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, steeped in unbridgeable suspicion of and conflict with each other. Israel had such deterrence until 1973. It lost it in the Yom Kippur War, due mainly to its ignorance of the Orient and poor judgment of its leaders, ill-advised with regard to Arab persistence and military capability.
The same kind of misjudgment is now leading Israel's peace-hungry leaders into offering Arafat far-reaching concessions in return for an agreement that they hope will end a century of conflict. Seen against the background of Middle East history it looks more likely that such an agreement will spawn new illusions on both sides: the Arabs will misinterpret it as another sign of Israel's growing weakness and will encourage them to more defiance and confrontation. Israel’s leaders will wishfully mistake it for lasting peace, perhaps frigid at the beginning, but with the promise of normal relations to follow. The patient, stolid, unchangeable collective will of the Arabs is to delete Israel from the Middle East map however long it may take, because they regard its territory as their own and the existence as a sovereign non-Muslim state among them an affront to their national and religious self-esteem. They will not be appeased by any concessions that Israel can live with, just as Pakistan will not ever accept an Indian or
an independent Kashmir.
Elsewhere on this site we refer to conflict between the ancient Romans and Carthage because of its similarities with those now defying a peaceful Middle East solution: then incompatibility of political and commercial claims, an East-West cultural and ethnic gap, unequal respect for contractual commitments, and the three long Punic wars between the rivals. The final outcome was decided by military superiority and civic discipline. Today the elements of conflict between the Arabs and Israel are mainly religious, cultural and ethnic. We looked in vain for a reference in Israel publications to the Phoenician wars and to the still characteristic disregard for treaty observation in the East. No agreement will last there in a way that both signatories can agree on and live with. This is not to suggest that non-observation does not occur also elsewhere on the globe. The breach in Munich in 1938 by France of its treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia, or those of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler, were exceptions. In the Middle East breaches are the norm. During the eighties and nineties armistice and cease-fire accords s were signed by delegates of the Lebanon and Israel in the morning - and broken in the afternoon. It seems that the American and Israeli politicians, unfamiliar with Oriental ways, are learning history not by “market research”, a branch of applied psychology, but by the costlier method of trial and error.
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