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Editorial: Recipe for peace or war?

Predictably, the Middle East Quartet’s Wednesday meeting in Washington to bridge differences on the next steps towards a peace process in the region has come a cropper. The meeting was sponsored by the United States, one of the four – the others being the United Nations, the European Union and Russia – and reconfirmed the sharp differences that persist between how the US perceives the situation and how the EU, Russia and the UN read it. In an attempt to salvage the process, the Quartet began another round of discussions Thursday and included in it Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. But the probability is that the second round of discussions is also likely to go the way of the first.

The sharp differences reported between the US on the one hand and the rest of the Quartet on the other are not peripheral differences. They relate to substantive, core issues. While everyone agrees to the need for peace in the Middle East, the US perception of the peace trajectory is markedly different from that of the others. There are two major issues here. First, what is to be the role of the current Palestinian Authority president, Yasser Arafat? Second, whether a provisional Palestinian state, as envisaged by President Bush in his speech, is the beginning or an end of the final settlement.

The United States has made it abundantly clear that Yasser Arafat has failed to be a partner in peace and therefore must exit if any peace process is to be meaningful. Leaving aside other problems with this approach, the US trajectory for the peace process is clearly tipped in favour of Israel and the latter’s concern over “security” instead of an equitable settlement of the issue. Here the issue becomes one of what kind of peace we are looking for and what it might entail for the Palestinians. For instance, if peace were to mean a long-drawn process in which the entire onus of success or failure is on Palestinian conduct and if that conduct implies total obeisance to Israel’s notions of security even when the latter refuses to consider the genuine demands of the Palestinians, then the problem begins to relate more to the conception of such peace itself than the presence or absence of Yasser Arafat.

And yet, the very issue of Mr Arafat’s presence and absence is no lightweight matter that can be dismissed on the basis of what Washington and Tel Aviv have to say. President Bush wants the Palestinians to build democratic institutions through holding free and fair elections and in the same breath tells them not to elect Mr Arafat. This is clearly absurd. If elections are held and Arafat does present himself as one of the contenders and manages to also win those elections, then he becomes the president regardless of what Mr Bush or Mr Sharon think. Elections and democracy are all about the popular will and if Mr Arafat can ride its high tide and get back into office then that cannot be contested.

There is much, too much that is wrong with the US approach, not least the fact that Mr Bush’s policy postulates are all drawn from the Israeli policy laid down by Mr Sharon. Almost at the very onset of Mr Sharon’s term, he and his advisors made clear that they were not prepared to deal with Arafat. Since then, they have militarily, politically and diplomatically operated in a manner as to make it clear that they want Mr Arafat ousted. The US, which initially refused to go along with this sans-Arafat policy, has now lapped it up. This is what makes it so difficult for the other interlocutors to agree with the US approach on the issue.
The conditions laid down by Mr Bush in his speech relate to prerequisites that even the most developed nation in the developing world cannot meet, and that includes Israel itself, which for all its democratic credentials remains a state obsessed with a particular notion of security and in enhancing that is prone to all types of oppression, corruption and subterfuge. As one European commentator observed: “Bush wants Palestine to become Sweden before it can become Palestine.”

Similarly, the idea of a provisional state has been variously described by international law experts as “a bit of a nonsense” and as being akin to “a woman who is somewhat pregnant”. A state is either a state or it isn’t. Yet, other experts have pointed out that the idea may not be bad, politically speaking, if it were to be the starting point rather than the culmination of a peace process based on consistently good Palestinian behaviour. The problem is that the Palestinian dossier is to be kept by Mr Sharon, which is akin to getting the wolf to guard the sheep. Scores of analysts, including the Israeli peace lobby, have pointed out that Mr Sharon wants Palestinian Bantustans and will press his advantage to a point where the Palestinians accept that ghettoisation as the normal, acceptable course of their existence. This is also why he wants to get rid of Mr Arafat. This is not a recipe for peace; it is a recipe for prolongation of war.

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