The Peace Process

With Bush re-elected, and Arafat on his death bed, there’s talk of new opportunities for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Michael Gove has some thoughts:

There is a widespread sense that a new opportunity exists to provide the Palestinian people and the Israelis with fresh hope for the future. But that fresh hope is compromised by the tired assumptions with which it is accompanied. As Tony Blair prepares to meet President Bush this week there is near-unanimity from European commentators and politicians about what should be done.

The President should be told to re-engage with a peace process that has faltered, more than anything, because of his culpable neglect. He must show greater impartiality, rather than favouring, as he has, if only by inaction, the Israeli Government.

The Israelis, for their part, must recognise the folly of seeking to use military means to protect themselves from terror. And only through progress between Israel and the Palestinians can the wider problems of the region be solved.

All of these clichéd assumptions: the belief that America is to blame for neglecting to engage; the conviction that the President must display neutrality; the judgment that Ariel Sharon’s current tactics are folly; and the idea that the peace process is the principal solution for the region’s woes are almost totally wrong. These assumptions have underpinned the policies that were followed for 30 years in the Middle East, and they have been responsible for our current misery. The repetition of each of these clichés now brings to mind another, with politicians who refuse to learn from history condemned to repeat it.

The first wrong-headed assumption is embodied in the demand that Bush “re-engage” with the Middle East peace process, as though conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians was like a squabble between children, a dispute due primarily to a failure on the part of the figure in authority to assert himself. This error springs from a misplaced faith that major conflicts can be resolved if only outside figures apply themselves to brokering negotiations with all the energy at their disposal. The truth about peace processes is that outside brokers can achieve something only if the parties to the conflict want out. And that wasn’t the case with Arafat.

Few presidents could have tried harder to engage with the Middle East peace process than Bill Clinton, but he knew where the blame lay for its demise. When Yassir Arafat sought to praise Clinton for the American leader’s efforts at the end of his presidency, Bill would have none of it. “I’ve been a failure,” he told the Palestinian leader, “and it’s thanks to you.” Peace talks at Camp David, and Taba, ran into the sand because Arafat chose not to accept what had been negotiated but preferred to see what more could be extracted through the violence of the second intifada. […]

[F]oreign statesmen who wish to see the people of the Middle East enjoy a better future should broaden their gaze beyond this one conflict to recognise what is truly at the heart of the region’s malaise. Arafat was not the only Arab leader to blame his people’s problems on the Jews, to prefer the romance of the liberation struggle to the hard work of democratic modernisation, and to line his own pockets while his citizens scrabbled for survival. The root cause of violence, poverty and division in the Middle East is not a failure to solve the peace process. The failure of the peace process stems from the continuing addiction of so many of the Arab world’s leaders to fomenting violence, presiding over poverty and indulging in the politics of division.