|
Elusive Peace in the Middle-East – The Way Out By Bello Abdullahi The Palestinian-Israeli protracted conflict has come to be identified with the level of peace in the Middle-East sub-continent. The precarious situation has made it difficult for the region to claim its deserved position in the world, considering the volume of oil reserves it controls. The Canaanites were the earliest known inhabitants of Palestine. Palestine, located at the center of routes linking three continents, made it a meeting place for religious and cultural influences from Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor. It was also the natural battleground for the great powers of the region and subject to domination by adjacent empires, beginning with Egypt in the third millennium BC. Egyptian hegemony and Canaanite autonomy were constantly challenged by other ethnically diverse invaders. Such invaders, however, were defeated by the Egyptians and absorbed by the Canaanites, who at that time numbered about 200,000. As Egyptian power began to weaken after the 14th century BC, new invaders appeared – the Hebrews, a group of Semitic tribes from Mesopotamia, and the Philistines (after whom the country was later named), and an Aegean people of Indo-European stock. The Israelites, a confederation of Hebrew tribes, finally defeated the Canaanites but found the struggle with the Philistines more difficult. The Philistines had established an independent state, with its capital at Jerusalem. The state of Palestine passed through Persian and Roman rules before the advent of the Arab Caliphate. The Muslim rulers did not force their religion on the Palestinians, and more than a century passed before the majority converted to Islam. The remaining Christians and Jews were considered People of the Book. They were allowed autonomous control in their communities and guaranteed security and freedom of worship. Most Palestinians also adopted Arabic and Islamic culture. Palestine benefited from the empire’s trade and from its religious significance during the first Muslim dynasty. The Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor invaded Palestine in 1517 and ruled until 1918. The country was divided into several districts such as that of Jerusalem. The administration of the districts was placed largely in the hands of Arabised Palestinians, who were descendants of the Canaanites and successive settlers. The Christians and Jewish communities, however, were allowed a large measure of autonomy. The decline in the Ottoman Empire brought about a decline in the socio-economic fortunes of Palestine in the 17th century, which continued until the 19th century. At that time the search by Europeans for raw materials and markets, as well as their strategic interests, brought them to the Middle East, stimulating economic and social development. German settlers and Jewish immigrants in the 1880s brought modern machinery and badly needed capital. The rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, especially the intensification of anti-Semitism during the 1880s, encouraged European Jews to seek haven in their “promised land,” Palestine. The founding of the World Zionist Organisation in 1897 to solve Europe’s “Jewish problem” increased the Jewish immigration to Palestine. Support for the Zionist Movement came largely from Jews in Europe and North America, and by WW I the Zionist Movement won backing from Great Britain, which wanted support from world Jewry for its struggle against Germany. In 1880, Arab Palestinians constituted about 95 percent of the total population of 450,000. Some Palestinian leaders were opposed to Jewish immigration, and land purchase. The number of Jews in the Palestine was small in the early 20th century; it increased from 12,000 in 1845 to nearly 85,000 by 1914. Most people in Palestine were Arabic speaking Muslims and Christians. Now the population is approximately 11m (2006). Aided by the Arabs, the British captured Palestine from the Ottoman Turks in 1918. The Arabs revolted against the Turks because the British had promised them the independence of their countries after the war. Britain, however, also made other, conflicting commitments. In a third agreement, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain promised the Jews, whose help it needed in the war effort, a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. The British government therefore issued the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, in the form of a letter to a British Zionist leader from the foreign secretary Arthur J. Balfour: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a nation home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” This promise was subsequently incorporated in the mandate conferred on Britain by the League of Nations in 1922. During their mandate the British found their contradictory promises to the Jewish and Palestinian communities difficult to reconcile. The Zionists envisaged large-scale Jewish immigration, and some spoke of a Jewish state constituting all of Palestine. A 1922 statement of British policy denied Zionist claims to all of Palestine and limited Jewish immigration, but reaffirmed support for a Jewish national home. After 1928, when Jewish immigration increased somewhat, British policy on the subject seesawed under conflicting Arab Jewish pressures. Immigration rose sharply after the installation (1933) of the Nazi regime in Germany; in 1935 nearly 62,000 Jews entered Palestine. Fear of Jewish domination was the principal cause of the Arab revolt that broke out in 1936 and continued intermittently until 1939. By that time Britain had began restricted Jewish immigration and purchases of land. The struggle for Palestine, which abated during World War II, resumed in 1945. The Holocaust produced world sympathy for European Jewry and for Zionism. Britain, however refused to admit 100,000 Jewish survivors to Palestine, but many survivors of the Nazi death camps found their way there illegally. Europe and America saw a convenient way of solving the Jews influx into their countries as a result of the persecution they suffered in the hands of the Nazis. Various plans for solving the Palestine problem were rejected by one party or the other. In 1947 Britain declared the mandate unworkable and turned the problem over to the United Nations (UN). The Jews and the Palestinians prepared for a showdown. Although the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews (whose figure got a boost from immigration) – 1,300,000 to 600,000, the latter were better prepared – thanks to Britain and North America. They had a semi-autonomous government, led by David Ben-Gurion. The Palestinians, on the other had never recovered from the Arab revolt, and most of their leaders were in exile. The Mufti of Jerusalem, their principal spokesman, refused to accept Jewish statehood. When the UN proposed partition in 1947, he rejected the plan while the Jews accepted it. In the military struggle that followed, the Palestinians were defeated. The state of Israel was therefore established on May 14, 1948, with Ben-Gurion as Prime Minister. Five Arab armies, coming to the aid of Palestinians, immediately attacked it. Uncoordinated and outnumbered, they were defeated by Israeli forces. Israel enlarged its territory. The war produced 780,000 Palestinian refugees. About half probably left out of fear and panic, while the rest were forced out to make room for Jewish immigrants from Europe and from the Arab world. (Historical data are from http://www.historychannel.com).
It is evidently clear from these historical antecedents that Britain sowed the seed of the Middle-East crisis, which America is nurturing today. The creation of the Israeli state in 1948 was seen by Europe and North America as a more than convenient avenue of discouraging Jewish dominance in their countries after the holocaust – especially in the areas of finance, economics, business and science. Britain, like it succeeded in doing in most of the countries it forcefully colonized, created a confused situation by inviting the Jews into Palestine, edging out the real owners of the land, and in the end handed over to a United Nations Organisation that emerged after the World War, with little or no experience in conflict-resolution or peace-keeping. With the benefit of hindsight, which is 20/20, the Israelis have grown from strength to strength, militarily and administratively, right from the day the British came into the scheme of things after the fall of the Ottoman Rule. After the forceful creation of the state of Israel Britain and America continued to support the new government of Ben-Gurion with wanton abandon, encouraging Jews in Diaspora to return “home” and join their kith and kin to build the new state of Israel. They answered this call and the population of the “state” of Israel continued to increase in a geometrical progression – even Ethiopian Jews were encouraged to shift base to the new Zionist state. Eventually America took upon herself to continue to not only support Israel morally, but arm it to the teeth with sophisticated military hardware and arms and ammunitions, in addition to the transfer of military technology. Today any sophisticated arms that America has in her arsenal can be found with Israel – from sophisticated gun ships, Mig-fighters, missiles, predators, armoured tanks, to “precision-bombers”. While on the other hand America allied with Europe to deny the Palestinians access to such arms – leaving them with the few options of Eastern Europe and the “radical countries” of Iran, Syria, and, until recently, Libya, to source them. While America openly continued to ship these arms to Israel, a small consignment of AK-47 rifles and grenades from neighbouring Arab countries under the cover of the night always makes sensational headlines – using it to justify why it labels the Palestinian organization of Yaser Arafat a “terrorist organization”. While Israel uses these sophisticated arms and armored tanks to destroy Palestinian homes and kill innocent people including women and children with wanton abandon arrogance, the Palestinian youths use crude missiles and suicide belts; the small children use common stones. The recent invasion of Gaza just to rescue a nineteen-year old army sergeant kidnapped by the Hamas militants and the arrest of some ministers in the Hamas cabinet shows that there is no love lost between the Zionist state and the Palestinian authorities. The tanks and over five thousand army personnel that rolled into the Palestinian settlement of Gaza, in addition to the air strikes, gave out the Zionist state as insensitive to any peace efforts in the region. Or is it a subtle way of toppling the Hamas regime which it tags a terrorist regime? If the claim of the Hamas militants of killing the army sergeant is true then the Zionist leadership should be blamed for deciding to use force instead of securing his release through diplomacy and moral suasion. As if this is not enough, Israel today is one of the few countries of the world that possess nuclear capabilities. While America pretends they do not exist it continues to mount pressure on countries like North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan, after arrogantly invading Iraq under the false pretext that it possessed weapons of mass destructions, popularly known as WMD, among other things. El-Baradei, the chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), would want to tell those who care to listen to him that America, and therefore the international agency, is not putting pressure on Israel to dismantle her nuclear arsenal because it (Israel) is not a signatory to the Non-Nuclear proliferation treaty. What a joke! What El-Baradei is simply saying is that only Israel and America are allowed to possess nuclear capabilities in the world! This is the situation as America introduced its double standard foreign policy of brokering peace between the two nations – from “Camp David Accord” to “Road Map”. Only presidents elected under the Democratic Party in America (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) made any meaningful effort to broker peace, while presidents under the Republican Party (Ronald Reagan and George Bush) have either shown nonchalance attitude or worsened the situation altogether. They will invite the Israeli president to Washington five times without inviting the Palestinian leader once; in most cases refusing to invite him, accusing him of being uncooperative. While it turns the other way as Israel attacks and kills women and children at the slightest provocation, minor skirmishes in either Eastern Europe or the Caribbean are always condemned instantly with “State House” press releases. Many international relations experts thought with the demise of Yaser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, peace would come easily in the region. How naïve! The recent unanimous election of Hamas, the radical arm of the Palestinian struggle, has completely changed the dynamics of the peace process. Even the Fatah leaders were shocked by the results of the elections. The recent conflict between the Fatah faction and Hamas, being encouraged by the Israeli government and the Fatah leaders is an ill wind that will blow neither of the sides any good. For Abbas, the Palestinian President, to threaten to call for a referendum to decide the issue of recognizing the state of Israel is foolhardy, and will not achieve anything even if it is carried out and the “Ayes” have it – achieving peace is far beyond recognizing the Zionist state. America can no longer play any significant role in the Middle East as a result of too many distractions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, and more recently, Iran, in addition to its continued double standard – the powerful American Jewish lobby group is too important to the American leadership to allow for unbiased handling of the conflict. Right now George Bush’s mind is not on the conflict even if he pretends to show otherwise with occasional cowboy gusto outbursts. In any event the underlying agenda is a polarized Middle East to which the American economy will continue to benefit from – it (America) is under the illusion that a divided Middle East with Israel armed to the teeth to police it will guarantee an uninterrupted supply of cheap oil to meet its insatiable demand. The only option therefore is for America to move over while Europe takes over the supervision of the peace process assisted by the Arab League. The so-called “moderate” Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Kuwait should by now realize that America will only continue to protect them as long they can serve her principal interests – policing the Middle-East to boost its economy and the survival of Israel as a Zionist state in the midst of Islamic countries. The wars they fought with the Zionist state should be enough experience for them to realize this – they were defeated because of American support in arms and intelligence. My blueprint for peace in the Middle-East has a five-point agenda – all fundamentally important for the peaceful co-existence of the two nations. First and foremost, the Palestinian leadership is to openly recognize the state of Israel. The reality of the present international relations diplomacy is that even if the Palestinians lay a better claim on the state of Palestine, neither Palestine nor Israel can drive the other out of the area. On the other side of the equation the new Israeli government must acknowledge the fact the Palestinians wanted a change from the inept and docile regime of Fattah that was why they unanimously voted for Hamas – branding them terrorists will only continue to worsen the standoff. Israel must fully return all the territories it occupied such as the Golan Heights, West Bank, etc to both the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab nations such as Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Realistically such withdrawals cannot be immediate but Israel must have irrevocable plans under the supervision of the European Union to return the occupied territories within a reasonable timetable, irrespective of the party in power. Israel must return its capital to its 1948 status – in Tel Aviv. Returning its capital to Jerusalem with the encouragement of America is one of the reasons why peace will continue to elude the sub-continent. Jerusalem is of religious significance to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, so why should Israel change it to its capital simply because of its strong presence in the East? And yet America did not see this Israeli action as an impediment to peace and an act of aggression. Tel Aviv is an industrial center and still the largest and most populated city in Israel, which explained why Britain decided to choose it for the Israelis as their capital way back in 1948, among other things. For a brokered peace to last and ease tension in the entire sub-continent Israel must dismantle its entire nuclear arsenal, irrespective of the fact that it is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This should be supervised by an independent body under the auspices of the European Union. The International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, under the United Nations is only serving American purpose, therefore cannot be expected to carry out an effective and unbiased supervision. Israel should also dismantle the so-called “safe-barrier” it erected. Erecting this barrier in the name of preventing suicide attacks was inimical to peace, unrealistic, and above all makes life difficult for both the Palestinians and Israelis alike. The economies of the two nations very much need the productive work force of each other. The double standard of America is clearly visible if one recalls the amount of efforts and pressure it mounted on the then USSR to “tear down” the Berlin Wall. Soon after that it encouraged Israel to erect another Berlin Wall in the Middle-East. As an incentive a gradual dismantling can be arranged, still under the auspices of the European Union, leaving those high risk areas last, while the Hamas government is being monitored to maintain cease-fire on Israel. As it is said, it takes two to tango. The Palestinians must participate actively too in brokering peace in the region. Living under the illusion that the Israelis must leave the land does not do them any good. They should therefore come to terms with the existence of Israel as an independent sovereign state and cease fire by calling off all militant attacks against them. In the same vein, the Israelis must accept the fact that the creation of an independent sovereign state of Palestine is inevitable; in the end the two countries will have to establish diplomatic relations. Europe and America must treat the two independent states at par. It is also important that all the other Arab nations in the Middle East recognize the nation of Israel, even if they are free to decide whether to establish diplomatic relations with the Zionist state – the Arab League should give all the moral support to the Arab countries. Meanwhile, Europe and America should resume the foreign aid they give the Palestinian government in the interest of peace in the Middle East. Suspending such assistance on the excuse that Hamas is in power is undiplomatic, constitute a stumbling block to any chance to broker peace in the region, and will also continue to harden the Palestinian youths to challenge not only Israel but their leaders – the vicious circle will then continue.
|