THIS week’s leaks to The Guardian and Al-Jazeera show more clearly than ever the fundamentalist religious triangle which prevents peace in the Middle East.
The leaks reveal a Palestinian side willing to make major concessions for peace and an Israeli side rejecting them. Some of those concessions included giving away significant parts of East Jerusalem.
The Middle East conflict should not be seen purely as a two-sided political-land conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and their supporters in the Arab world, but as a three-sided religious conflict – with the US as the other side.
The leaks also reveal the importance of the urge to stay in power, which seems to have motivated leaders at key times. Peace has been closer when that urge has been lower.
Hitherto, it has been a popular belief that the Palestinian side has been the recalcitrant one. The belief is easy to understand. The bulk of the major acts of indiscriminate violence causing death and destruction of civilians has come from the Palestinian side, even if the more insidious pressure by the Israelis on water, health services and living and working conditions of Palestinians has probably caused more death, illness and injury.
Also, it is fair to conclude that when Yasser Arafat led the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Palestinian negotiators, led by him, were almost invariably the ones to put up stumbling blocks. Arafat was more interested in being feted as a leader of a “liberation” movement than peace – more interested in rockets than garbage collection or health and education.
If Arafat had honoured the Oslo Agreement, particularly by accepting and implementing the 2000 offer by Israeli Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak, there could well have been a Palestinian state by now. But after Bill Clinton was replaced by George W. Bush and Barak was replaced by Arial Sharon at the beginning of 2001, Israel would never offer so much again.
The reason is straightforward: the intertwining of politics and religion. Peace was closest at hand when the political position of two of the three leaders was not threatened. Clinton’s term was almost up and Barak thought he could ignore the religious right believing (as it turned out wrongly) that a peace agreement would work and help his electoral fortune.
Since then, every Israeli Government has been beholden to the religious far right. The Israeli proportional representation system invariably gives them a few seats in the often-finely-balanced Parliament – enough to topple any government which dares to hand back to the Palestinians any of the land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank that they assert is Jewish by Old Testament right.
With George W Bush in office all US pressure for Israel to make concessions was removed. The fundamentalist Christian voters who supported Bush also supported and continue to support Israel and the Jewish religious right’s claim to lands in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
So, successive Israeli leaders have been able to play hardball, and have had to play hardball for their political survival. And the leaks show they have in fact been playing that hardball.
In the meantime, since Arafat’s death in 2004, the mainstream Palestinian Fatah Party has been desperate to get a peace agreement of some sort — again, as this week’s leaks reveal.
And again, staying in power has been critical to that approach. Fatah leader and President of the Palestinian National Authority Mahmoud Abbas needs an agreement to stay in power. Without it, the Gaza-based Hamas will erode his authority, weak as it is after his official term has run out and no timetable for a new election or prospect of him winning it.
Even with the election of Barack Obama in the US, the religious right and Jewish lobby still hold enough sway to prevent any US withdrawal of support for Israel. But that is precisely what is needed for peace in the Middle East.
While US support continues, there is no need for Israel to make any concessions, so there can be no two-state solution. Israel can rebuff the Palestinians and still survive as an enclave in a hostile Arab world, as long as it has US support of several billion dollars a year and total US diplomatic backing.
Without it, though, any Israeli Prime Minister would see that agreement with the Palestinians would be more important for survival than pandering to the religious right.
Worse, US support for Israel also underpins continued Islamic terror campaigns beyond those instigated by Palestinians.
Here al-Qaeda is critical. Before the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, the Bush Administration, and to a lesser extent the Clinton Administration before it, under-estimated or did not even acknowledge its threat. Neither Bush nor his security advisor Condelessa Rice even mentioned al-Qaeda publicly before the attacks. Missile defence (not very useful in fighting terrorists) and oil-rich and mass-destructive-weapons-free Iraq were the main game.
But even after September 2001, Bush still got it wrong. He asserted that al-Qaeda’s aim was to destroy the freedoms the US rightly holds so dear – freedom of speech, assembly and religion and free elections. Not so. Al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden was and is a religious fanatic – fanatical enough to use violence to further his religion’s aims. He does not care what happens inside the US; he is concerned only with US foreign policy outside the US.
In al-Qaeda’s early days it concentrated on attacks against autocratic Arab regimes, particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which were often US-backed. Islamic fundamentalists still attack those regimes (most successfully recently in Tunisia), but Osama turned al-Qaeda’s attention to what he said was the main enemy – the US itself.
And he did so almost purely on religious grounds – three in particular:
One, the presence of US troops, in the lead up to and aftermath of the First Gulf War, in Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s two holiest places, Mecca and Medina.
Two, the US backing of Israeli tenure (since 1967) of Islam’s third most holy place the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem which happens to be on the Temple Mount, the Jewish most holy place.
And three, what al-Qaeda sees as the humiliation of Islam in Iraq and Afgahnistan.
The terrorism is inexcusable, but to defeat it requires us to understand its source and do something about that. Otherwise there will be no Middle East peace or an end to terror.
The leaks this week, and a clearer understanding of al-Qaeda, show why the US should change its policy. If it removed its support for Israel, Israel would not cease to exist, but it would have to negotiate more seriously than these leaks suggest it has been doing so far. And it would be negotiating with what has been revealed as a fairly willing Palestinian side. In this environment, a two-state solution with shared administration of religious sites should be possible.
That, coupled with a withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan would see al-Qaeda’s reason for existence disappear. There would be nothing to be a martyr for.
This would be a far more successful way to wage the “war on terror” than the present method which seems destined to result only in endless bloodshed.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 29 January 2011.