Peace in no time

by John Thompson

06/16/03

Once again, another peace plan in the Middle East has been proposed, agreed upon, and gone down the sewer in a matter of weeks. Once again, another vision of what could be has splattered against a hard cruel reality.

The reality of peace in the Middle East is simple: The Palestinian Arabs simply cannot get their act together, and the Israelis simply cannot trust them until they do.

The Palestinian Arabs are an unfortunate people. They are victims of the Israelis, but it is much more true that they have been the victims of the rest of the Arab world and of their own leadership. In 1948, when Israel hurled back the Arab armies that were thrown at it in the instant of its birth, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled their homes — out of fear of what the Israelis might do, but also with the encouragement of the Arab leaders who cynically hoped that a mass of refugees could be used as a symbol and a weapon against the victors.

Huddled in the refugee camps — still referred to as "camps" despite becoming towns in their own right decades ago — Egypt, Iraq and Syria refused to resettle them inside their own countries, preferring to use them to destabilize the weaker states of Jordan and Lebanon. In the 1950s, most of the major Arab states created or backed their own Palestinian groups, encouraging them to militancy and violence while purging their ranks of potentially moderate leaders. The result was a highly factionalized community where influence and money from Arab Government sponsors depended upon the expression of hatred and militancy.

Fifty years later, we can still see the results. The Palestinian Authority established under Yasser Arafat’s initial leadership has never been able to control its own people, nor could Arafat do so when the PLO was first formed in 1969 — after the Israelis overran the West Bank and thrashed the Arab armies poised on its borders in the Six Day War. The new Palestinian umbrella group saw faction after faction (like Black September and the Abu Nidal Organization) created outside of their aegis, and had to compete with them by being more aggressive to Israel than they were.

With the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, the old quasi Leftist rival Palestinian organizations were supplanted by new groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — groups that were already present inside the West Bank and Gaza when the Palestinian Authority was created after the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993. Over the last ten years, the following cycle has repeated itself as the Palestinian tragedy plays out:

1. The alternative Palestinian groups like Hamas demonstrate greater zeal than the ‘mainstream’ Palestinian groups by committing terrorism against Israel, provoking an Israeli response.
2. Because the response irritates the Palestinians, and to avoid losing prestige among them, the Palestinian Authority sends out its own groups (like the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or Tanzim Militia) to stage more attacks.
3. The Israelis clamp down hard, and hammer the Palestinian infrastructure.
4. The outside world steps in, with a new attempt to restart the Peace Process (usually with a new wrinkle of some sort).
5. An accord is reached.
6. The rival Palestinian groups rush out to undercut the accord by returning to Step 1 as quickly as possible … and so it goes.