Not since the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks during former US president Bill Clinton’s last days in the White House has the Middle East seen such a frenetic pace of peace diplomacy as it is seeing today. A ceasefire has been brokered between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel and Syria have started peace negotiations, and Israel has offered Lebanon a chance to resolve the issues that block a bilateral settlement. Less dramatic perhaps, yet persistent nonetheless, are the peace talks between Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.
So is the Middle East at the gates of a lasting, comprehensive peace? Not quite.
Aside from the Annapolis talks, which seem to be going nowhere because of the parties’ irreconcilable differences over the core issues, all the other peace efforts are more tactical than strategic. In none of them do the conditions yet exist for an immediate leap from war to peace, nor do the parties themselves expect that to happen.
It would require bold statesmanship to turn the ceasefire with Hamas into a prelude to political talks. Indeed, both Israel and the US are adamant about excluding Hamas from the Annapolis process unless and until it recognizes Israel’s right to exist, while Hamas will not abandon its identity as a resistance movement merely to join negotiations that seem unlikely to satisfy the Palestinian people’s minimal requirements.
For Israel, the ceasefire with Hamas reflects its reluctance to become mired in another asymmetric war like the one it fought in Lebanon two summers ago, this time in the alleys of Gaza’s refugee camps. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, an especially unpopular figure whose days leading the government are probably numbered, lacks the legitimacy to throw the country into another bloody war, which given conditions in Gaza would be both costly and inconclusive. Israel’s leaders believe that the day of reckoning with Hamas will come only when the conditions for a major military showdown are riper.
The Syrian track — requiring Israel’s withdrawal from the strategically vital Golan Heights and the evacuation of tens of thousand of settlers — is hampered not only by the Israeli leadership’s legitimacy deficit, but also by US opposition to the talks. For the Syrians, the major objective in concluding peace with Israel is rapprochement with the US, but they will balk at the US’ demand that they stop flirting with terrorism as a precondition for talks. In fact, it is doubtful that they will ever agree to this.
As Buthaina Shaaban, a Syrian minister, put it, “To demand that Syria forsake Hamas and Hezbollah is like demanding that the United States forsake Israel.”
The US has been absent from Middle East peacemaking for too long. Indeed, for the first time in the history of its special relationship with Israel, the US is not speaking to Israel’s enemies, be they Syria, Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah. As a result, Israel, embattled and facing a gathering storm of regional threats, had to find its own way to talk, without the diplomatic assistance of its big brother.
The demarche with Lebanon, to which US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice devoted most of her recent surprise visit to Beirut, has much to do with the US’ desperate attempt to revive its role as the main regional peace broker. After all, it was tiny Qatar that brokered Lebanon’s domestic settlement, Egypt that mediated the Gaza ceasefire and Turkey that is facilitating the Israeli-Syrian talks. Shifts in policy towards Syria from Israel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy were powerful messages to the US that it should not miss the Lebanese train as well.
But the US’ dwindling leverage cannot match the influence of the region’s “axis of evil.” Lebanon is too vulnerable to pressure from Syria and Iran, neither of which wants to see their local clients relieve the Israelis of the burden of a “Lebanese front” before their own grievances are addressed. Nor is Hezbollah keen to see the end of Israel’s occupation of the Sheba Farms on the Lebanon border undermine its claim to the formidable independent military force that it has built with Iranian and Syrian help.
Tactical moves, however, can always develop into strategic shifts. The Gaza ceasefire should be allowed to facilitate reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, which would make the Annapolis process more legitimate and inclusive. It was none other than the Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Salah al-Bardawil, who defined the ceasefire as “a historic opportunity for all the sides involved to live in peace, and to build a future for the next generations.”
Nor are the other peace tracks — Lebanon, Syria and maybe also Iran — doomed to permanent failure. But their success, so urgently needed to save the region from the politics of Doomsday, will have to wait for a new US administration to inject into them the necessary balance of realism and idealism, military power tempered by a genuine commitment to diplomacy.
Shlomo Ben-Ami is a former Israeli foreign minister who now serves as the vice-president of the Toledo International Centre for Peace in Spain.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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