Isrel, February 08: With Obama on the defensive, and Israel apparently bent on further expansion, peace in the Middle East seems further away than ever, says Patrick Seale.
Indeed, this past week brought a hint of a renewed American peace effort. Robert Ford — a veteran State Department Arabist who has served in half a dozen Arab countries — has been appointed U.S. ambassador to Damascus. The suggestion is that his mission is to revive the Syrian track of the peace process. He will be the first U.S. ambassador in the Syrian capital for five years, no doubt a belated recognition by Washington of Syria’s renewed importance as a regional player.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hard line prime minister, has no liking for Obama’s peace-making and has done his best to subvert it. He managed to halt progress on the Palestinian track this past year by rejecting the total settlement freeze Obama demanded and by pressing ahead with the Judaization of Arab East Jerusalem. He now looks set to pre-empt Obama’s efforts on the Syrian track as well.
This may explain Israel’s sabre-rattling in recent weeks, together with its hints of a new assault against Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, the two defiant resistance movements, backed by Syria and Iran, which have survived Israel’s attempts to destroy them and which, to Israel’s intense frustration, have even managed to achieve a certain deterrent capability.
On 3 February, Syria’s President Bashar al-Asad responded to the worsening regional climate by telling Spain’s Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos that Israel was “pushing the region towards war.” Later the same day, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallim called on Israel “to stop making threats against Gaza, southern Lebanon, Iran and now Syria.” Israel, he warned, “should not test Syria’s determination, for it should know that a war will move to Israeli cities.”
This was a direct challenge to Israel’s security doctrine which lays down that Israel’s wars with its neighbours must always be fought on Arab soil, never on its home territory.
The Syrian leader’s remarks triggered an immediate and furious outburst from Israel’s extremist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. “Asad should know,” he said, “that if he attacks he will not only lose the war, but neither he nor his family will remain in power.”
“Syria must be made to understand,” he added, “that it has to relinquish its demand for the Golan Heights.”
These statements illustrate what Netanyahu has in mind when he calls for negotiations with the Palestinians and with Syria “without preconditions.” He means that they must give up their territorial demands. The Palestinians must accept defeat and the loss of much of the West Bank, as well as of East Jerusalem as their capital, while Syria must accept the loss of the Golan. This is indeed a recipe for war rather than for peace.
It is also a sharp — even an impudent — message to Obama that Israel will accept none of his peace-making.
No doubt Israel’s right-wingers, and their fanatical constituency among land-grabbing settlers and the ever-more powerful ultra-Orthodox, think that they can get away with their arrogant and expansionist behavior, for it seems that there is no one to stop them.
The Arab states are in no position to challenge Israel’s military might. The Europeans are divided. The Russians have more urgent priorities in the Ukraine and Central Asia. As for the United States, it declares it wants a Middle East settlement but it continues to give Israel the means — the political, financial and military backing — to prevent it from happening.
Obama has, in fact, virtually conceded defeat. His special envoy, George Mitchell, has nothing to show for his repeated visits to the region. In any event, AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States, is said to control at least thirty per cent of the U.S. Congress, thereby ruling out the possibility of any serious pressure on Israel.
Meanwhile, America’s pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, undaunted by the catastrophic Iraq war which they did much to engineer, are once again raising their heads. Elliot Abrams, a notorious hawk in former President George W. Bush’s National Security Council, has called for tough measures against Syria — even military action. “Why can’t we use pressure on them as well as engage them diplomatically?” he asked in a recent exchange of views at the Hudson Institute with Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
Another shrill pro-Israeli advocate is Daniel Pipes, a Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. In an article in the Jerusalem Post on 2 February, he urged Obama “to order the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity.” Such a “dramatic gesture,” he argued, would “change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue.”
With Obama on the defensive, and Israel apparently bent on further expansion, peace in the Middle East seems further away than ever.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
—Agencies