Boston is the capital of the world’s largest and most distinguished academic complex spread across several highly reputed universities, most containing Middle East studies departments. Naturally, the very existence of such a complex gives rise to numerous scholastic seminars, workshops and conferences, in which the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict, as the perpetual topic of the moment, have a constant place. This was the subject of a seminar that drew me along with clusters of scholars and intellects of different nationalities and diverse disciplines to that academic capital. Like other historical conflicts, the Middle East conflict, or the Palestinian cause, if you wish, has become fodder for scientific study and analysis around which converges an entire multi-disciplined academic substratum consisting of historians, political scientists, sociologists and no small number of psychologists.
There was an air reminiscent of the post-game play- by-play analyses shot live in television studios following each of the World Cup’s matches. Certainly some participants were still affected by the attack on the Freedom Flotilla and its political and diplomatic repercussions. The analyses of this drama were intense and exciting, as were the speculations surrounding the fate of other ships that were readying themselves to break the blockade on Gaza and that were the subject of periodic updates from television stations in Tehran and Tripoli. However, this was something of a sideshow compared to the central discussion on a solution to a conflict that has lasted more than a century. As up-to-the-moment news was coming in from Cairo on the visits of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and US Envoy George Mitchell, participants leaped upon the opportunity to evaluate and comment. The optimists hailed the albeit late beginning of a peace process and direct negotiations, while pessimists took the selfsame occasion as proof of another utter failure. The roadmap that Netanyahu put to President Hosni Mubarak was instantly rejected (or so it was reported) with the result that direct negotiations were forestalled by the collapse of indirect negotiations.
Academicians love to get down to the bottom of things. So when participants were asked why the Arab-Israeli conflict has lasted for so long -- as though it were some fate to which the Middle East and the world were eternally doomed -- it was as though they had been given a bone to gnaw at. To sum up the give-and-take, Arab-Israeli antagonism has fed on latent energies that have kept it burning from the late 19th century until the present. It raged though the colonial era and after the waning of that age it acclimatised to the Cold War period and then to the post-Cold War era. It continuously demonstrated this amazing capacity to remould itself to suit the prevailing world order, whether that order was aggressively competitive or cooperative or a blend of both. It exhibited this chameleon trait superbly in the wake of 11 September 2001, in the form of three successive wars: the second Intifada, the war in Lebanon and the war in Gaza. Against the backdrop of the global clash of civilisations, the conflict thus unfolded in a way that eagerly embraced the new ferocities in international relations. If religion was a prime facet of the conflict from the outset, now was the time to stir the ogre of religious strife, an ogre that had been constantly lurking and waiting only for the moment that would give it the greatest force and momentum when it pounced.
Of course, international powers have had a constant hand in stoking the flames of this conflict. At one point, it was Britain and France that fed it. At a subsequent phase the US and USSR took over and nourished the combatants with arms, economic aid and various forms of political and diplomatic backing. Although the US eventually gained the upper hand over the Soviet Union and, hence, in the business of meddling in the Middle East, Russia has not vanished from the scene entirely. Meanwhile, China and India have always sought to put in their oars and, more recently, Iran and Turkey have been scrambling for a louder say. Furthermore, the Arab-Israel conflict must be the only conflict in history that has officially brought together its present and former meddlers to solve it. This development took the form of the Quartet, consisting of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN. Speaking of the UN, the conflict has also occasioned more international resolutions than any other crisis in modern history. Moreover, the international organisation proved ready and willing to create new international bodies just to handle this intractable conflict and its consequences, such as UNRWA, UNEF and assorted peacekeeping forces, together with the teams of observers and monitors who speed to the region with every flare up.
This long-lasting multi-tiered conflict, with its overlapping and interlacing local, regional and international dimensions, has constantly defied historians and political scientists. Not only are they baffled by its sheer complexity, they are astounded by the extent of its material and moral costs and are especially mystified by the fact that regardless of how immense the attrition, it never seems to be heavy enough to weary the combatants and drive them to a settlement. The conflict has ultimately become akin to a Greek tragedy, one through which threads the ominous theme of an arms race over both conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. A parallel theme is that whereas for most Third World countries their mission after winning their independence was to develop and catch up with the industrialised world, for the Arab world development took a back seat to urgent security priorities. However, after a while the picture grew so confused that it was no longer possible to tell whether the failure of development was the consequence of the ongoing conflict or whether the reverse was the case.
Such a bleak historical outlook would almost certainly sneer at predictions of a renewed beginning of the peace process as idle fancy and it would scoff at forecasts of a reinvigorated peace drive on the part of Obama following midterm congressional elections as mere wishful thinking. Still, bitter pessimism did not entirely pervade the Boston discussions. Some of the participants managed to inject a positive note or two on a conflict in which there has always been a current that strove towards peace. That current may have slowed and dwindled at times, but it was always present and there were even moments when it seemed poised to thrust forward and prevail. So, ultimately the conflict lends itself to more than one approach and it would be prudent to determine which would be the best to promote.
The first is the “What’s the point?” approach. It holds that all the international and regional energies being poured into kick-starting negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis will yield nothing positive. After all, the proponents of this view hold, the Netanyahu government finds the current rift between the Fatah government in the West Bank and the Hamas government in Gaza ideal for its own purposes. Accordingly it has chosen to move in two tangential directions. It has refused to offer any major concessions to the Palestinians, either because it feels there is no need or because it fears that this would lead to the collapse of its coalition that is held up by hardliners and ultraconservatives. At the same time, that government has sought to buy time in its dealings with Washington. For the moment, at least, it appears to have won this battle, as the Obama administration has turned its attention to other priorities in view of upcoming midterm congressional elections in November and pressures on the part of fellow Democrats to alleviate tensions with Israel. Another major reason why negotiations will prove futile, according to this point of view, is that reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah still appears out of reach. Not only do these factions seem unswervingly set on their own separate agendas, various regional powers are set upon standing between the two sides and manipulating them towards their own separate and divergent regional aims and objectives.
There are other impediments to a solution to the Palestinian cause based on negotiations conducted with the framework of the two-state solution. Israel does not want to see the emergence of a fully sovereign Palestinian state, complete with powers to defend its own national security and apply the rule of its own law on its own people. It claims that such a state would pose a threat to Israeli security and insists that if a Palestinian state is to be created it cannot be fully sovereign. For one, this scenario could play into the hands of trends in Israel that advocate an ethnically pure Jewish state and that would use a newly created Palestinian state as a pretext to justify the forced transfer of Palestinians in Israel out. It could simultaneously pave the way for a state that is not territorially contiguous and that, instead, consists of a patchwork of isolated cantons interspersed by Israeli settlement compounds and cut off from one another by a network of ring roads, military barriers and the Separation Wall.
Spectres of this sort have given rise to the term “the Bantustan solution” and have inspired Israeli and Arab visions that reject the two-state solution. On the Israeli side, some have begun to argue that the concept of a Palestinian state lacks any demographic or geographic logic and that Israel was too hasty in adopting it and should have first paid closer attention to its feasibility, ramifications and repercussions. They further hold that the two-state solution would give Hamas control over the West Bank as well as Gaza, and that Hamas’s increased strength as a consequence would not be in Tel Aviv’s favour. The Palestinian/Arab side holds that the two-state solution, in its current form, constitutes an attempt to circumvent the principles of international law and threatens further attrition on Palestinian rights. These opponents to the two-state solution therefore urge the continued advocacy of the core principles of the Palestinian cause, which they say has come no closer to a just solution within the framework of the Oslo Accords and the roadmap.
But if there is no hope for a two-state solution, what are the alternatives? A second approach sees hope in a “three-state” solution. This summons two possible triangles, the first consisting of Israel, a state in the West Bank controlled by Fatah and a state in Gaza controlled by Hamas. The second has been dubbed the Benelux scenario. Taking its name from the economic union created between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1958, the participants in this scenario would consist of Israel, Palestine and a Palestinian- Jordanian confederation. Certain quarters have already suggested procedural measures to bring such a confederation into being, such as creating a federal army, possibly backed by international forces, to protect its joint borders, the complete opening of borders between them, and provisions to guarantee that each side can keep its own form of government and its own laws. Not surprisingly, Jordan has roundly objected to this scenario. In his address on the occasion of Army Day, Coronation Day, and the anniversary of the Great Arab Uprising, on 8 June 2010, King Abdullah II declared that his country rejects any solution to the Palestinian cause that would come it Jordan’s expense. He added that Jordan would not play a role in the West Bank but that it would continue to perform its duty to support the Palestinians until they established their independent state.
This leaves the third approach: the creation of a single, secular and democratic state for both Palestinians and present-day Israelis. Advocates of the “one-state solution” maintain that not only does it offer the most moral solution to the age-old Arab-Israeli conflict, but it also might prove inevitable. They argue that there are no signs of a resolution to the current impasse between Israel and the Palestinians and that the existence of vast Jewish settlement complexes on the West Bank effectively undermines the logic of a separate Palestinian state. Of course, the one-state solution would also face immense obstacles, most notably from within Israel and especially from that camp that is pressing for an ethnically pure Jewish state. But the idea would encounter stiff resistance in less extreme quarters in Israel who would fear that a secular democracy would, for demographic reasons, yield an Arab majority and, hence, Arab control over the state’s powers and resources. Such concerns gave rise to an alternative suggestion, which is to create a confessional democracy. But, some counter, this alternative would court systematised discrimination and Israel would, therefore, reject it on the grounds that it would open it to the charge of apartheid, propelling it towards a new phase of heightened tensions with the international community. A new state emerging from the one-state solution would encounter another potentially serious problem. It would suddenly have to cope with hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking to return to their homes.
The three approaches outlined above are not entirely new. However, in the climate of cool academic thought they may offer fresh alternatives to a situation that, while it has not yet reached a dead end, shows no signs of relief either. On the other hand, perhaps the problem is that the people who are searching for a solution ignore the reality that a solution of sorts is already in effect. This “solution” is to live with the ongoing conflict in one way or another, as the world has been doing for more than a century, only stirring into action when a blaze erupts and then, after dousing it, returning to the contentment of its normal life.