President Bush’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories earlier this month, his first to the region in the seven years of his administration, brought with it little hope for any substantive resolution to one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. The president has an unenviable record of being slow in responding to numerous critical events during his presidency. but for once, incompetence cannot be blamed for the president’s failure in the Middle East. On the issue of peace in Palestine-Israel, the Bush administration has made a definitive choice to give low priority to resolving the ongoing conflict.
The president’s Jan. 9 visit was a distasteful demonstration of political theatre, utterly devoid of any substance. The same goes for the entire Annapolis Peace effort which began last November but has yet to move forward in resolving any of the core outstanding issues, making the prospects of a long and lasting peace agreement any time soon extremely remote. The unattainability of peace is reinforced by the political weakness of both Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, who are both hugely unpopular leaders at home and face domestic opposition to making any of the concessions that are necessary for peace.
The political climate in the region is not one conducive to a peaceful resolution, despite what the vast majority of the civilian population desires. Instead, cosmetic measures such as peace talks that never lead to any tenable solutions have become the instrument of choice for both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership to gain cheap political points at home and abroad. However, the prospects of peace are remote because the preconditions set up in these much-hailed talks sabotage any chance for real negotiations to take place.
Prime Minister Olmert’s success in getting President Bush to not push Israel into a peace agreement until after the Palestinian leadership clamps down on Palestinian terrorists is an automatic recipe for failure. This would essentially require President Abbas to take on and potentially demolish militant Hamas before any progress can be made on the issue of an independent Palestinian state. President Abbas is in no position to accomplish this precondition. This fact has been acknowledged by Olmert, who last November characterized his Palestinian counterpart as “a weak partner, who is not capable.”
Olmert and Bush know that this precondition cannot be met by Abbas, and yet they insist upon it because the status quo of continued low-level conflict is advantageous to Israel, America’s main ally in the region. This is because Israel’s leadership has accepted the emergence of Fortress Israel, whereby the Jewish state, with its vastly superior armed forces and its almost total control of movement in the region, can live in relative security without making any concessions to the Palestinians—such as refugees’ right to return to their occupied lands or the cessation of deadly raids into Palestinian territory—which would be necessary for real peace.
A perfect example of Israel’s choice of security over real peace is the current project of erecting the West Bank barrier, an eight-metre high, 700 km wall separating Israel from parts the territories. The wall has been highly effective in virtually eliminating the threat of suicide bombings, but it has done nothing to address the underlying reasons for conflict between the two groups.
Israel’s prospect of genuinely cordial relations with the Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are not terrorists but rather peaceful citizens, remains unlikely. Especially as long as the Palestinian people’s right to return, a right anchored in international law, goes unfulfilled. In so far that a physical barrier has achieved some level of success in smothering the ferocity of the Israeli-Palestinian violence we can perhaps be thankful that President Bush’s shenanigans didn’t make things any worse.
