Israeli jockeying around the Mecca Accord proves that it is not interested in a just peace, only pacification and the continuance of its colonial plans, writes Hassan Nafaa* The fanfare surrounding Condoleezza Rice's visit to the region, in which she has made herself a frequent guest these days, does little to convince any that a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is just around the corner. What we have is yet another episode in that everlasting American serial called managing the Arab-Israeli conflict the Israeli way. To me, more than 30 years into the so-called peace process, it is clearer than ever that the Arab governments that signed "peace" treaties and entered into official relations with Israel made a fatal strategic error. They had based their negotiating positions on the assumption that Israel was ready to conclude a final settlement that would be acceptable to all concerned parties. So as not to lay myself open to misinterpretation, I had better say that I do not believe there is such a thing as an irresolvable conflict. Any conflict can be solved if two conditions are met: that both sides are sincere in their desire to reach a peaceful settlement and negotiate with good intent, and that there exists an even balance of forces prepared to aid the search for a compromise solution and to ensure the ongoing implementation and commitment to agreements even after the governments that signed them are no longer in power. In the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, these two fundamental ingredients have been sorely lacking and are doubtful to be supplied within the foreseeable future. The confidence gap is still too great, even among those parties that have signed accords with Israel, and the balance of powers on the ground is still too skewed to ensure ongoing commitment to any agreements that have been signed or may be signed in the future. Close inspection of the more than 30-year old peace process reveals an underlying conflict between the negotiating strategies of each side. Whereas the Arabs, from the outset, have taken a "conflict resolution" approach, the Israelis have been set on "conflict management". The former approach presumes the possibility of reaching a settlement satisfactory to both sides; the latter aims to utilise all possible means to debilitate the adversary until finally he has to cave in to the conditions dictated to him. Like two parallel lines stretching to infinity, the two strategies are destined never to meet. Certainly, this helps explain why the settlement process has dragged on for so long, in the stumbling way it has, and why it will probably continue to do so unless one of the sides radically alters its negotiating strategy, with either the Israelis resigning themselves to "conflict resolution" or the Arabs switching over to "conflict management". Israel has always had at least one significant advantage in this regard. As the only player on its side of its court, it could formulate a cohesive and consistent conflict management strategy and bounce this off variably against the many players on the other side of the net, each of who has their own conflict resolution strategy while lacking the independent means to make it work. Israel, in full keeping with the conflict management approach, has consistently rejected the notion of a comprehensive settlement brought about by means of an international peace conference in which all concerned parties would participate. Instead, it opted for Kissinger's "step-by-step" approach in order to undermine the Arabs' achievements from the October 1973 war. Once it had succeeded in levelling the ground to its liking, it subdivided the settlement process into separate "tracks" and then, within these tracks, it sorted its adversaries into those it could deal with and those it would refuse to deal with. Israel anticipated, and proved correct in its anticipation, that with every new negotiation or every new agreement on one of those separate tracks it would throw its adversaries into deeper havoc. President Sadat had gone voluntarily to Jerusalem in search of a comprehensive once-and-for-all settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict only to find himself in the end forced to sign a separate peace. He paid for this with its life, and Egypt paid dearly, and continues to pay, in the form of damage to its regional status and prestige as the result of the more than decade-long Arab boycott and international isolation in response to its breaking of ranks. When Arafat agreed to enter into secret negotiations with Israel, he must have hoped that he had found the road to a final settlement that would culminate with the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, even if defined by pre- June 1967 borders. Instead, the road led him to an interim agreement that deferred negotiations over final status issues and that Israel refused to abide by anyway, even concerning its obligation to halt settlement construction. As a result, the "peace process" on this track degenerated into that labyrinthine darkness for which Arafat, too, paid with his life and for which the Palestinians are suffering the ever-mounting toll of murder and destruction, economic siege and starvation tactics, along with internal strife spiralling towards civil war. Because Israel's conflict management strategy forbids any of the Arab parties from coordinating with one another, Israel worked assiduously to separate the Lebanese and Syrian tracks and to undermine every Syrian attempt to link them. Towards this end, it shrank from nothing: it invaded southern Lebanon several times, it lay siege to Beirut, it installed Bashir Al-Gemayel as president of Lebanon by force of arms and tried to force a separate peace agreement upon him. Most recently, it unleashed a savage war of destruction against the whole of Lebanon with the purpose not only of uprooting Syrian influence in Lebanon but also of dividing the Lebanese people against themselves and setting off another civil war. It almost succeeded. Israel could have spared the region all that bloodshed and destruction if only it had responded from the outset to the idea of an international conference aimed at producing a comprehensive settlement. The 1991 Madrid conference almost presented such an opportunity. In fact, I would not be going too far to suggest that Israel could have contributed to altering the regional map for the better much earlier on. If, in 1977, it had responded differently to President Sadat's initiative and accepted the principles for a solution that Sadat outlined to the Knesset and that are essentially the same as those contained in the Arab peace initiative adopted in Beirut in 2000, the Middle East would have been an entirely different place than it is today. But Israel, then as now, rejected any settlement on the basis of a return to pre-1967 borders and the implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 concerning Palestinian refugees. Fortunately, not everything has gone as Israel wished for or planned. The crisis is far from over, but Saudi Arabia's success in midwifing the Mecca Accord may form that crucial turning point. Perhaps with this agreement it will now be possible to reverse the general deterioration in the Arab position through the formulation of an Arab strategy for conflict management that will ultimately compel Israel to abandon its strategy and turn to "conflict resolution". However, to achieve this, the Arabs must awake from their slumber and resolve to coordinate their efforts on three fronts. On the Palestinian front, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria must work together to support the implementation of the Mecca Accord. Specifically, they must help the Palestinians overcome all obstacles to the formation of a national unity government, as called for in the agreement, and to the broadest possible levels of participation in that government, bringing on board the Palestinian Islamic Jihad if possible. The successful creation of such a national unity government should not be perceived as an end in and of itself but rather as a major step towards a Palestinian consensus over a strategy for managing the conflict with Israel and, simultaneously, towards generating the conditions conducive to the development of Palestinian institutions capable of building a modern state, a process that should begin with the restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. If the Arab countries, mentioned above, are earnest in their intent to help the Palestinians work in this direction, they should take the soonest possible opportunity to call for an end to the blockade against the Palestinian people as soon as a national unity government is formed. Perhaps a new Arab League Council resolution to this effect, issued at the prime ministerial level, would best suit the purpose. At the same time, the Arabs must remain on guard to all the machinations Israel will probably resort to in order to forestall the creation of a Palestinian unity government, or to bring about its downfall once it is formed. It may resort to the US and it may also try to enlist the services of some Arab parties, but what is certain since the Mecca conference first convened is that Israel does not want a Palestinian unity government to see the light of day. Even while President Abbas was still in Mecca, Olmert warned him that Israel would not deal with any Palestinian government that includes Hamas. Then, hardly had Hamas and Fatah reached an agreement in Mecca than Olmert called up Bush to coordinate with him over ways to prevent the formation of a unity government or to hamper its manoeuvrability should it be formed. In this regard, I can see no possible advantage that would accrue to the Arabs by trying to persuade the new Palestinian government to commit itself to the conditions of the Quartet. Moreover, acceding to such conditions will not facilitate the negotiating process and will probably only complicate it further. The Lebanese front requires coordination between the same governments mentioned above and, if necessary, between them and Iran, in order to help all major Lebanese political forces reach an agreement on the basis of the "no winners-no losers" principle. All parties must also agree upon the linkage between the Syrian and Lebanese tracks in the negotiating process, which is essential to preserve the security and welfare of both the Lebanese and Syrian peoples, and upon the need to identify those responsible for the assassination of Rafik Al-Hariri, but without violating the sovereign rights of each country and without jeopardising their stability. On the Iraqi front, all Iraq's neighbours and Egypt must work together to come up with a formula for helping the Iraqis usher in a true and comprehensive national reconciliation. Among the most important considerations this endeavour must take into account is the need for a specific timeframe for the phased withdrawal of the forces of the US and its allies from Iraq and for the gradual handover of the Iraqi file to the United Nations as the agency that would oversee the implementation of the agreement reached by the national reconciliation conference. It would also be understood that the major purpose of that conference is to draw up a new national constitution establishing the foundations of a fully democratic government based on the principle of citizenship as opposed to denominational quotas. If Arab countries fail to coordinate harmoniously along these three fronts, especially the Palestinian one in order to build on the Mecca Accord, international and regional forces that base their calculations on divide-and-conquer tactics will succeed in obstructing the impetus the Arabs acquired in Mecca and, ultimately, in reversing its positive results. In such an event, the Arabs will have returned again to square one, leaving the sole prospect of civil war in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. I suspect that those forces, which harbour no good will towards the Arab and Islamic peoples, are already trying to drive a wedge between Syria and Egypt, on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia on the other. This attempt has taken the form of portraying the Mecca Accord as a sign of Saudi Arabia's rising regional status, to the detriment of that of Egypt and of Syria, because Saudi Arabia ostensibly succeeded where the two latter governments failed. Of course neither Egypt nor Syria should fall for such nonsense, which, due to the personality-based nature of Arab regimes, has been so regretfully effective in sullying the relations between Arab leaders. It remains to be said that the Mecca Accord, if capitalised upon properly, offers the Arabs a unique opportunity to rectify the many mistakes they made in the course of their management of the conflict with Israel. The Arabs should therefore bear in mind that the Bush administration seeks no more than to pacify the Palestinian front for the sole purpose of generating a more suitable climate for military action against Iran. One wonders, will the Arabs succeed in stopping a scheme that will only bring them fresh disasters? * The writer is professor of political science at Cairo University.
