There are growing fears that Kerry might be even more biased towards Israel than Bush, presenting the Arabs with the need to come up with a common strategy in the face of such a challenge, warns Mohamed Sid-Ahmed Traditionally, the Democratic Party stands to the left of the Republican Party. Moreover, Kerry's choice of a running mate, John Edwards, is said to belong to the left-wing faction of the Democratic Party. And yet there are signs that on the issue of the Middle East the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is even more to the right than the Republican incumbent George W Bush. Kerry won his party's nomination not because he is the best representative of the various trends within the party but because he stood a better chance of beating Bush at the polls than any of the other contenders. This criterion, established after long debates, meant that the party was willing to overlook its nominee's departure from the traditional party line as long as he could guarantee its return to power. Thus although Howard Dean is certainly more representative of the party than John Kerry, he did not win the nomination because his chances of beating Bush at the polls were considered less likely than Kerry's. Then there is the fact that the November elections will be the last time Bush runs for president and the first time for Kerry. This gives Bush greater room for manoeuvre, making it less necessary for him to court any specific political constituency, including the Jewish vote, and allowing him to concentrate more on issues of substance than on winning over support. In counterpart, Kerry would like to win over prominent Republican personalities with impeccable political credentials and a good knowledge of long-standing conflict situations, such as the Middle East, in order to widen the political clout of the new administration. James Baker, a Republican who served as secretary of state under Bush senior but was for some obscure reason, excluded from the junior Bush's team, has been mentioned in this connection. People like Baker, when coopted by a Democratic administration, will tend to strengthen the right within the new administration, rather than the left. In terms of legacy, Clinton personifies the failure of a "left-wing" attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Clinton approach to a resolution of the conflict has been adopted in the Yossi Beilin/Yasser Abed-Rabbo Geneva Accord. Although the accord will not necessarily lead to an overall settlement nor necessarily provide a way out of the present impasse, its value lies in the fact that it constitutes proof that a settlement bringing together representatives of the two sides is not unworkable. A team from one side can eventually find common ground with a team (or more than one team) from the other side. However, the prospects of a settlement are more remote than they have ever been, with the situation sharply polarised between two opposing trends: one which believes that a settlement is possible and another which believes that the two conflicting parties must be totally separated. Sharon is the leading exponent of the second line. As he sees it, building a physical barrier between the two sides is an ideal way out of the impasse. More generally, the Bush administration's approach to the problems of the Middle East has been consistently more to the right than was the case under Clinton. Kerry's keenness to regain the Jewish vote comes at a time the Arab world's ability to affect American policymaking is at an all-time low. It is now generally, if only tacitly, accepted by all the Arab parties that their ability to exert pressure on Washington is close to nil, and that the best they can do is to reward whoever does not oppose them and not to penalise those who do. Because of this strategy built on weakness there is nothing to prevent American policies from sliding over more closely towards the Israeli positions. It is also generally accepted by the Arab parties that the peace process has ground to a halt, that we have moved away from any genuine attempt to reach a settlement and that the so-called peace process has been reduced to a ritual reading of the roadmap. The most salient features of the situation today are Sharon's policy based on the total separation between Palestinians and Israelis and on his firm belief that there does not exist a Palestinian partner with whom negotiations can be conducted. It is a belief shared not only by Bush but also by Kerry, who has declared that he does not consider the Palestinian leader a valid interlocutor. Even Clinton, who focussed his attempts to achieve a historical breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis on Arafat, states in his autobiography, My Life, that Arafat cannot rise to the challenge of peace. The Arab side, with all its component elements, continues to believe that a peace process based on existing UN resolutions can still constitute a basis for negotiations, while the American side, with all its component elements, now believes that the peace process needs to unfold within a new and different framework. This new framework is what Israel is trying to establish as it builds its security fence. Between Bill Clinton's last attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Kerry's first attempt (that is, if he is elected president next November) a major event occurred, namely, 9/11, which introduced an altogether new factor into the political equation. Immediately after 9/11, Sharon asked Bush to consider Arafat the "Bin Laden of the Middle East" but Bush refused because he did not want to reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a confrontation with terrorism. Although various theories have since been put forward to explain why Bush was uncharacteristically loath to comply with Sharon's wishes in this instance, the probable reason is that the US president believed it was too dangerous to antagonise the entire Arab and Islamic worlds by identifying them with terrorism. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated, however, whatever qualms Bush may have had subsided, and Sharon's logic gradually came to prevail. The Israeli prime minister succeeded in convincing Bush to identify the Palestinian resistance movement with terrorism, and played no small part in persuading him that Iraq's alleged arsenal of WMD would be made accessible to international terrorism. Bush finally embraced Sharon's logic completely, and in order to restore the Jewish vote, Kerry found himself obliged to take things further than Bush. Kerry came up with the slogan "Israel's cause must be America's cause". In other words, the US should not act as an honest broker between Israel and other parties, but should work to ensure that all of Israel's requirements are met! Even Bush, who is regarded in the Arab world as the most blatantly pro-Israeli American president ever, stops short of voicing his bias quite so openly. Kerry's overt disdain for Arab sensibilities is a warning sign the Arab world cannot afford to ignore at a time its heartland is exposed not only to an explosive crisis situation in Palestine but also in Iraq. Although the two crises are quite distinct, the Bush administration approaches both from the perspective of its grand neo-imperial design for the region. Thus Iraq and Palestine are now lumped together in what it calls the Broader Middle East, a region that America deals with from its vantage point as the sole remaining superpower in the unipolar world order. The question is whether Kerry will be ready to pursue an imperial policy that responds to the aspirations of America's conservative forces at the risk of alienating the middle classes, widely represented in the US Democratic Party and now suffering from the hegemonic tendencies of America's new neo-conservatives. It is high time we Arabs come up with a unified position towards the forthcoming US presidential elections, by deciding first of all whether we would prefer to see Bush or Kerry in the White House. Our choice must be made on the basis of a thorough study conducted by the Arab League, which would then invite all the Arab states to determine their position in the light of its findings. Will the Arab parties opt for Bush in the hope that during his second term he will distance himself, to one extent or another, from the powerful Jewish lobby and become more concerned with achieving a spectacular political success for the history books, say a breakthrough in the Arab- Israeli conflict? Is this possible in the present climate of anti-Americanism that has reached a peak throughout the Arab-Islamic world in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal? Or will the Arabs place their bets on Kerry, even though he has yet to disclose his plans for the Middle East? Is he likely to distance himself from his predecessor by adopting a strategy towards Iraq centred on giving the UN, not the US, the leading role in that country and towards Palestine by working to make the creation of a Palestinian state a reality? Does Kerry, who now enjoys a six- point lead over Bush, realise that the future belongs to a multipolar world order? More important, do the Arab governments realise that they will not reap the fruits of such a future unless they play a role in shaping it? What is certain is that if they continue their present state of confusion and disarray they must abandon any hope of affecting, let alone determining, the course of events in their own region of the world.
