By Gamil Mattar * The Middle East is a seething cauldron of conflict: this cliché has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At no point in recent history have the people of this region, young or old, had the luxury of a life free of tension, conflict and, frequently, war. Recently, political decision-making centres in many Arab countries have received a new shot of anxiety, precipitated by reports of arrangements for political and military coordination between Israel and Turkey. Influential powers in the region quickly moved to contain anxieties by defending Turkish policy on the grounds of Turkey's sovereign right to pursue the policies it deems beneficial to its national interests. These attempts, however, have been undermined by each successive joint Turkish-Israeli military manoeuvre and provocative official statement. Still, several Arab states have attempted to intercede directly or indirectly, encouraging Turkey to avoid upgrading its relations with Israel to a point that will embarrass most Arab governments, raise tension in the region, and further damage the peace process. Interestingly, Israel has seemed especially keen to disclose the most important and threatening aspects of its agreements with Turkey. While at first Turkey refrained from comment or belittled the significance of these disclosures, it too soon began to leak information intended to give the impression that its relations with Israel had reached the level of a strategic alliance and full coordination in matters pertaining to military intelligence and training. Turkey, furthermore, initially tried to distract the Arabs until the alliance was firmly in place. This involved opening negotiations with certain Arab parties, ostensibly to encourage them to enter the alliance, so that it would not appear aimed against the Arabs. That these intentions were spurious was made clear when Turkey and Israel began to implement certain aspects of their alliance, notably by apprehending Arab commercial liners traveling to or from the Black Sea to search and confiscate their freight. In other words, they have expanded the pact and given themselves rights recognised by no international organisation. From the outset, the US has been a full partner in this alliance. It participated in joint naval manoeuvres and reversed its ban on the re-export of certain goods, permitting Israel to sell military equipment to Turkey; it has also lent extensive support to Turkish-Israeli actions in northern Iraq. More tangible evidence of the US role is the fact that increased US support for such joint military action in various parts of the Middle East, such as Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, has coincided with a clear downsizing of its role in the so-called Middle East peace process on both the Syrian-Lebanese and the Palestinian fronts. We should not pass lightly over what initially appeared to be a contradiction in US policy, and then turned out to be fully consistent. At a time when the US seemed to be taking steps to back the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it was also actively laying the groundwork for a Turkish-Israeli military alliance created solely with the intent of undermining the Arab parties to the peace process. This apparent incongruity was resolved when the peace process ground to a halt for 18 months while Israel and Turkey exerted every possible effort to develop the pact. Once it was in place, the US no longer tried to conceal its role in building this alliance or in "strangling" the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process, after having single-handedly crushed negotiations between Israel and Syria in order to isolate the Palestinians and their negotiating interests from those of the Syrians. These developments could be purely coincidental; perhaps we should not accord this coincidence disproportionate weight and portray it as another conspiracy against the Arabs and Egypt. I hold the entirely opposite viewpoint, not because I am given to exaggeration or hysteria, but because I know Israel's intentions. I also know that the coming months will be decisive in this phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Next May, the Palestinians may be true to their word to declare a Palestinian state, whether or not circumstances over the coming months permit it, and whether or not they themselves are fully prepared to do so. Also, Israel may take advantage of the intervening months to liquidate the Islamist bases in the Occupied Territories and among Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship, whether it undertakes such actions independently or with the assistance of the CIA and its Israeli and Palestinian agents, placing the Palestinian Authority under enormous regional and international pressure to keep silent about the massacre of Muslim and Christian political activists in Palestine. Regardless of whether any of this occurs, Israel will need Turkey to divert Syria's political and military attention northwards, forcing it to withdraw a major portion of its forces from its southern borders. Turkey will also be useful in diverting the attention of the Arabs toward a renewed conflagration in Iraq and fulfilling its single most important function in the region -- to deter Iran. In light of the state of high tension currently prevailing in the region, however, Turkey may not be sufficient deterrence to keep Iran at bay. This is why the Western nations, including the US, are bending over backwards, singing their desire a rapprochement with Iran from the rooftops, and endeavouring to improve Iran's image in the international media, while at the same time explicitly keeping the option of Israeli missile strikes at Iranian strategic locations open. Once again, the lessons of history prove invaluable. Operation Red Star, planned jointly by Israel, Turkey and the US, was launched in 1957, not long after the Tripartite Aggression on the Suez Canal. According to the plans, Turkish forces were to move against Damascus in order to topple a government which the Eisenhower administration believed was veering too strongly toward the communist camp. The real aim of the operation, however, was to extricate Israel from the international predicament it had landed itself in by participating in the conspiracy against Egypt. The US, and the West in general, needed to use Turkey in order to restore Israel to its former level of international respect. This is why Egypt, then as now, acted quickly and urgently. The experience of the '50s is still very much present in the minds of Egyptian policy-makers. Egypt knows that any military engagements between Turkey and Syria will inevitably harm the fabric of inter-Arab relations. Observers in Cairo have even been entertaining the thought that Egypt itself may be directly or indirectly targeted by the escalation of tensions in the Middle East via Turkey. Many Arab capitals had hoped that nothing would overturn the uneasy stability prevailing in the region. They feared Netanyahu, because his actions in the Occupied Territories and with regard to the peace process have already threatened to spiral into a whirlpool of violence for which no one is prepared. Today, these Arab capitals are even more intensely perturbed by the onslaught of trouble from different sources, one which is designed to effect a fundamental change on the ground in one or more areas of the Middle East, the ultimate aim of which is to secure Israeli hegemony, with Turkish and US backing, for decades to come. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
