The Arabs are trapped between the anvil of Israeli belligerency and the hammer of US indifference to their concerns, writes Ayman El-Amir* The 22-day long devastating Israeli war on Gaza and its Palestinian population has ended in a stalemate. Israel has not achieved its declared goal of silencing Palestinian rockets, has left the resistance more resilient and the Gaza people more defiant, has undermined the Arab moderates, and has set back the peace process. With one-third of its armed forces thrown into battle, Israel has lost its second regional war in 30 months, after the 2006 debacle in Lebanon. The implications of the limits of Israeli military power, the credibility of Palestinian resistance and the price they are willing to pay, and the worthiness of Israeli peaceful pretences could not be lost on regional powers. The power paradigm in the Middle East is slowly changing to the advantage of hardliners. With unreserved support from the Bush administration, Israel went to all extremes to inflict its updated version of the Holocaust on the Palestinians in Gaza. In more than 2,000 air strikes, the Israeli air force rained 1,000 tons of bombs and unknown thermal explosives, probably still in the testing stage, on Gaza's people and infrastructure. Its artillery, tanks and seaborne missiles pounded the Strip from all sides as its ground forces fought pitched battles with Palestinian resistance fighters. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced a unilateral ceasefire, half of Gaza City lay in ruins, reminiscent of Berlin in the final days of World War II. More than 1,200 people were killed and 5,300 injured, not taking into account those who may still be buried under the rubble. As the dust settled it turned out that the supposedly humane children and grandchildren of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust spared nothing: civilians were ordered by leaflets to abandon their homes and then were bombed in the shelters they took to, in UNRWA schools and other hiding places; schools, hospitals, medical centres, administrative government buildings, graveyards, fire engines, ambulances, men and mosques were uniformly bombed, killed or destroyed. Diplomatically, Israel carried out its campaign the best way it could. Having received a green light from the US to "defend itself" without qualification, it played the Egyptian peace initiative for three weeks, secured European Union complicity by silence, trounced UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, and amusedly watched Arab leaders compete for hosting summit conferences that lead nowhere. Israel had all its options open, including overwhelming military force, US-EU support and diplomatic channels whenever it chose to use them. All Arab countries put together had only one option: to plead for a ceasefire. Whatever other political, diplomatic, economic or military options they had at their disposal, they were reluctant to use. Israel ended the war at a moment of its choosing, not in response to any initiative or plea, although Olmert may have professed otherwise as a gesture to Egypt. When the Bush administration gave Israel the green light to launch its incursion it set a deadline -- the operation had to be completed and the fighting terminated before the expiry of the Bush presidency. It was probably responding to admonitions by President-elect Barack Obama's transition team that he did not want to have this dirty piece of work on his desk as he entered the Oval Office. Obama, it will be recalled, was briefed by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice on the invasion and its developments early on in the crisis. Another factor is that the Israeli army has little stamina for military operations exceeding three weeks. This was demonstrated in the Six-Day War in 1967, the October 1973 War and the 2006 war on Lebanon. The war against Hizbullah proved the inefficacy of the use of superior Israeli regular army forces against hundreds of scattered targets, each consisting of five to eight mobile guerrillas who fired Katyusha rockets, mortar rounds or anti-tank projectiles. For overwhelming military power to achieve any measurable impact it has to reckon with unacceptable levels of destruction and civilian casualties. And then the outcome is never conclusive. At the end of its military campaign, Israel made sure that its announced ceasefire was in response to US face-saving guarantees of naval deployment to block weapons supplies to Hamas. Major EU countries, which stood on the sidelines during the Gaza carnage, played along and volunteered to contribute naval units to the mission. Leaders of the EU met in Sharm El-Sheikh at the invitation of Egypt and called for stabilising the ceasefire in Gaza and, equally, to stop the smuggling of weapons to the Palestinian resistance in the Strip and the restoration of peace. The leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and other countries adopted a declaration that largely reflected strategic Israeli goals of weakening the Palestinians until such time as when it is convenient for Israel to grant them what it deems they deserve. They did not make it their business to fully endorse the Egyptian initiative calling for immediate and total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, ending Israeli land and sea blockade and opening up all crossing points in and out of the Strip. Only the host, President Hosni Mubarak, reiterated his position that Egypt would not accept any foreign presence on its side of the Gaza-Rafah border area to monitor Israeli-claimed smuggling corridors. The Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, like the whole Palestinian problem, has been restored to the status quo ante, with a promise of yet another international conference. With no word of reprimand for excessive Israeli military action, the meeting endorsed a familiar and dangerous trend in international relations where the aggressor gets away with aggression and the right of the struggle for the liberation of occupied territory is denied. The spate of Arab meetings and summit conferences has confirmed once more what the Arabs can do best for the Palestinian problem -- throw money at it. Olmert confirmed the fulfilment of one of the major objectives of the Israeli invasion: to weaken Hamas and thus strengthen the hand of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas's leader Khaled Mashaal announced that Israel had failed to achieve victory. This, he said, provides an opportunity for inter-Palestinian reconciliation between the Fatah and Hamas factions. But Israeli-supported Abbas, whose term as president has expired, declined to participate in the Doha consultative meeting, citing "pressures" exercised on him. Hamas leaders, who were invited and participated in Doha, were not invited -- not even as observers -- to the Kuwait summit, or the Sharm El-Sheikh meeting, that would discuss the Palestinian crisis as well. Only Mahmoud Abbas was invited to and attended both. Inter-Palestinian division mirrors the state of Arab disarray. The abrupt Israeli ceasefire announcement and the redeployment of troops signals to Arabs and the world that one country only matters to it -- the US. And the US is not persuaded by Arab pleas, warnings of rising radicalism, pressures that undermine their moderation, and their confrontation with outraged masses. The US takes the rising power of Iran seriously; it only takes the Arabs seriously to the extent that they comply with its policies and directives. To unlock the logjam of being caught between Israeli policy of military aggression and US policy of undermining Arab unanimity, the Arabs will have to seriously consider the extent to which they are willing to use the means of power that are available to them to support their interests. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
