By Salama A Salama Never before have the Palestinians been so divided, the Iranians so manipulating, the Europeans more duplicitous, the Israelis as barbaric, or the Arabs so hopeless. We used to have a Palestinian cause. Now little is left, aside from news headlines, photo opportunities and endless meetings. As the Palestinians lose their focus, Israel is becoming judge and jury, closing crossing points, blocking supplies and unleashing settlers to grab land at will. Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh cannot do anything about it. Arab countries cannot -- or won't -- do anything about it. The Arabs are not trying to break the siege on Gaza. Some of them are even ridiculing the attempts by foreign boats to run the blockade. And no one seems able to heal the rift among the Palestinians. How hopeless can things get? As the Palestinian cause loses focus, outsiders, especially the Iranians, are stepping in to fill the void. It so incenses the Arabs that the Iranians would actually offer alternative solutions to the problem. Consequently, Arab officials lash out at the Iranian regime, branding it as evil, accusing it of trying to proselytise all Sunnis. As the whole scene unravels, erratic actions become more common. One example is the sudden meeting between the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar and Shimon Peres. The meeting, held on the sidelines of an inter-faith dialogue in New York, was little more than a stint in a Saudi PR campaign. One wonders why such a gratuitous act of normalisation was deemed necessary? Then Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister and leader of the Kadima Party, a woman who some Arab leaders hoped would be more moderate than Netanyahu, decided to throw her lot in with the advocates of "transfer" -- those who call for Israeli Arabs to be deported or at least deprived of political and civil rights. Recently, Palestinian leaders ran an advertisement in Israeli newspapers showing an Israeli flag accompanied with Arab ones in an attempt to persuade the Israeli public that the Arab peace initiative was not all that bad. How silly can one get? Time was that the Arabs banked on Europe's support for a just solution in the Middle East. Not anymore. EU foreign ministers have just called off a strategic document that would have linked the enhancement of Israeli-European ties with Israel's efforts to further peace. The original idea was to entice Israel to stop building settlements, end the siege on Gaza and move forward on final status negotiations. But Israel managed to abort the plan. It persuaded the Europeans, especially the French, to keep the peace process away from the issue of future cooperation. Livni succeeded in persuading the EU to maintain a strategic dialogue with Israel and even allow the latter to attend meetings of European foreign ministers three times a year. Arab countries reacted by voicing "astonishment" at the European turnabout. Now all the Arabs have left is the hope that once the US administration changes hands, Obama may get things moving. Perhaps he will, but in what direction exactly? When a cause has run out of steam, it is hard to know what comes next, and it is even harder to rally allies. The Arabs are now busy documenting the outcome of talks they've had. They are counting the initiatives that led to nothing, reiterating the very views that ran into dead ends. And there is no short supply of those. The UN Security Council, due to meet soon, is likely to issue another statement that would eventually gather dust along with the documents signed in Annapolis and reports issued from Quartet officials. Where is this going except nowhere?
