A proposal to form a regional organisation has raised eyebrows, writes Sherine Bahaa Two weeks ago, Bahrain made an unprecedented proposal which it presented during the United Nations General Assembly suggesting the establishment of a regional forum that would include Arab countries, Israel, Iran and Turkey. The initiative was ignored by the august body; however, it is interesting in the sense that it draws a line between the old Middle East and some murky new one. Ever since the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, relations with Israel have been a taboo that only a few regimes have dared breach. Even the victory of Arab armies in October 1973, the Camp David agreement in 1979 and the Jordan-Israel peace treaty in 1994 didn't change the pattern of hostility and deception that characterise Israeli-Arab relations. But that was the old Middle East -- before the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Today there is a new Middle East that has a new agenda, one in which the Arab-Israeli struggle has supposedly been moved down the list, replaced by the Arab Gulf with its current and potential conflicts. Judith Kipper, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the mouthpiece of US foreign policy, believes the key word to all this is Iran. "What really concerns the Middle East now is Iran and how it is settling the political agenda in the region." In short, a new Middle East is crystallising as a result of the disastrous US invasion of Iraq, though it is not the one the CFR had in mind when it helped engineer that war. What should have been a move to secure Israel, cow the Palestinians and ensure a steady, cheap supply of oil to the US in perpetuity turned into a platform for Iran to assert its own political hegemony in the region. The initiative of Bahrain's foreign minister is a hasty rewrite of the early CFR scenario for a new Middle East, one that accommodates a resurgent, unreconstructed Islamist Iran, today powerful enough to sit at the same table with long- time US ally Turkey, ironically now ruled by Islamists as well. "Why don't we sit together even if we disagree, even if we don't recognise each other? Let's be in a single organisation in order to overcome the difficult stage through which the Middle East is passing -- a stage that remains hostage to the past," Bahrein's Sheikh Khaled told the Arab London-based Al-Hayat newspaper. The sheikh's remarks were clearly a sounding board for the US, as it flails desperately to salvage something from the past eight years of chaos it has perpetrated. Bahrain, with Sunni rulers and a Shia majority, is home to the US Navy Fifth fleet. Earlier this year Bahrain appointed the Arab world's first Jewish ambassadress as its envoy to Washington. In December 1994, Bahrain was the first Arab Gulf state to drop secondary boycotts against Israel and in September 2005 it ended its boycott of all Israeli goods as a condition for signing a US free trade agreement. Relations between Israel and Bahrain were run in a very discreet way, out of the spotlight, as it inched towards the CFR scenario for the new Middle East. Of the 22 members of the Arab League, only Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania have full diplomatic ties with Israel. With its brave new initiative, it is tentatively stepping out of the shadows. But there are few takers for Bahrain's vision of the New Middle East so far. Samira Ibrahim Ragab, Bahraini analyst, believes the suggested organisation is not the solution. "There is a problem and Arab regimes have to face it open-mindedly, i.e., without foreign dictates." Ragab sees parallels between the appointment of Arab ambassadors to Iraq and her country's initiative. "Arab regimes are lost. They do not know how to correct the new situation after the war on Iraq especially with fears of Persian hegemony reigning high. They believe that in this way they are filling the Arab vacuum. But the Arab governments are really just plain lost, and they are heading towards more crises." Jordanian sociologist, Yasser Zaetra, sees the Bahraini proposal as a backward move not only for the Gulf Sheikhdom but for the entire Arab world. "If the Arab situation had shown more steadiness and solidarity it would have been impossible for a small country like Bahrain to issue such a proposal." The only positive appraisal for that proposal came from Arab League Secretary- General Amr Moussa who assessed it as worthy of further study. Normalisation is viewed as synonymous with concession, as laid out in the 2002 Arab initiative, despite its weakness. The 2002 initiative stated that withdrawal from lands occupied in 1967 is a precondition to normal ties with Israel -- a more flexible phrase of the "land for peace" formula. That was a formula which kept changing and being diluted until it virtually vanished, expressed in such vague terms such as "Arab constants", "international legitimacy" and "UN resolutions", all failed remnants of the past. Arab regimes have gradually lost domestic popular support with their inability to address the cancer of Israeli aggression, creating a gap that continues to widen between governments and their people. "There is a persistent trend to widen this gap. In the past it was Arab policy but today there are external elements that are pushing hard to do this. They want to direct the internal dissent to be a threat to Arab regimes," Ragab stated. "There are sectarian and ethnic fears and threats that have emerged, and with the absence of a clear vision of how to contain this volatile situation things will be more vulnerable," Ragab warned. Indeed, this is the underlying, unwritten text in the CFR scenario for the new Middle East: replace Arab hostility towards Israel with intra-Arab hostility, Sunni- Shia, intra-tribal, etc. The merits of the initiative were not seriously debated in Bahrain itself. In Manama, where political associations act as de facto parties (in Bahrain political parties are still banned), questioning the foreign minister is not easy, especially on such a delicate matter, one which no doubt was agreed with US advisers. The Bahrain Society Against Normalisation with the Zionist Enemy nonetheless rejected the call: "The formation of a regional organisation that includes the Zionist entity is in fact an implementation of the US plans to support Israel in the Arab world and is part of the so-called Greater Middle East which seeks to integrate the Zionists in the region," read the statement. MP Nasser Al-Fadhala, who last year criticised Sheikh Khaled for shaking hands with his Israeli counterpart, said the formation of the suggested forum "would mean the end of the Palestinian cause and the integration of Israel in the new Middle East order." Considering the stalled "peace process" in the Middle East, the many uncertainties both in US and Israeli politics, the continued instability in Iraq, Iran's indifference to US and Israeli threats of attack, not to mention Turkey's debilitating Kurdish insurgency, Bahrein's lonely voice is unlikely to find much of an audience where it counts.
