Obama and Middle East urgency

Condoleezza Rice, U.S. secretary of state in the outgoing George W. Bush administration, has this week paid yet another of her pointless visits to the Middle East - her eighth in the past year since the Annapolis Conference of November 2007 - and very probably her last. The mystery is why she has bothered to come to the region, again and again and again. She has been indefatigable, but totally ineffectual.

Will President-elect Barack Obama now take up the challenge of the collapsed Middle East peace process? Rather than waiting until he takes office in late January, he is being urged in many quarters to act without delay by appointing a special envoy for the Middle East with powers to negotiate on behalf of his incoming administration. Bill Clinton, the former president, has been mentioned as a candidate for the job. A better man might be Colin Powell, former U.S. secretary of state and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

The Arab world, however, has been disappointed and alarmed by Obama’s appointment as White House chief of staff of Rahm Emanuel, a tough American with Israeli roots and sympathies. To Arabs, his appointment does not suggest that Obama will give early attention to the festering Arab-Israeli conflict or to the sufferings of the Palestinians.

Annapolis, the conference that Bush convened a year ago, was meant to bring a Palestinian state to birth by the end of 2008. Instead, the prospect of such a state has virtually vanished. Bush and the hapless Rice have presided over a situation that has become far worse than a year ago. With full immunity, Israel has accelerated its policy of land confiscation and settlement expansion, together with the continued construction of the ‘security wall’ and settlers-only roads in Palestinian territory.

Since Annapolis, Israel has destroyed 94 Palestinian homes in Arab East Jerusalem, and another 235 Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank. In Gaza, every sector of life has been disrupted by Israel’s siege. The population is crippled by poverty, hunger, disease and unemployment. Eighty percent of the population depends on food aid for survival, while children suffer from chronic malnutrition and anemia.

After a visit to Gaza last week, Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first woman president (1990-1997) and the former U.N. high commissioner for human rights (1997-2002) said: “The whole civilization is being destroyed.” She added: “I cannot believe that Israeli ordinary people understand what is being done in their name; they couldn’t possibly support it if they did.”  Meanwhile, the Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas is hanging by a thread. In a blatant breach of the truce, Israeli troops entered Gaza the day Obama was elected, and blew up a tunnel which was allegedly heading toward Israeli territory, and which it was feared would be used to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Six Hamas fighters were killed. Hamas responded by firing 50 rockets into the Negev, causing neither damage nor loss of life. Tony Blair, representative of the Quartet - the so-called guarantor of the Middle East peace process consisting of the United States, the United Nations, European Union and Russia - has been as ineffectual as Rice. Indeed, he has neglected Gaza altogether.

This past Monday, Rice was due in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for a meeting with the Quartet and with Egyptian officials. But she has already conceded that peace talks have ground to a halt and that a Palestinian state will have to wait until “political circumstances permit.”

The Arabs must bear their share of blame for the collapse of the peace process and the continued martyrdom of the Palestinians. Unlike Israel, which for decades has conducted a tireless, multi-faceted campaign to influence American opinion and every successive American administration - exerting every effort to place its sympathizers in key U.S. government posts - the Arabs have remained largely passive.

In recent years, they have failed to convert their considerable financial resources into political muscle on behalf of their Palestinian brothers. They have preferred to buy Western assets - like the recent purchase by Gulf investors of a considerable slice of Barclays Bank - rather than exert political influence. The Arabs seem unaware that a destruction of the Palestinians’ hopes for a viable state of their own will bring the region nothing but violence and instability and will be a defeat for the entire Arab world.

* Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of “The Struggle for Syria”; also, “Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East”; and “Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.”

Related Content

•  Panorama Of July 2009
•  Obama and Iran, Considered
•  Do you feel lucky, Hugo?
•  US intervention in Iran
•  The mortality of the Dalai Lama
•  Panorama Of June 2009
•  Why is Obama so popular?
•  Neda Soltan: anger and fear
•  Obama will back green energy in Asean and Indonesia
•  Obama’s hands-off policy is just the right touch