We’re all so fixated with the Middle East war that’s about to begin, we’ve stopped looking at the one that never seems to end. But the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has not disappeared just because we’ve stopped paying attention. It’s still pressing on, stealing lives and breaking hearts every day.
In the past couple of months alone, Israel has killed more than 150 Palestinians. In the same period, Palestinians have made more than 100 attempts to take Israeli civilian lives. Most of them failed — until the recent Haifa bus bombing, which killed 17.
So what’s been going in this most wearily protracted of conflicts while the world’s been looking the other way? And what impact might the coming war have on this long-running one?
The first answer is plenty. Israel has a new government, for one thing. The heart of it is still Ariel Sharon, though with his Likud bloc now much expanded and joined by some new partners. Internally, this new coalition may actually bring some much-needed progressive reform to the country: for the first time in decades the ultra-orthodox parties are not in government, handing the militantly anti-clerical Shinui Party a rare chance to separate religion and state.
Externally, there’s much less cause for optimism. Sharon’s new government includes two hard-right parties, ideologically set against any compromise with the Palestinians. And the new administration’s first acts have hardly been encouraging. Where once Israel made only brief raids into Gaza — targeting a suspected terrorist here, bombing a Hamas building there —now they seem to be digging in.
There is a clutch of explanations for this new, entrenched push into Gaza. First, Israelis believe last year’s reoccupation of Palestinian cities in the West Bank worked, at least slowing the rush of suicide bombers able to make it into Israel: now they want to repeat the process in Gaza.
Second, the slight brake represented by Labour in the last, ‘national unity” government is absent now; Sharon and his hawkish Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz have a free hand.
Third, Israel’s near-complete destruction of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has left a vacuum. Arafat still wants to be seen making the national decisions, most recently appointing Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) veteran Abu Mazen as his prime minister, but the PLO is not the dominant force it once was.
‘It’s Hamas that controls the streets now,†says one Israeli government official. ‘The Palestinian Authority is not shutting them down, so we’re having to do it.â€
There’s one more reason why Israel’s doing this now: because it can. Attention is not on Israel so it’s a good moment to get any unpleasantness out of the way. There’s no reason to wait till the shooting war itself, say Israeli sources, because any attack on Iraq might be very short. Instead the window of opportunity is open right now.
That’s especially true because the United States is in no mood to hold Israel back. Washington needs Sharon to follow the policy of ‘restraint” exercised by his predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, during the first Gulf War. George W Bush wants Sharon to sit tight rather than weighing in to what would fast become a regional conflagration. European diplomats believe that such is the need to keep Sharon on side that Washington will say nothing to rile him.
What about afterwards? How will an American victory in Iraq affect the Israel-Palestine conflict? Only the ill-informed pretend to know the answer to this. Everyone else admits it could go either way — with a pile of evidence supporting two quite opposite scenarios.
The first imagines swift success in Iraq, leaving the US feeling pumped and under no obligation to anyone. European and moderate Arab whining about the need to pressure Israel into a peace process would be waved aside: after all, America would owe nothing to anyone.
‘The US could tell everyone to get stuffed — including Tony [Blair],” says one Israeli official. The British prime minister, so vital now during the diplomatic endgame, would no longer have much leverage. Instead Washington’s hawks could claim vindication for the conviction that underpins their approach to the war on terror: that the only way to fight fire is with fire — the same philosophy advocated by Sharon.
The hard-right view of peace processes — that they amount to little more than appeasement and the rewarding of terror — would be in the ascendant. Washington would also have a pragmatic reason to indulge, rather than lean on, Sharon: the 2004 presidential election season begins later this year. No White House wants to immerse itself in such a thankless task as Middle East peace-brokering in a campaign year.
This, incidentally, is a far cry from the more lurid fantasising that has appeared in some European commentary, suggesting not only that a post-victory US would go easy on Sharon but that the purpose of a war on Iraq is the furthering of Israel’s interests. This, coupled with the pointed and constant lingering on Bush’s Jewish advisers and so on, is not that far from the age-old anti-semitic claim, raised before every major conflict, that ‘it’s the Jews who are dragging us into this warâ€. Rest assured, the US right has plenty of reasons of its own for wanting this fight.
Indeed, there’s at least some reason to believe that Bush will follow the precedent of his father: flush from victory in the Gulf, George Bush Snr convened a Middle East peace conference a few months later in Madrid — and pressed a right-wing Israeli prime minister to attend.
If the Gulf War of 2003 is slow and tricky, and the US realises it needs allies, it might well have to heed the demand of Blair and the Europeans and start knocking Israeli and Palestinian heads together this time too. That might not be such a leap for Bush Jnr as it seems: after all he has already publicly committed himself to a free, viable Palestinian state — the first US president to do so.
So the impact the conflict will have on Israel-Palestine will depend on two things: how the war goes and what Bush truly believes. The trouble is, no one can know either thing for certain. —