Hawks, doves and lame ducks
By Khaled Diab
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the standoff between hawks and
doves has long rendered the quest for peace a lame duck.
August 2008
Ever since Ehud Olmert announced his resignation, there has been
speculation about what his status as an outgoing leader will mean for the peace
process. Not very much, I suspect, as this lame duck prime minister has done
little more than engage in politically expedient dead duck initiatives.
Olmert – who can best be described as a
scavenging hawk with a dovish song – lacks the vision, courage and ideological
inclination to take the steps necessary to reach a workable resolution, despite
the Annapolis platitudes and its 12-month deadline.
At the time, I saw
the gathering as an “elaborate way of reiterating the current status quo”.
And so it is hardly surprising that some nine months on from Annapolis, the status
quo remains unchanged.
The only glimmer of hope is on the Syrian
front, where both Olmert and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are making strong
peace overtures, but this could easily be derailed by the next elections,
especially if Binyamin
Netanyahu takes over the reins, or Syria fails to distance itself
sufficiently from Tehran.
In fact, the fractured and divided nature of
the Israeli political landscape is one of the main obstacles to peace because
it paralyses the government from taking the bold steps needed to achieve peace,
and enables the hawks to take the doves hostage.
Perhaps the most striking example of this
uneven contest was the clash in perceptions between Israel’s first and second
prime ministers David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s ‘founding father’, and Moshe Sharett. Although both were committed Zionists, Sharett was in favour of diplomacy and a negotiated
settlement with the Arabs.
Unlike Ben-Gurion, who knew little about Arab
society and culture and distrusted Arabs intently, Sharett
was an accomplished Arabist and had many Arab
friends. At a Mapai party meeting, he once declared that: “There is a
wall between us and [the Arabs]… If this wall can be prevented from getting
taller, it is a sacred duty to do so.”
Sharett’s most spectacular attempt to
dismantle the “wall” was the secret talks he initiated with the new Egyptian
regime led by the revolutionary Free Officers Movement. Despite his later
anti-Israel reputation, Gamal Abdel-Nasser
saw, at the time, that compromise and accommodation were the only way to
resolve the conflict.
Before he became president but as de facto leader
of the revolution, Nasser assured Sharett, in a
secret correspondence in May 1953, that Egypt harboured no belligerent feeling
towards Israel and signalled his willingness to build bridges.
Even the 1954 ‘Lavon Affair’ did not
weaken his resolve. Nasser decided not to blame Sharett
– who was in fact not aware of the plot – and agreed to resume the clandestine
contacts. Between October 1954 and January 1955, the two men discussed
indirectly Israeli-Egyptian relations, border issues, solutions to the
Palestinian refugee crisis, Israeli shipping rights and avenues for economic
co-operation.
Nasser even agreed to high-level secret talks
between Egyptian and Israeli diplomats, but Sharett
got cold feet due to domestic anger surrounding the trial of the Israeli spies
behind the Lavon terror campaign.
Alarmed at Sharett’s
dovish overtures, Ben-Gurion came out of retirement and replaced him as prime
minister again in 1955. Almost at once, Ben-Gurion launched a major raid on
Gaza, sparking a downward spiral to war and effectively burying prospects for
peace for almost a quarter of a century.
Had Sharett succeeded
and managed to translate his backroom talks into an actual peace that covered
all the aspects he and Nasser discussed, the Middle East today could
potentially have been a very different place. But he lacked the popular appeal
and charisma to counter the populism of his opponents.
But militants getting the
upper hand over moderates is not just an Israeli malaise. The
Palestinians have also suffered their fair share of that. A Palestinian
parallel of the Sharett-Ben-Gurion standoff was the
confrontation between the mufti and mayor of Jerusalem.
Haj Amin el-Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem, was a complete rejectionist of the Zionist presence in Palestine. While
the Palestinians had the right to feel irked that the British had promised
their land to another people without consulting them, a realist and humanist
would’ve tried to find an accommodation that would allow Palestinians to
realise their national aspirations and enable Jews to flee persecution, either
by agreeing to a bi-national state or partition – both of which were on the
cards. In fact, just before the outbreak of the second world
war, the British offered the Palestinians a state with an Arab majority
within a decade. He rejected that, too.
Raghib el-Nashashibi,
who was the mayor of Jerusalem between 1920 and 1934, was opposed to the unbending
and uncompromising stance of Haj Amin.
El-Nashashibi was in favour of a negotiated
settlement with the British and the Zionists and, as head of the National
Defence Party, he was willing to accept partition so long as the Palestinians
got sufficient land and could merge with Transjordan
to form a viable political entity.
But the mufti, a master populist, managed both
to get the upper hand against el-Nashashibi and other
moderates, setting back the Palestinian quest for nationhood, and to tarnish the
Palestinian struggle by moving to Europe and collaborating with the Germans.
Again, one cannot help but speculate how
different reality would’ve been had moderates like el-Nashashibi
gained the advantage during the British mandate and managed to find moderate
Zionists with whom to reach an accommodation.
In order to avoid total despair, it is
important to realise that moderates may lose many battles, but they can
eventually win the war. After all, a quarter of a century after the Sharett-Nasser talks, Egypt and Israel made peace.
Likewise, trailblazers like Israel’s veteran
peacenik Uri Avnery and moderate PLO members, such as
the late Issam Sartawi, met
together in the Israel-Palestine Peace Council in the mid-1970s to discuss a
two-state resolution to the conflict. Said Hammami
(whose name means pigeon or dove in Arabic), the PLO’s London representative,
was a vocal advocate of a two-state solution which, he believed, would
eventually merge into a single, democratic, multi-ethnic state. Both Sartawi and Hammami paid for
their convictions with their lives.
Today, hope for the future does not lie with
the mainstream players, but with the brave, principled and sensible advocates
currently on the political fringe. On the Palestinian side, a strong candidate
is Mustafa Barghouti, the founder of the Palestinian
National Initiative and the runner-up in the last presidential election. On the
Israeli side, there is Adam Keller, the spokesman of the peace group Gush
Shalom. More in the mainstream, there are Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabo, two Oslo negotiators who went on to forge the
informal Geneva Accords.
This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 6
August 2008. Read the related
discussion.
ă2008 – Khaled Diab.
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