Beware of Small States

President Obama, then, was from the start firmly wedded to ‘two states for two peoples’. But of course, in principle at least, all his predecessors had been too. So the real question was just how seriously he would seek to bring it about. If, as many believed, his Administration represented the positively last chance for such a solution, to make it good he was going to have to summon up two virtues, and in very large, if not heroic, measure: impartiality- and the determination to apply it. ‘Western purblindness’, Walid Khalidi, doyen of Palestinian scholars, once wrote, ‘is itself a hallmark of the Palestine problem’² - and the partiality of Western leaders, their inveterate favouring of one side over the other, to which the purblindness gave rise has been a leitmotif of this book. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, more than any other single factor except the Zionist movement itself, their partiality virtually created ab nihilo this ‘Palestine problem’ which they have ever after been vainly trying to solve.

True impartiality can only be founded on at least an implicit acknowledgement of errors past. Thus, in and of itself, national self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people might have been a perfectly legitimate aim, just as it has been for any other people, and, in the light of Jewish history, it might even have been an indispensable, inspiring and supremely moral one. But it can hardly be gainsaid that in choosing Palestine as the place in which to enact it, the Zionists - and of course their Western sponsors - were all but automatically ensuring that this empowerment of an historically persecuted race entailed the Nakba, the Catastrophe, of another one. For Arabs and Palestinians, Jewish nationhood could only have materialized as another form of Western settler-colonialism, and a more extreme and repugnant one than usual in that it did not confine itself to political domination, economic exploitation and more or less racist attitudes towards an indigenous population, but sought to drive this population out of its ancestral homeland altogether. It very largely did so, and not in some haphazard, gradual or incremental way, not, famously, in some ‘fit of absence of mind’, but in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that was as brutally executed as it was long premeditated and minutely planned. The outcome, so far, of what is by now an almost centennial conflict is one of pure Zionist gain versus pure Arab/Palestinian loss. Mindful, no doubt, of the overwhelming moral debt it owed the Jews, the Christian West supported, or acquiesced in, this wholly one-sided gain as well as the aberrant methods by which it was achieved. As for the one-sided loss, that was sustained by a people who, in no way responsible for the historic persecution of the Jews, were in effect called upon to foot the bill for the sins of those who were. And then, on top of all that, they were constantly reproached, or even vilified, in the court of Western opinion for their persistent refusal - admittedly with sometimes aberrant methods of their own - to accept a wrong that no Western country would ever have accepted for itself.

There can be no serious peace-seeking diplomacy that fails to address this historical imbalance. That requires the adoption of what, from the standpoint of the currently dominant Western orthodoxy, would be seen as an egregiously ‘pro-Arab’ partisanship, but which, in any true historical reckoning, would be nothing of the sort. Quite the contrary. For it is not as if the Palestinians are demanding anything like the full redress that almost all such other colonially subject peoples have demanded - and largely secured. To be sure, that used to be their aim. But since 1988 they - or their internationally recognized, representative institutions, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestine National Council - have formally renounced what, from both the standpoint of international jurisprudence and established anti-colonial norms, they were entitled to claim as their right: the recovery of their usurped homeland, the return of the refugees and the dismantling of the whole Zionist-colonial apparatus of immigration, settlement and political control. It was only their ‘recognition’ of the Jewish state, and its ‘right to exist’ on some 78 per cent of the territory they considered to be rightfully theirs, which enabled a ‘peace process’ to get going at all, or at least a peace process that had any prospect of eventual success. It is essentially Israel, disdaining any remotely comparable spirit of compromise in reply, which now impedes all further progress. For having secured so very much, it wants yet more. And what it wants - a greater share of original Palestine than the 78 per cent it has already has, the Judaization, through settlement, of much of the remaining 22 per cent, full-scale sovereignty over Arab, East Jerusalem, and various other things - is precisely what any serious American administration will be bending itself to combat. There can be no such thing as ‘reciprocity’ in the sense that Israel and ‘the friends of Israel’ in the US interpret it; giving up settlements is not a ‘concession’, it is a disgorging of what never belonged to Israel in the first place, either under international law or the requirements of a two-state solution. And, if Israel continues to kick against the pricks, any serious administration would need to resort to economic and diplomatic penalties of the kind that America has slapped on so many a miscreant down the years; and finally, if that does not work, impose a settlement with the aid of an international military force that will simultaneously guarantee the security of all the parties to it.

No sooner was he sworn into office than Obama designated peace in the Middle East as a key foreign policy interest of the United States. With his swift appointment of a special Middle East envoy - and with the reputation for integrity, perseverance and, above all, impartiality which George Mitchell enjoyed - he seemed to move in the right direction. But, right from the start too, it was clear that the obstacles in his path would be daunting. They were not merely the traditional ones, chief among them the fierce opposition that any president who ‘gets tough’ with Israel is bound to face, from Congress, ‘the Lobby’ and all those institutions in which the ‘friends of Israel’ hold such potent sway. For them, the very notion of impartiality, or ‘even-handedness’ as it is usually called in the United States, has always been a suspect one. Abraham Foxman, the president of the Anti-Defamation League, was quick to remind everyone of that with his remark, upon learning of Mitchell’s appointment, that there could be ‘no moral equivalence’ between such adversaries as Israelis and Palestinians; in their case, he said, even-handedness ‘could only lead to the distortion of what’ - shared values - ‘American-Israeli relations are all about’.³ Newer - or, rather, higher - obstacles had also been thrown up by that further rightward shift of a whole society which the Israeli elections registered and duly mediated into official government policy. Obama’s immense popularity, combined with a first, perceptible tarnishing of Israel’s exalted reputation even among America’s pro-Israeli political elite, was doubtless going to help him. Yet, from the first, Arabs could not but notice the continuities too. The America which under Bush had condemned, and conspired to overturn, the results - in the shape of Hamas rule - of the freest and fairest Palestinian elections ever held, was quick, under Obama, to assure the Israelis that it would work with whatever government their ‘thriving democracy’ threw up. It was improbable, Arabs lost no time in concluding, that the new Administration was going to stop the rot if it failed to abjure attitudes like that.

In the event, Obama certainly went further than any of his predecessors - and especially the last two - in making it clear that the major contribution to an eventual peace would have to come from Israel. That was apparent, in the first place, from his rhetoric, from - for example - the tone and substance, carefully pitched to the Arab ear, of the ‘address to the Muslim world’ which he made from Cairo University five months into his presidency. Rarely had words like ‘occupation’ ever fallen from the lips of a Bill Clinton or a George Bush, and certainly never any mention of the Palestinian ‘resistance’ to it which Obama all but likened to the American civil rights movement or South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. He dwelt on the Holocaust as an irrefutable raison d’être of Israel’s very existence, but, in the same breath, he all but ascribed to the Nakba a comparable place in the tragedy of the Palestinians. While condemning Hamas’s violence against civilians, he did not call it a ‘terrorist organization’, and even accorded it a certain legitimacy as an authentic representative of the Palestinian people and their aspirations. But, practically and most importantly, he said it was high time that the Israelis ceased their building of settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem; this was both ‘illegitimate’ in itself and - he intimated - no less a violation of previous agreements or obstacle to peace than anything that Hamas was doing.

Ever since Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it has of course been the official position of every US administration that the settlements are illegal; but in practice, and despite periodic pro-forma protests, they effectively tolerated or even connived in them. But Obama and his Middle East envoys were immediately different. They appeared to take this official US position seriously at last, demanding a complete ‘freeze’ of all further settlement construction, and dismissing all the subterfuges, such as the disingenuous claim of ‘natural growth’, with which the Israelis had successfully inveigled their predecessors. In consequence settlements became the source of unprecedented tension between America and an Israel increasingly dismayed at the prospect of losing the very special status as America’s ally, friend and protégé, and the automatic involvement in, and strong influence over, its Middle East decision-making, which it had come to look upon as part of the natural order. Settlements, and the way Obama handled the issue, were seen as a key, initial measure of just how resolute in facing Israel down Arabs and Palestinians could expect him to be. But they would also constitute a vital component of an eventual peace agreement itself. And herein lay the yet greater test to come. For it would have been one thing to put a genuine ‘freeze’ on further settlement construction. The dismantling of already existing settlements - and dispersing the nearly half a million Israelis who inhabit them - which the two-state solution at least implicitly requires, would be quite another. Would Obama really go on to insist on that too? Could he ever induce an Israeli government to take on the settlers, and their powerful accomplices within the whole Israeli body politic, in a monumental, destiny-shaping showdown like this? Though generally impressed with Obama’s debut, most Arabs remained very sceptical about that. And by the summer of 2009, they were already noting signs of America’s retreat from such positions as it had been bold enough to stake out, chiefly evident in new calls on Arab countries to ‘normalize’ relations with Israel in return for as yet vague and unspecified curbs on its settlement activities. Two of America’s closest allies in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, mindful of a long history of unreciprocated Arab concessions, flatly rejected any such new ones, pointing out that, under the existing, Saudi-sponsored, collective Arab peace offer, ‘normalization’ would come at the end, not the beginning, of its implementation.

By autumn, Arab scepticism had turned into full-blown disenchantment, as the retreat looked more and more like abject surrender. It was, Obama said, no longer a total freeze on settlement construction that he required, simply a measure of ‘restraint’; and soon after that - and even as settlement construction resumed with no less vigour than before - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Netanyahu for making ‘unprecedented’ concessions that entirely escaped the attention of most observers. In any case - she proceeded even more astonishingly to assert - a settlement freeze never had been a precondition for the renewal of talks. So, rhetoric aside, just what, Arabs, Palestinians and despairing Israeli doves now asked, was the difference between Obama’s policies in the Middle East and those of his predecessor, Bush? Even President Mahmoud Abbas, most patient and pliant of Palestinian leaders, threw down a gauntlet of sorts. He had banked his all on America and its pledges; and now he had been personally betrayed. He threatened to resign. Within less than a year of Obama’s taking office, the ‘peace process’ looked sicker - just about terminal in fact - than it had almost ever looked before.

In the absence of a final Arab-Israeli peace, or even any sense of progress towards one, there will be war, or large-scale violence. It was ever thus in the Middle East. How much more so, then, if, after all the hopes vested in him, so promising and popular a new American president as Obama fails to solve the everlasting ‘Palestine problem’ in his turn. King Abdullah of Jordan even put a firm date on it: ‘another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next twelve to eighteen months’.⁴

And doubtless, in due course, yet another one after that. This book didn’t start out as a history of the Arab-Israeli struggle. Yet, at every stage of its writing, the struggle kept intruding on it as so inseparable, intrinsic and formative a part of its titular subject that that is what, in great measure, it actually turned out to be - a history in which Lebanon, the author’s country of half a century’s residence, nonetheless always remained to the fore as the lens through which he viewed it. And if, upon its completion, there was one main prognosis which it seemed to embody it was surely that a seemingly interminable conflict which began with the sword the sword will end; but it may have to administer many a bloody and painful, yet inconclusive blow, before it finally does so.

Of the forms which, in the absence of peace, further hostilities will likely take, the likeliest, for the first of them at least, will be the one that Gaza pre-empted - Israel’s much-predicted ‘second round’ with Hizbullah, still very much the formidable foe which, Israel keeps threatening, it will sooner or later have to deal with. It is true that Lebanon did not quite turn into the fully-fledged ‘Hizbullah state’ which - with the parliamentary elections of June 2009 — Israel had feared it would. For in those the ruling ‘14 March’ coalition came out on top again, with seventy-one seats against only fifty-seven for the ‘8 March’ opposition. But even if Hizbullah and its friends did not secure the parliamentary majority which they had expected, they still - Nasrallah insisted - represented the ‘popular’ one; and in point of fact they did actually take the greater number of individual votes. In any case, continuing to re-arm, recruit and train on an unprecedented scale, this ‘most technically-capable terrorist organization in the world’ - as a new State Department report called it- remained the most powerful military and political organization in the country.⁵

Before long Israel was sounding new alarms about Russian-built, vehicle-mounted SA-8 missiles, capable of shooting down aircraft up to a height of 35,000 feet, on which Hizbullah personnel were reportedly being trained in Syria. These, it said, were ‘destabilizing weapons’, capable of posing such a threat to its mastery of the skies over Lebanon that their introduction into that country would constitute a ‘red line’ they could not permit Hizbullah to cross. Defence Minister Ehud Barak warned that, in another war - unlike the last - Israel would ‘use its full force’ against this Lebanese state of which a ‘terror organization’ had become an integral part.⁶

Then, in August, the whole internal Lebanese balance of power shifted in Hizbullah’s favour when the great ‘prestidigitator’ himself, Druze chieftain Walid Jumblat, announced that he was distancing himself from the ‘14 March majority‘, of which he had been the most important and outspoken leader, if not the glue that really held its disparate elements together. The ‘Cedar Revolution’ it spawned had now exhausted itself, he said, and his continued association with right-wing, pro-American, ‘isolationist’ members of it was at odds with the basically Arab nationalist, pro-Palestinian and ‘leftist’ principles which he and his Druze-based Progressive Socialist Party purportedly stood for. He who had been most virulent in his denunciations of Baathist Syria now said that, with its ‘occupation’ of Lebanon over, it was time to rebuild the ‘special relationship’ with it. But his main, if discreeter, motives were altogether more local and pragmatic. Ever since Hizbullah’s armed ‘coup’ of the year before, he had been growing more afraid for the future of his small and increasingly vulnerable community, and he now sought an accommodation with the Shiites, the rising power on Lebanon’s sectarian chequerboard who represented potentially the greatest threat to it. He was not, he said, planning to join the ‘8 March’ opposition, or even quit ‘14 March’ altogether; rather he was finding his way into a centrist ‘third force’ appearing to take shape under the auspices of President Michel Suleiman. But whatever he was actually doing, it was clearly another significant political gain for Hizbullah - and a vexation to the Israelis.⁷

But not a few people in the region believe that while the next resort to arms might thus - and for the umpteenth time - begin on the Israeli-Lebanese front, for thirty-six years the only militarily active one outside Palestine itself, it might not, this time, remain confined to it. This time, in what would undoubtedly qualify as the ‘Seventh Middle Eastern War’, other members of the Islamo-nationalist camp might join in: Hamas; Syria; and even, most formidably, the rising regional hegemon and Israeli-American bête noire, the ayatollahs’ Iran. Together, they would wage a Hizbullah-style ‘missile war’ writ large.