A Dangerous Gap in the Middle East

BEIRUT-- When you get off a train in many countries, a sign tells you to “mind the gap” between the platform and the train car door. We need a sign like that over the entire Middle East, which witnesses the dangerous trend of the growing gap between an increasingly extremist Israel and the more pragmatic Arabs, Iranians, Americans, and Europeans.

A flurry of recent developments -- statements, gestures, hints, trips -- suggests that the United States, Iran, the Arab states and some Europeans seem interested in exploring reconciliatory moves and are beginning to make noises to that effect: 

• American members of Congress visit Syria and Gaza;

• the Iranian and American presidents allude to resuming talks and normal relations; 

• the Syrian president stresses the centrality of the United States for peace talks in the Middle East and welcomes a visit by head of U.S. Central Command General David Petraeus to discuss Iraq;

• Italy ponders inviting Iran to the next G-8 meeting;

• and assorted European legislators hold quiet talks with Hamas, 

• whose leaders just sent a letter to President Barack Obama.

The common denominator is that key parties that had been estranged now seek to resume normal contacts. This is a critical first step towards sensible behavior, and then, perhaps, peace and security for all. The critical element that could lead to breakthroughs on several fronts is that all of these players have something to gain and something to lose, and they are not comfortable with the status quo -- that is, they are willing and able to negotiate, and are well placed to make a deal.

A deal is in everyone’s interest, which is why I suspect we may soon see senior American diplomats meeting more regularly with Syrians and Iranians. If that happens, Hamas and Hizbullah will both find that they will have to adjust to new realities. They will probably do so quickly, because they too are reality-based players who cannot afford to be left out in the cold waving the banner of eternal resistance to a shrinking constituency -- while everyone else around them is busy negotiating deals on coexistence, acceptable accommodation, and mutual rights.

The important element in the current trend is the clarification that the root causes of tensions between the United States and Europe, on the one hand, and assorted Arabs, Iranian and, occasionally, Turkish parties are political -- not religious, cultural or civilizational. 

Political problems -- including occupied lands or nuclear power -- have political solutions.

Israel, on the other hand, seems to be moving in a direction in which it will take off the table the items that could prompt political negotiations and lead to peaceful coexistence. The rightwing majority in the new parliament -- with a sprinkling of Zionist fascists, some of whom might be in a new government -- now explicitly rejects serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, in favor of only “improving economic conditions” for the Palestinians. 

Israelis will deal to get back the soldier Gilead Shalit who is in Hamas’ hands, and might agree to a medium-term truce with Hamas, but otherwise the majority of Israelis and their members of parliament seem uninterested in a serious peace negotiation that requires Israel to make major concessions that would see the Jewish state comply with international law. What a supreme irony this is, in view of the fact that the Jewish people, in the accepted biblical narrative, were the chosen instrument through which God passed on a set of laws to humankind to guide ethical and peace-seeking behavior, through the great law-giver Moses.

The likely Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, speaks only of improving economic conditions for Palestinians, rather than negotiating Israeli withdrawal and an end of Jewish colonization, or achieving Palestinian statehood and an end to refugeehood. While everyone else in the region explores how to achieve mutually agreed equal rights, negotiated through mechanisms that affirm their common dignity and sovereignty, the Israeli public and political establishment both are moving in the opposite direction towards an almost pathological addiction to militarism, colonialism, and racism against Palestinians that is now ratified by the voting public.

There is great danger in the gap between Israeli extremism and the more accommodating realism and pragmatism of everyone else in the Middle East -- including an America that seems slowly to be coming to its senses again. 

Historically, the U.S. government in such situations was the only external party with enough leverage with Israel to craft a diplomatic process that sought to tone down extremist tendencies, and instead address the legitimate concerns of both Israelis and Arabs alike. The same approach is needed again today. It will succeed if it acknowledges that Israelis, Arabs, Iranians and Turks in this region all have equal rights that must be implemented simultaneously. It will fail, and trigger Gaza-like destruction on a wider regional scale, if it tries mainly to appease Israeli political pathologies and ideological extremism.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large ofThe Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.