Pointless ‘peace plans’ that fuel violence

WHATEVER happened to Middle East peace? Some sort of deal between Israel and the local Arabs was, for decades, the vital goal of diplomacy. US presidents were obliged to try to achieve it. Both sides were repeatedly dragged to summits where they were forced to shake hands and smile at each other while clenching their teeth.

I was once present at one of these horrible staged occasions, on the White House lawn in September 1993, when a smiling Bill Clinton compelled Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and that awful old antisemite Yasser Arafat (who once said ‘I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews’) to pretend to be friends. That particular episode ended with the murder of Yitzhak Rabin by an ultraZionist fanatic and with a renewed wave of organised Arab violence on the West Bank of the Jordan.

In fact, this has been the outcome of almost all such efforts: more division, more violence, more barriers, more checkpoints. An Arab/Israeli colleague once said to me, as we negotiated one of the complex barricades that divide up the region: ‘How I long for the good old days before we had peace.’ And when I was visiting an Israeli town near the embattled Gaza Strip, I was reminded by one of the residents that it was not all that long since Israelis had actually gone to Gaza for the nightlife.

My own guess is that, left alone, the ordinary human beings of the region will work out informal, small-scale ways to live together, just as long as the big powers don’t try to push for a final treaty. They have much to gain from doing so. So I was pleased to see that President Trump’s fanciful ‘peace plan’ was treated as a non-event. Hardly anyone could even be bothered to get properly angry.

This is because the major Muslim powers of the region have lost interest. Once, they tried to divert their own unhappy, discontented peoples into officially encouraged hatred of Israel. They cynically used the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza to continue this process.

But Saudi Arabia’s hate-filled obsession with Iran has eclipsed that. Riyadh’s Sunni Muslim fanatics loathe Tehran’s Shia Muslims so much that they will even ally with Israel against them. And so an issue which once seemed capable of blowing up the world has gone cold and quiet. The trouble is that the Saudi-Iran conflict – in which Britain is foolishly taking sides – could be even worse and harder to solve.