Going Deeper
Forty years of servitude
It has been forty years since the six day war that signaled the defeat of the Arabs at the hands of Israel and continued occupation of the Palestinian and other occupied territories. Barring the occupation of the Baltic nations by the Soviet Union and that of Korea by Japan (1910-45) there has not been such lengthy occupation by force of others' territories in the post-colonial world. It is sad that while the international community is celebrating the "third wave" of democratisation (by Samuel Huntington's estimate) in the freedom achieved by the former client states of Eastern Europe of then Soviet Union and is hoping for a fourth wave to take place in the broader Middle East, the promise made in 1917 by then British Foreign Secretary to Lord Rothschild of the World Zionist Organisation that the British government "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and the assurance given in 1923 by then Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill that the Balfour Declaration did not mean imposition of a Jewish nation upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole, seems to abide by the old adage that promises are made to be broken The international community is now occasionally engaged in finding a solution of the "Palestinian problem" as it promises to translate Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" from an academic exercise to a virtual conflict between two distinct civilisations. Samera Esmeir (of UC-Berkeley) correctly states that forty years after the 1967, war the world is grappling with a solution of the territories occupied in 1967, dropping from international vocabulary the occupation that took place in 1948. The international community is trying to convince the Israelis that eighty per cent of Gaza households should not be reduced to earning less than $1 a day and that food insecurity should not be allowed to rise to unacceptable level, but hypocritically the international community must be allowed economic suffocation of the Palestinians because they had chosen to be governed by Hammas. Lori Allen (of Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies) holds Israel, the US, European Union, and the Palestinians governments as well as the citizens who voted them into office for this "deliberate orchestration" of human tragedy of "poverty, oppression and existential insecurity since the occupation began." One wonders whether the appointment of Tony Blair as the Middle East envoy of the Quartet would be able to find an acceptable solution given his narrow brief -- Palestinian governance, economics and security -- excluding the wider conflict that engulfs the area. Besides, his almost total unanimity with President Bush on all matters makes him suspect to the Arabs despite President Mahmoud Abbas's welcoming his appointment. On the final prime ministerial question day in June this year he told the House of Commons that the absolute priority was to give effect to the international consensus that stability and peace in the Middle East could only be brought about by establishing two states -- Israel and Palestine -- side by side to live in harmony. One may think that perhaps Robert Kagan and the likes of him who believe in the superiority of hard power as the inevitable instrument to solve international disputes and insistence on the rule of law as reflective of weakness are not wrong after all. Demise of communism and the disintegration of USSR were results of the weakness of the communist system and the realization of the vast difference of power between the US and the dying Soviet Union. As for the Europeans, Kagan explains that the end of colonialism and the Cold War whereby Europe lost its centrality in the US defense matrix have goaded the Europeans to respect international law for the conduct of inter-state relations, a practice the Europeans were averse to follow during the heydays of colonialism. But Kaganite conviction of the absolute superiority of hard power is confronted by Harvard Professor Joseph Nye's contention that throughout the history of civilisation the unassailable power is inevitably confronted by a coalition of other powers who challenge its hegemony. In the present day context uni-polar moment will be substituted by multi-polarity that appears to have arrived with Bush's second term in office. Yet the fact remains that the division of the world into rich and poor, North and South, weak and strong, technologically developed and less developed -- making dependence on developed economies of the major part of the world for their economic development -- gives life to the adage that some are more equal than others. This dependence, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, makes the eyes of the less fortunate more acute to see the reality of the present and in the conflict of production of labour-intensive and capital-intensive goods the less developed countries are less likely to be ideologically deflected. But if the core-periphery relationship between two inter-dependent regions based on unfair terms of trade continues for a long time then the periphery may take resort to violence for their redemption. As the dynamics of the capitalist world system are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future regardless of whether mankind has reached the end of its ideological evolution as premised by Francis Fukuyama, any solution of the Middle East crisis will favour the Israelis because the West wants it to be so. Those dispossessed in 1948 will remain a footnote in the history of the Middle East, and the death and destruction meted out to them will be a fleeting tragic scene in the narrative of mankind. Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.
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