January 18, 2015
Watch out, the Quartet is waking up and
threatens to make a move. We should have mixed feelings about the news that the
“Quartet” group of powers that aims to shepherd Palestinian-Israeli
negotiations to a successful peace accord will convene soon to seek to revive
diplomatic efforts that have been stalled for six months.
I say “watch out” because the Quartet, since its
establishment 12 years ago, has not lived up to its expectations in promoting
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations under the umbrella of its four members — the
United States, Russia, United Nations and European Community. Years of
negotiations since the Quartet was formed in 2002 have generated much heat,
some hope, and mostly unfulfilled expectations, but no breakthrough.
Maybe that was the aim and the Quartet has
indeed achieved its main aim. Some people more sinister than myself argue that
the Quartet’s main role was to provide an international cover for the United
States’ dominance of the peace negotiations and making sure they respond first
and foremost to Israeli concerns.
A United Nations announcement that Quartet
states diplomats would meet in Brussels Jan. 26 coincided with the UN
Security Council’s first formal meeting on the Middle East this year. At that
session a senior UN official offered a bleak assessment of the current
hostility and mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians who are “engaged in a
downward spiral of actions and counteractions.”
The Quartet was a good idea that initially aimed
to expand the circle of major parties that lent their weight to achieving a
negotiated peace; it allowed both principals to feel that they were not on
their own in the negotiations arena, but rather felt secure that Quartet
members would ensure a level playing field, or negotiating table. That never
happened, for several reasons.
The United States dominated the Quartet’s
actions and perpetuated the reality that bilateral Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations took place according to priorities and red lines established
primarily by Israel. The Palestinians did not harness the considerable support
they enjoy around the world and among the Quartet member states or
organizations, and the European Union and Russia proved fickle in their Mideast
peace-making actions. The Quartet’s special envoy to the Arab-Israeli peace
process, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, was also a failure who seemed to
spend more time making money for himself in consulting and speech-making than
in engaging in the needed even-handed diplomatic mediation.
Blair once again showed his incompetence and
misreading of realities on the ground in the Middle East this week, when he
addressed a group of 300 Republican members of Congress and staffers. His
remarks on radical Islamists, Western responses to them, the US- and UK-led war
against Iraq, and other issues revealed a man whose penchant to repeat clichés
and simplistic exhortations about Islam and Muslims reflected his wider
inability to grasp the realities and causes of political sentiments in the
Middle East.
An example of his poor analysis is the assertion
that the root of several factors that contributed to radical Islam is a
struggle within Islam about the nature of the faith and its relationship with
other religious communities. More accurate is the fact that the overwhelming
majority of Muslims have no problems with the nature of Islam or its relations
with others, but small pockets of cult-like extremists and criminals carry out
actions, including terror attacks; these generate global responses that often alienate
that massive majority of Muslims who are neither confrontational nor confused
about their faith and their relations with non-Muslims.
A Guardian newspaper report of
the sessions said that “he reportedly argued that the US and UK had learned
that if you topple dictators, you release other forces that have to be dealt
with. However, the Arab Spring demonstrated that many of those dictatorships
would be swept away in any event.”
This would appear to be a damning criticism of
US and UK actions in Iraq especially that helped create an environment that
provided radical Islamists the space to develop into movements that now
threaten us all to some extent. But Blair would never admit this, and his
problem of not coming to terms with Middle Eastern realities was one reason for
the failure of the Quartet.
Despite these weaknesses, the idea of a Quartet
mechanism remains valid, because American-dominated diplomacy in the
Palestinian-Israeli arena, however vigorous it has been in the last 20 years,
has failed to achieve a peace agreement that responds to the legitimate rights
and needs of both sides. An expanded diplomatic umbrella that drives
negotiations on the basis of international legitimacy and the rule of law,
rather than Israeli-American-dominated power imbalances on the ground, would be
a positive contribution — indeed, a lifesaver — for the failed and moribund
peace process.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in
the Daily Star. He was
founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for
Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On
Twitter: @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri -- distributed by
Agence Global