Daniel Levy has written an interesting post-mortem of the Bush visit to Israel and the West Bank, and published it on his blog on 18 January: “Accurately or not, the president’s visit to Israel was interpreted as signalling a green light to an Israeli military escalation in the Gaza Strip. That is certainly what has happened in the last days with a Palestinian death toll of at least 25 and a barrage of rockets on the Israeli town of Sderot and neighbouring communities in response. The brakes that exist on a further deterioration in Gaza, and perhaps an extensive Israeli ground operation, are being generated locally out of a concern on both sides that escalation will achieve little. There is no visible Washington foot on that brake, and if anything it hovers closer to the accelerator. While certain Israeli ministers and former senior officials call for a ceasefire with Hamas (an option apparently also favoured by the Hamas leadership), President Bush still inhabits a Game Boy version of the Middle East, divided simply into black and white where you kill the bad guy to advance to the next level. In fact, Bush’s insistence on confronting an undifferentiated green enemy of Islamists continues to miss the nuances that exist in reality, to miss opportunities for new alliances with Islamists against al-Qaida and to undermine the goal of restabilising the region.
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So, what of the items that were supposed to feature prominently on the president’s agenda: democracy, Iran and an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal? The democracy agenda was discounted in the region long before the president’s visit and will not be taken anymore seriously as a consequence of meetings in UAE with young Arab leaders, in Saudi Arabia with entrepreneurs and in Kuwait with women activists. The Bush administration’s push for freedom has suffered from at least four basic flaws from the get-go. First, it has been obsessively election-centric and ill-attuned to local conditions. Second, it had no sensible, inclusive plan for dealing with the inevitable electoral successes of political Islamists. Third, touting freedom for everyone but denying it to the Palestinians under occupation was (somehow) perceived as hypocritical. And fourth, the Bush team had a special talent for delivering the message in the most patronizing, demeaning and unsympathetic way possible. Add to this list the real life experiences of post-election Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, and one understands why the neoconservative designers of the policy should be laughed out of town, rather than feted on the op-ed pages of the New York Times (see William Kristol). Oh, and saying nothing about the Israeli imprisonment of 43 members of the Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform party elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council does not make the message sound any more credible.
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And finally, Israel-Palestine. This is the one area where the president’s visit hinted at a genuine intention to get something done in the coming year. During his trip the president seemed to convince some sceptics of his personal commitment to achieving a two-state solution, and he belatedly accepted some of the logic that links an end of the occupation to progress on other issues in the region, including efforts to marginalise radicalism and build regional alliances.
But even those impressed by the demonstration of political will were left scratching their heads as to whether this US administration has the political skill to constructively engage. The appointment of three different US generals to oversee various aspects of the process suggests that Washington is still competence-challenged, and there are real question marks regarding the depth of American understanding of what the content of a mutually acceptable two-state deal would look like.
Finally, there is the continued self-defeating approach to Hamas. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley outline a way forward in this Middle East triangle of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas in today’s Guardian. They describe the need for Fatah and Hamas to reach a new agreement that Israel would not oppose, for Hamas and Israel to achieve a ceasefire and for Abbas and Olmert to negotiate a political deal (and have a mandate to do so from Hamas). ‘Synchronicity is key … . The current mindset, in which each side considers deal-making by the other two to be a mortal threat, could be replaced by one in which all three couplings are viewed as mutually reinforcing … a choreography that minimizes violence and promotes a serious diplomatic process’. Wise advise and advise that the Bush administration would do well to adopt if it is to salvage anything from a Middle East nightmare that it has been so seminal in shaping – or maybe it was all just about oil and arms sales“…
Daniel Levy’s thoughts on the results — or lack of them — from Bush’s recent visit to Israel and the West Bank were posted on 18 January here.
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