Palestine can't wait until all this is over
David Hirst, Guardian News Service, Beirut
Tony Blair says that both he and George Bush are "completely seized of the need to push forward" the Middle East peace process, because the Arab-Israeli conflict helps "terrorists who seek to utilize prevailing feelings of frustration and despair in the Arab and Islamic world to justify terrorist activities".
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is reportedly preparing to put pressure on the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to accept a viable Palestinian state.
All this comes close to recognition, by the two leaders of the war against terror, of the centrality of the Palestinian question, the need to address it with greater urgency, seriousness and impartiality than ever before, and the likelihood that this means a decisive showdown with Sharon and the most extreme government in Israel's history.
This recognition is already an achievement for Osama bin Laden. He is said to be preoccupied with his holy war against the infidel West and with establishing Taliban-style rule throughout the Muslim world, and that he only seized on Palestine in opportunist demagogy.
This is not true. Destroying Israel, driving the Jews out of the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, of which Palestine is an intrinsic part, was always inherent in his world-view; and since the 1980s, when he fought the Russians in Afghanistan, he used to say that Palestine should be next.
Even if the accusation of opportunism were true, it would merely show that, like any politician, he exploits the most profitable issues to hand.
Bin Laden is only doing what Saddam Hussein did in 1990: Saddam pioneered the concept of "linkage" between Palestine and any (separate) crisis of another's making. Having perpetrated his great act of international banditry, the rape of Kuwait, Saddam announced he would withdraw from it as soon as Israel withdrew from the occupied territories.
To Arabs and Muslims, this linkage, and the Western bias that has made it possible for Saddam and bin Laden to exploit it, is an obvious, fundamental reality -- even if they concede that sicknesses in their own societies are also part of the reality. And, for them, the fact that it is so obvious explains why the other side seems so resolutely blind to it.
Even the Washington Post argued that "the largest single cause of Islamic extremism and terrorism" is pro-western Arab governments that "encourage state-controlled clerics and media to promote the anti-Western, anti-modern and anti-Jewish propaganda of the Islamic extremists".
Any Bush-Blair recognition of the obvious will create the unfortunate impression that terrorism does pay. The pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi wrote: "It is nice of Blair to declare that the Palestinians have a right to live on their land ... but did we have to wait for the loss of over 5,000 innocent American lives and billions of dollars to hear such words from the prime minister of the country that had the largest role in the tragedy of the Palestinian people?"
Neither Bush nor Blair can admit that linkage is again surreptitiously asserting itself. But it is. Once the Kuwait crisis was over, the U.S. could no longer summon up the will to fulfill the pledge that George Bush Senior had made to the Arabs: "To push the Israelis into a solution".
But this is a far graver crisis, of no known duration, scope or definable outcome. If the Palestine problem helped produce the conditions that created bin Laden, they must deal with those conditions now.
It means that there can be no widening of the war to embrace Iraq. Arab and Muslim attitudes to the Iraqi question are now almost entirely derivative of the Palestine question. The relentless punishment inflicted on the miscreant Arab state is bad; it is infinitely worse when set against the indulgence which the U.S. allows what, to Arabs and Muslims, is equally miscreant Israeli protege.
The U.S. and Britain could only deal with Saddam after they have given convincing proof that they are serious about Palestine.
Will they be? Two things might compel them to be. One is the gravity of the crisis. The other is Ariel Sharon. He is so extreme, so seemingly indifferent to the larger interests of Israel's U.S. benefactor, so recklessly apt to prove that his country, far from being a Western strategic asset, is the most burdensome of liabilities. If the U.S. and Britain are really serious, there is bound to be the kind of battle which successive American administrations, fearing the Zionist lobby's extraordinary influence, have shied away from in the past.
It wouldn't be very difficult for an exasperated U.S. president to portray an Israeli leader with a brutal past -- and, because of the patriotic fervor of the times, carry the American public with him.