BEIRUT — There is a tragic, pitiful quality to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s current trip around the Middle East, which he says aims to resurrect an Arab-Israeli peace process, though it seems much more obviously designed to salvage some of his own fading reputation. It is unlikely to succeed on either count, for he continues to pursue the same sort of biased policies that generated the Palestine problem in the first instance under his nation’s dishonest tutelage over half a century ago.
Tony Blair, even more than the befuddled Condoleezza Rice, has come to epitomize in a single stroke the three most destructive tendencies of Western powers in the Middle East in the past century: sending their militaries to rearrange our region, intervening in domestic conflicts to help one of the feuding local parties, and generally ignoring the democratic rights of the majority of Palestinians and Arabs, in favor or Israel or chosen Arab elites who pay as much attention to the needs of Israel and the Western powers as they do to their own people’s rights and sentiments. This has been a proven recipe for conflict and disaster since colonial Great Britain first sided with Zionism over Arabism in Palestine in the 1930s, and it remains so today.
This is also a tragic missed opportunity, because Tony Blair has the potential to practice real statesmanship by supporting a political and peace process among Palestinians and Israelis that truly responds to their mutual needs. He could show the way towards a more stable Middle East for the dumbfounded George W. Bush, by fostering an Arab-Israeli negotiating process that starts to cool down some of the other hot spots in the region. He could help his European partners reverse the rising tide of tension and mistrust between many in the Arab-Asian region and Europe. He could atone somewhat for Britain’s colonial mismanagement and duplicity.
He could do all this and more if he only chose to be honest, rather than dishonest, and principled, rather than voraciously expedient. Blair’s UK should assert and stand up for the rule of law, impartiality, consistency, democratic pluralism, and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Instead, by boycotting and starving the democratically elected Hamas government, supporting the politically frail and largely discredited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas, and standing firm alongside Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Blair seems likely only to exacerbate tensions within Palestine and between Palestinians and Israelis. His incoherencies are many, and consistently destructive to both our societies and his reputation.
He makes for a fine sound bite in asking the world to support “moderates” in the Arab world who want peace, but his support of Mahmoud Abbas in the internal Palestinian power struggle sends the message that corrupt and inefficient Arabs are the West’s chosen partner. He speaks eloquently about supporting democratic processes in the Arab world as an antidote to terror, but also insincerely — for he quickly jumped on the Israeli-American bandwagon to boycott Hamas after its election victory in a rare modern Arab democratic endeavor.
He reminds us that Great Britain today, as in the 1930s in mandatory Palestine, favors the political will of Zionism and Israel over the democratic will of the indigenous majority Palestinian Arabs, or the equal rights of both communities. He is free to hold that position, of course, but he sounds like a fool — or simply an eccentric Englishman in Arabia — when he simultaneously preaches to us about democracy and moderation while practicing immoderation, supporting a bizarre Palestinian thugocracy, and boycotting democratically elected governments.
Blair said Monday in Palestine-Israel: “If the international community really means what it says about supporting people who share the vision of a two-state solution, who are moderate, who are prepared to shoulder their responsibilities, then now is the time for the international community to respond.”
This sensible commitment to moderation, a two-state vision, shouldering responsibility and acting in a timely manner is embarrassingly contradicted, however, by the policies of Blair’s and many other British governments going back nearly a century. Their cumulative policies have been characterized by immoderation, partiality and bias, ignoring the democratic will of the majority, turning a blind eye to pre-state Zionist terror and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, responding to urgent issues with immobility and negligence, favoring the security of the Israeli state over the rights of the Palestinians to a parallel state, and brandishing political and moral irresponsibility as their policy compass.
This insincerity does not escape us, and has not done so for generations. I recall in the 1960s when my aged maternal Palestinian great aunt was on her deathbed in Beirut, having lived through the entire modern history of Palestine from the 1910s. When I was visiting her one day shortly before she died, she offered me sage advice, garnered from much bitter experience: “If you want to live a long and happy life,” she told me, then a lad of 16 years just embarking on life’s journey, which she was completing, “you should remember two important things: Always brush your teeth well in the morning and evening, and never trust the British.”
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 19 December 2006
Word Count: 848
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