Time to Put the Middle East Quartet Out to Pasture
The past twelve months have seen unpredicted political and social upheaval throughout the Middle East and North Africa and currently just about the only certainty is that there is still much more to come.
With the cards still very much in the air and last January's confident assertions on the part of the various Middle East experts - who informed us that the two countries in which revolution would definitely not be taking place were Syria and Libya - still ringing in our ears almost as loudly as Hillary Clinton's bizarre assurance that Bashar Assad was 'a reformer', only fools would try to predict how the MENA region might look in five years' time.
What is clear, however, is that the general trend appears to be towards a rise in power on the part of religiously-motivated political elements and a deepening of the Sunni-Shia sectarian rift which has long existed in the region, alongside real cause for worry about the futures of other minorities.
In this volatile climate and with the fate of existing peace treaties between Israel and some of its Arab neighbours far from guaranteed, the Middle East Quartet (comprised of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States) is to meet next week in Jerusalem for another session of flogging the dead horse known as 'the peace process'.
Amazingly, with the Palestinian Authority having trawled up every possible excuse for not renewing negotiations over the past three years, having opted to pursue the unilateral option at the United Nations, and with Hamas-Fatah reconciliation as much of a pipe-dream as ever, the Quartet is still promoting the anachronistic notion that a peace agreement can be reached by the end of 2012.
No less hallucinatory is the affirmation in the Quartet statement of September 23rd of its adherence to "principles including land for peace, the Roadmap". Leaving aside the important fact that the Quartet has not managed to implement even the first clause of its Roadmap which relates to the cessation of incitement against Israel in Palestinian media, mosques and school text-books (as documented in a new book by Palestinian Media Watch), it is particularly disturbing that in the current regional climate the Quartet still thinks that 'land for peace' is a viable route to promote.
Despite the Israeli withdrawals from land in southern Lebanon in 2000 and the Gaza Strip in 2005, peace did not prevail. In fact, both areas are currently under the control of Islamist organizations deemed terrorist entities by members of the Quartet itself. The winds currently blowing in the Middle East would suggest that the political elements we are likely to see gaining strength and power in the near future are more likely to resemble Hamas and Hizbollah than anything the West could define as democratic and peace-loving.
In such an uncertain climate, the Israeli people are not about to authorize their government (no matter who is at its head) to take risks which could well lead to the creation of a third border with an area of land controlled by rocket-launching Islamists emboldened by the regional rise of their strain of politics. From Israel's point of view, this is a time for battening down the hatches, preparing for any eventuality and waiting until the stormy weather of the Arab Spring becomes clear.
The insistence on the part of the Quartet upon carrying on as though nothing had happened in the Middle East during the past year is therefore no more than a very expensive exercise in futility.
As much of the Western world battens down its own hatches in the face of a different kind of storm, its taxpayers – particularly the British ones – might ask themselves whether it makes sense to continue financing a project which has little to show for almost ten years of its activity and is extremely unlikely to be capable of meeting its declared objectives in the years to come.
Hadar Sela is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist living in Israel.
