Gerald Warner: Cursed are the peacemakers in the Middle East

Attitudes will not change; historic hatreds are immutable

That detachment is not shared by our politicians. A century ago the British political class confected the Balfour Declaration, in the days when manufacturing and opening cans of worms was an imperial industry. There were few corners of the globe with problems so intractable they could not be skilfully aggravated by the proconsuls of His Britannic Majesty. Post-Balfour, the establishment did not share his Zionist sympathies: for the public school policymakers in King Charles Street the culture of the souk and the desert held more appeal. Britain’s tradition of cack-handed intervention found a ready imitator in the United States, starting at Versailles in 1919, then going global as the 20th century progressed.

Today, in a climactic parody of that chronicle of incompetence, the Anglo-Saxon axis is represented in the bear-pit that is the Palestinian problem by Barack Obama and Tony Blair, the two most busted flushes in the discarded deck of geopolitical cards. Blair’s role as the Quartet’s peace envoy is a sick joke: nobody could seriously have imagined his presence would be constructive. The West needs to regain influence in the Middle East – why not send the instigator of the Iraq invasion? Obama is there ex officio, which serves the American electorate right.

His speech last week at the United Nations was tedious garbage. Everyone knows that he and his Democrat Party advisers have been poring over the printouts showing his evaporating support among Jewish voters and that is the only consideration of concern to any US administration of either party. America is debarred from any effective role in resolving the Palestinian question by the realistic perception that the White House and the Capitol are indentured to the Jewish lobby. That alienation of the Arab street has been further intensified by the past decade of intervention in Middle Eastern affairs.

When Obama approached the UN podium he was not focused on statesmanlike prescriptions to resolve historic hatreds: he was thinking about his party managers’ warnings that the recent Republican win in New York’s Ninth Congressional District was apocalyptic evidence the Jewish vote had collapsed because of Obama’s policy towards Israel. Of course, Israel returning to its pre-1967 boundaries is a minimal precondition of any settlement; but no US president can deliver that prize.

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stood on the same platform last Friday to demand full statehood and UN membership, he knew his application would be vetoed by America in the Security Council. He too was grandstanding: he wanted to appease his own public and to get out from beneath the shadow of Yasser Arafat by defying America. In any case, UN membership would be a meaningless gain, after the first euphoria had worn off: peace cannot be made by the so-called international community in New York, but only by Israel and Palestine. Since the original 1947 UN proposals were for a two-state solution it is difficult to see on what grounds the UN could now reject such a situation, especially since the territory that has changed hands since then is occupied by the member state, Israel, not the non-member, Palestine.

There is no real desire for or prospect of peace in the Middle East. On the Palestinian side the past 60 years have been marked by terrorism, chaos, incompetence and handing Gaza to Hamas. Israel has responded with bigger and more aggressive settlements on the West Bank and intransigence over its 1967 conquests. Now it has lost the benevolent neutrality of Egypt and Turkey. The West has mindlessly encouraged the “Arab Spring”, mesmerised by the mirage of “democracy”. The kind of democracy that gave Hamas control of Gaza, do they mean? Freedom of expression across the Arab states means unleashing the dogs of war.

Only deluded Western liberals imagine democracy – the preferred euphemism for mob rule – is benevolent. Israel’s neighbours want to destroy it. A peace settlement, even on the pre-1967 boundaries, would be reneged upon and war resumed. There is no solution: the Palestinian question has no answer. Attitudes will not change; historic hatreds are immutable, whatever Guardianistas and bien-pensants imagine. The demography is inexorable: history shows enclaves such as Israel, in the long term, are doomed – despite the best offices of Blair and Obama. In any case, even for that region of the world, two messiahs operating simultaneously smacks of overload.