by Dore Gold
Mahmoud Abbas delivered
a speech on Jan. 4, on the anniversary of the founding of Fatah, that
may have marked a turning point in the relations between the Palestinian
Authority president and the State of Israel. Using extremist rhetoric
that he has not adopted before, Abbas spoke about the need of the
Palestinians "to renew an oath to the heroic martyrs and to walk in
their path."
In his list of
Palestinian "martyrs" are not only recent leaders of Hamas, like Sheikh
Ahmad Yassin and of the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad, like Fathi Shkaki,
but also figures from the 1930s, like Izzedine al-Qassam, and especially
the notorious Jerusalem mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who openly
collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
What happened to
Mahmoud Abbas? Hasn't he been regarded by Israeli leaders for the last
twenty years as a moderate who was interested in reaching a peace
agreement? What is important is not the vapid debate over whether Abbas
can still be regarded as a partner for peacemaking, but rather
understanding the hard fact that conditions have changed influencing the
declared intentions of leaders.
What is essential to
internalize is that the political environment in 2013 no longer
resembles what the Middle East looked like when Israel began talking to
the Palestinians in 1993.
There were three very
specific geostrategic conditions that prevailed when the political
process of the last two decades was originally launched in 1991. These
are now undergoing dramatic changes.
First, the Soviet Union
was collapsing leaving the U.S. the sole superpower dominating the
Middle East. With the U.S. armed forces deployed across the region after
the American victory in the first Gulf War, the supremacy of American
power was not theoretical but very real.
Second, with the defeat
of Saddam Hussein, the most powerful member of what had been known as
the “Rejectionist Front” was no longer a significant factor in the
Middle Eastern balance of power. The pro-American Arab pragmatists were
the predominant regional force.
And third, Iran, which
had not yet recovered from its eight-year long war against Iraq in the
previous decade, was not in any position to exploit the collapse of the
40-division strong Iraqi Army and assert itself as the new hegemonic
power.
These three conditions
set the stage for the convening of the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991
and later for the signing of the Oslo Agreements in 1993.
Yet, in 2013, that
unique international constellation plainly no longer exists. The
oil-rich Arab states, especially in the Persian Gulf, were concerned
that the American withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011, marked a new
period in which the U.S. would have far less to do militarily with the
region and could no longer be depended upon to assure their security.
Qatar effectively
jumped from the ship of American protection and made up with Tehran
already in 2007, when the Bush administration published its National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran. This move was interpreted as meaning that
Washington was not going to dedicate military resources to resolve the
problem of the Iranian march to nuclear weapons.
Moreover, with the
uprisings in the Arab world since 2011, a new rejectionist front has
come to power through Islamist parties that are now ruling from Tunisia
to Egypt. Hamas, which already ousted the Palestinian Authority in the
Gaza Strip in 2007, serves as a Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim
Brotherhood and hence has a built-in advantage over Abbas, given the new
regional map that was emerging.
Abbas, who in the past
looked to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as his key ally, now had to
contend with a Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo, which worked in
favor of his Islamist rival, Hamas. In Middle Eastern capitals, it
became widely believed that this shift came about with Washington's
approval. This was a huge overstatement, but nonetheless it was a shared
perception across the region.
Finally, despite the
losses it faces in Syria (including Lebanon), Iran has been
demonstrating an enhanced ability to project its influence with weapons,
training, and in some cases, special forces, by inserting itself into
multiple Middle Eastern conflicts, from Iraq to Yemen and from Sudan to
the Gaza Strip. Its activism is likely to only increase, should it cross
the nuclear threshold.
Israel does not have to
reach the conclusion that it has no diplomatic options with the
Palestinians and that an impasse is inevitable. But to proceed with any
initiative in the future it needs to make several important adjustments
in its approach. First, the next Israeli government must accept that
given what is going on in the Middle East, it is completely unrealistic
to propose negotiations to reach a full-blown final status agreement
with the Palestinians.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3223
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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