After the Champions League Hangover: Nuclear Proliferation and Peace in the Middle East

After the Champions League Hangover: Nuclear Proliferation and Peace in the Middle East

After the Champions League finals hangover, let’s get back to some key world events and issues. These include the following: North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests, Iran’s continued desire to acquire nuclear weapons and existential threats against Israel, Pakistan’s all-out assault on Taliban Islamists in the Swat and surrounding regions, and Obama’s clear message to the Israelis and Palestinians that a two-state solution and the end of settlements in the West Bank are crucial for regional and global peace.

Some of the aforementioned issues are indeed connected. Others have their own logic. The North Koreans and Iranians challenge the right of a select group of nations to acquire nuclear weapons. They are both totalitarian-authoritarian regimes that use the nuclear issue as much to cement national support as question the nature of global politics. Kim Jong-Il and Ahmadinejad might appear mad, fanatical, and ideological, but their pressing of the nuclear issue is designed to gain more concessions from the international community from regimes that are losing domestic popular support. Elections are coming up in June in Iran, while the North Korean dictator is showing perhaps one last flash of rejection to the international community before he dies.

Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic of Iran, the Pakistani state's offensive in Swat, and Obama’s two-state approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are surely connected. For the US, the West, and Israel, the aim is to stop the tide of political Islamism. This is a growing concern for Israel with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah on its northern flank in Lebanon, and a growing constituency of Islamists in both Israel proper and the West Bank (Fatah-controlled). It is a growing concern for Israel that Iran funds Islamists in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq. It is troubling for the US that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have increased the power of Islamist movements, which radically reject foreign intervention in the Muslim ummah (pan-Islamic “nation” or community of believers). For Islamists, Israel is an alien, foreign body that must be destroyed and united as part of the ummah. For the Pakistanis, who were allied to the Taliban pre-9-11 and have many Islamist sympathisers among the ISI (Pakistan’s secret services), they now realize that giving the Islamists the Swat region was a grave mistake. It emboldened Islamists to march to other parts of Pakistan. They hope to one die take Islamabad, sever the relationship of the state with the US, and turn Pakistan into a radical, shari’a (Islamic law) state.

Obama’s logic is the following: Arab states since 2005 have increasingly expressed a desire for full relations with Israel in exchange for a two-state solution, the end of settlements, and the full return of the West Bank and Golan to the Palestinians and Syrians respectively. Iran is a growing presence in the region, turning the tide away from compromise and a two-state solution. Iranians carry the rejectionist front mantle vis-à-vis Israel that was once carried by radical secular Marxists, pan-Arabists, and nationalists. Of course, there are outstanding issues like the right of return, Jerusalem, and the boundaries of the new Palestinian state. The first will perhaps be acknowledged through compensation, or a statement of contrition. Jerusalem can perhaps be under joint Palestinian-Israeli control, acting as a model of friendly relations in a land that is holy to three monotheistic faiths. On boundaries, most acknowledge the 1967 boundaries, before Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights.

But like in any conflict, the key is a will for compromise by all parties. The Obama gamble is that a two-state solution undermines political Islamism and brings quiet among Palestinians and the Arab world. Yet, with Hamas in power in Gaza and the right-wing Netanyahu government ruling Israel, a two-state solution may be delayed. A two-state solution might not stop radicals that want to annihilate Israel (secular leftists and Islamists), but maintaining the state of affairs of Palestinian semi-statelessness, checkpoints, demolitions, and the arming for war is also no option.

The two-state solution is really in the interests of the US, Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab world. Yet not in Iran’s interest, or in the interests of the Islamists. Can you imagine Palestinians, Israelis, and Arabs with full trading, diplomatic, scientific, sporting, and cultural exchanges? Can you imagine swords turned into ploughshares from Gaza and Jenin to Tel-Aviv and Haifa? Can you imagine the military industrial complex of the region turned into institutes of cultural and national understanding and tolerance?

Conflicts continue because of mistrust, sentiments of revenge, fundamentalist visions, historical enmity, and all-or-nothing calculations. Yet, there must be a will for peace. Then there will be a way to peace. Leaders must rise to the task in both the Arab world and Israel. Ideologies of hatred and extermination in the schools and media must be undermined in the Arab world. If we miss this opportunity to miss another opportunity for peace, then Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians, and other Arabs must ask themselves if they have the stomach for more wars, bloodshed, and suffering? For how long? And if they do, then are they not addicted to conflict, violence, and war?

Tamir Bar-On