There is a tragic, pitiful quality to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s current tour around the Middle East. He says the trip is an effort to resurrect the Arab-Israeli peace process, but it seems much more obviously designed to salvage Blair’s fading reputation.
It is unlikely to succeed on either count, for the prime minister continues to pursue the same biased policies that generated the Palestine problem in the first place under his nation’s dishonest tutelage over a half-century ago. Blair, even more than the befuddled US secretary of state, 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 of 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 in Palestine in the 1930s, and it remains so today. This is also a tragic missed opportunity, because Blair has the potential to practice real statesmanship by supporting a peace process for Palestinians and Israelis that truly responds to their mutual needs. He could show the way towards a more stable Middle East for the dumbfounded US President George W. Bush, by fostering an Arab-Israeli negotiating process that starts to cool down other hot spots in the region.
He could help his European partners in reversing the rising tide of tension and mistrust between many in the Arab and Asian worlds and Europe. He could atone somewhat for British colonial mismanagement and duplicity. He could do all this and more if he only chose to be honest and principled rather than voraciously expedient. Blair’s United Kingdom and other medium-level world powers should 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 incoherences are many, and have been consistently destructive to both Middle Eastern societies and Blair’s own reputation. Blair makes a fine sound bite in asking the world to support “moderates in the Arab world who want peace, but his support for Abbas sends the message that corrupt and inefficient Arabs are the West’s preferred partners. Blair speaks eloquently about supporting democratic processes in the Arab world as an antidote to terror.
But he also speaks insincerely – for he quickly jumped on the Israeli-American bandwagon to boycott Hamas after its election victory in a rare Arab democratic endeavor. He reminds us that the UK today, as in the 1930s in Mandatory Palestine, favors the political will of Zionism and Israel over the democratic will of the indigenous majority of 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: “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-1948 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 state of their own, and brandishing political and moral irresponsibility as their policy compass. Blair’s insincerity does not escape us, nor has Britain’s. In the 1960s my Palestinian maternal great aunt was on her deathbed in Beirut, having lived through the entire modern history of Palestine from the 1910s.
I visited her shortly before she died, and 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 a life’s journey, “you should remember two important things: Always brush your teeth well in the morning and evening, and never trust the British.
Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR
