The Hindu : Lessons from West Asia

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Wednesday, Jun 19, 2002

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Lessons from West Asia

By Kesava Menon

Examples of institutional rot as displayed most vividly in Gujarat are not at all conducive to ending the state of perpetual animosity with our Muslim-majority neighbour to the West.

AS ANALYSTS in India agonise over the label they should attach to the role the Bush administration is currently playing with regard to the India-Pakistan face-off they might find it useful to look at the mediatory functions the United States has taken on itself in respect of West Asia. India is, of course, nowhere near as well embedded in the American political consciousness as Israel is but for that matter neither are Pakistan and the Arab world equally placed in Washington's scale of importance. Within the limits set by these caveats it should still be possible to learn some useful lessons.

Despite the continuance of violence between Israelis and Palestinians there is a widely-held and pretty firm idea about the shape of the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Such a solution will involve the creation of a Palestinian state to exist alongside Israel, slight adjustments to the 1967 borders, the return of Palestinian refugees to the state that will be created, evacuation of most Jewish colonies in the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip and shared sovereignty over Jerusalem. Opinion polls show that even now, after nearly two years of extreme violence, slender majorities on either side acknowledge that these will be more or less the contours on which a final settlement will be struck. Many of those who so acknowledge might not be fully satisfied with such a settlement but they are prepared to live with it.

A settlement along these lines is not merely something that well-wishers of both sides would like them to arrive at. Negotiators from both sides almost arrived at such a solution during the talks in Taba in January 2001. A wall of mistrust and bitterness was being built even as the Taba talks were taking place and it has only become more formidable since then. But the idea of the two-state solution has not died and still forms the central elements of all the peace-making efforts currently underway whether it be the Arab initiative, George W. Bush's vision for West Asia, the summit meeting that is being talked about or the diplomatic run-about of the Europeans.

What everyone, inside and outside the region, also acknowledges is that neither of the elected leaderships of the Israelis or the Palestinians is going to agree to a settlement along these lines unless and until pushed into it. There will be many people on both sides of the divide, and people with very strong political convictions at that, who will not be just dissatisfied with such a settlement but will vehemently oppose it. The Israeli right will find it very difficult to abandon the concept of a Jewish state between the river and the sea or to accept a division of Jerusalem and the dismantling of settlements.

On the other side, there will be Palestinians who will not be able to tolerate Israel's continued existence or be able to abandon the right of the refugees to return to ancestral land now inside Israel. But the fact that slender majorities on either side continue to acknowledge the inevitability of the two-state solution and the fact that these majorities have been wider during periods of peace keeps alive the hope that such a solution can be pushed through. For the longer term, the hope is that the hard right on either side will eventually accept the outcome if and when the two states begin to live in neighbourly harmony. In the current situation, it is widely acknowledged that the U.S. administration alone can push the Israelis and the Palestinians to an agreement. Mr. Bush and his officials seem to have abandoned their old line that they cannot wish for peace more strongly than the two parties directly concerned and that Washington will not offer its services unless the Israelis and the Palestinians are clear that they want to make use of it. While Bush & Co. have yet to push let alone shove they do seem to recognise that they cannot dither indefinitely on the sidelines.

Mr. Bush has at least partially bought into the argument of Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in stating that a thorough reform of the Palestinian Authority is a necessary adjunct, though not a pre-condition (as Mr. Sharon insists it should be), to the revival of substantive negotiations. This is in all probability a smokescreen created by Mr. Sharon to avoid the necessity for negotiations and it also probably serves Mr. Bush as a justification for prevarication. It is also insulting to the Palestinians that their adversary and its main ally should be dictating to them how they should live their political lives. Yet, if these elements are set aside and the Israelis' formulations on the contents of a real peace are examined on their own merits there are lessons to be learnt.

Israelis of almost all political persuasions are convinced that real peace will require two very important developments on the Palestinian side. The establishment of a truly democratic Palestinian society is one and a change in the officially encouraged attitude towards Israel is the other. By creating and propagating a diabolical image of Israel and by inciting its people to wage war against such an enemy the Palestinian Authority hardly advances the cause of peace, say the Israelis. Ordinary Palestinians are more likely to have formed such an image about Israel based on their own experience with the occupation of their territories without any official prompting. Israeli doves and well-wishers of both sides might also be indulging in wishful thinking when they advocate that Palestinian hatred for Israelis will die once the occupation ends. But for all this there is an important lesson in that the health of the rivals' institutions and the basic view about the other that is officially promoted are elements that have to be addressed in peace-making elsewhere.

Coming to the South Asian context, it is clear that examples of institutional rot as displayed most vividly in Gujarat are not at all conducive to ending the state of perpetual animosity with our Muslim-majority neighbour to the West. The Gujarat incidents have been rightly condemned for a whole host of reasons and it is only an additional point to state that such behaviour only encourages Pakistanis to believe that India is made up of minority-hating Hindu fanatics out to expand and subjugate their neighbours. This belief is just one element in the complex of beliefs, ideas and emotions that propel hostility towards India from the Pakistani side. But the fact of it should not just be brushed aside, as our official machinery repeatedly tends to do, if peace-making with Pakistan is to be seriously pursued.

From the official Indian point of view, developments inside Pakistan have thus far been regarded as their own affair and rightly so. But is it possible to envisage a real and enduring peace with Pakistan until the military in that country comes under the full control of elected leaders who can themselves be held accountable. Issues such as these should be focussed upon instead of fanciful notions of confederation and so forth.

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