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Carter continues her crusade
Making resolutions stick
16 JANUARY 2008 THE INVERNESS ORAN PAGE 9
George W. Bush and the Middle East
By Gwynne Dyer
“Let’s not raise our
expectations too high. We are
talking about weak leaders
on both sides, leaders who
can barely stand on their
own two feet....It seems fair
to say that no great miracle
will happen here.” So wrote
Israeli journalist Yoel Marcus
in Ha’aretz on the eve of
President George W. Bush’s
visit to Israel. The two weak
leaders he was talking about
were Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud
Abbas, the president of the
Palestinian Authority, but
it applies equally to Bush
himself.
The most positive thing
that can be said about Bush’s
whirlwind seven-day tour of
the Middle East (Israel, the
West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain,
the United Arab Emirates,
Saudi Arabia and Egypt, plus
perhaps a surprise stop in Iraq)
is that it probably won’t make
matters worse. On the other
hand, that’s mainly because
they are so bad already that it
would take real creativity to
make them worse.
The spin machines are
spinning, and optimistic
forecasts are being made for
the outcome of this Bush
administration initiative,
which seeks to create a legacy
of success in the form of
an Israeli-Palestinian peace
settlement after failure on
almost every other front.
(Please don’t mention Camp
David, Bill Clinton’s similar
failed bid for a legacy in the
last year of his eight-year
tenancy at the White House.
It annoys them.) But Clinton
was operating in a far more
promising environment than
Bush is, for reasons that are
not entirely Bush’s fault.
Back in the Clinton era
(1993-2001), there was still
reason to hope that there
might actually be a “twostate
solution” that saw an
independent Palestinian state
co-exist peacefully with Israel
on the territory of the former
British mandate of Palestine.
The Oslo accords of 1993 had
drawn up a plan intended to
lead to such a goal through
phased negotiations and
concessions, and hard-line
opponents of a compromise
peace on both sides worried
that the deal might actually
be made. But thanks in large
part to their obstructionism, it
never happened.
After the pro-peace Israeli
prime minister, Yitzhak
Rabin, was assassinated by
a Jewish extremist in 1995,
Palestinian hard-liners in the
Hamas and Islamic Jihad
organisations were so afraid
that Israelis would elect a
radical pro-peace government
on a sympathy vote that they
launched a terrorist busbombing
campaign to prevent
it. The aim was to kill enough
Israelis to caused a wave of
outrage that drove voters
into the arms of the rightwing
Likud Party, which
fundamentally opposed any
“land-for-peace” deal with the
Palestinians.
The bus bombs during the
1996 election duly delivered
the prime ministership to
Likud leader Binyamin
Netanyahu, who spent the
next three years pretending to
negotiate with the Palestinians
(to keep the Clinton White
House happy), while dragging
his feet on the moves that were
actually required to make a
Palestinian state viable. And
the bus bombings stopped,
because there was no longer
any genuine danger of a “twostate”
peace settlement.
The change of government
in Israel in mid-1999 created
a slim chance of reviving
the Oslo plan, although
Palestinian disillusionment
with the project was already
pretty deep. The Clinton
administration held the Camp
David talks in July, 2000 in
the desperate hope that lastminute
success could be
snatched from the jaws of
failure, but it didn’t happen.
By 2001, when George W.
Bush took office in the United
States, the second “intifada”
(Palestinian uprising) was
well underway.
Since then things have
gone from bad to worse.
Israelis have despaired
of a negotiated peace and
shifted towards unilateral
measures like the wall that
wends its way through the
West Bank, separating the
Israeli settlements from the
Palestinian hinterland. For
many Palestinians, the death of
Arafat in 2004 drained the last
credibility from the two-state
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