October 16, 2001	Tuesday	Rajab 28, 1422

BEIRUT: Tony Blair says that both he and George Bush are ”completely seized of the need to push forward” the Middle East peace process, because the Arab-Israeli conflict helps ”terrorists who seek to utilize prevailing feelings of frustration and despair in the Arab and Islamic world to justify terrorist activities”.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is reportedly preparing to put pressure on the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to accept a viable Palestinian state including a shared Al Quds. Officials describe President Bush as “incensed”, “really steamed”, over Sharon’s outburst likening Israel to Czechoslovakia in 1938, and warning him not to “appease the Arabs”.

All this comes close to recognition, by the two leaders of the war against terror, of the centrality of the Palestinian question in this crisis, the need to address it with greater urgency, seriousness and impartiality than ever before, and the likelihood that this means a decisive showdown with Sharon and the most extreme government in Israel’s history. This recognition is already an achievement for Osama bin Laden. It is being widely said that he is a messianic fanatic, totally and exclusively preoccupied with his holy war against the infidel West and with establishing Taliban-style rule throughout the Muslim world, and that he only seized on Palestine in opportunist demagogy.

This is not true. It stands to reason that destroying Israel, driving the Jews out of the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, of which Palestine is an intrinsic part, was always inherent in his world-view; and since the 1980s, when he fought the Russians in Afghanistan, he used to say that Palestine should be next.

Even if the accusation of opportunism were true, it would not alter the true centrality of the Palestine problem, it would merely show that, like any politician, he exploits the most profitable issues to hand. More thoughtful Palestinians do not want to be associated with the Lucifer of international terrorism, but, as newspaper editor Ghassan Khatib says, that Osama chooses to associate himself with the Palestinians simply means that “the Palestinian cause is the most legitimate and credible in the region”.

It has to be said that any Bush-Blair recognition of the obvious will create the unfortunate impression that terrorism does pay. The pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi was sarcastic about it: “It is nice of Blair to declare that the Palestinians have a right to live on their land, to achieve justice and an opportunity to prosper as equal partners to Israel, but did we have to wait for the loss of over 5,000 innocent American lives and billions of dollars to hear such words from the prime minister of the country that had the largest role in the tragedy of the Palestinian people?”

If, as Bush and Blair seem to acknowledge, the Palestine problem helped produce the conditions that created Osama, they must deal with those conditions now. They cannot just wait until their war is over. At the least, the US and Britain should show convincing proof that they are serious about Palestine. Two things might compel them to be. One is the gravity of the crisis. The other is Ariel Sharon. He is so extreme, so seemingly indifferent to the larger interests of Israel’s US benefactor, so recklessly apt to prove that his country, far from being the Western strategic asset it thought itself to be, is the most burdensome of liabilities. If the US and Britain are really serious, there is bound to be the kind of battle which successive American administrations, fearing the Zionist lobby’s extraordinary influence, have shied away from in the past.

The emotional blackmail of Sharon’s Czechoslovakia jibe, and the mentality and method that lie behind it, would then rebound against him, and against the whole Israeli rightist camp. It would not be very difficult for a US president, exasperated beyond endurance, to portray an Israeli leader with a violent and brutal past - and, because of the patriotic fervour of the times, carry the American public with him. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.