A durable system is the key

[This is the remaining part of the article “A new patriarch is born” published in yesterday’s issue.]

LET me now turn to East Asia and see what Pakistan can learn from the experiences of political patriarchs that governed that part of the world. There was once a broadly shared view according to which democracy could stand in the way of economic development and social improvement. It used to be argued that a tidy and tightly managed system of government run by a well-intentioned patriarch could ensure economic growth.

Not only that. Such a system could also help the poor by getting resources to be flown to them without being captured by several layers of elites who stood between the government and the people it wished to serve. This line of thinking gained considerable currency following the amazing economic and social success of several countries in East Asia.

For nearly a quarter century, from the early seventies to the late nineties, the East Asian patriarchs oversaw the remarkable economic and political transformation of their countries. There was an uninterrupted growth rate of eight to ten per cent a year in the gross domestic product of these countries. Their economies were some eighth times larger by the close of the 20th century than they were in 1975. Most of these countries had already begun to see rapid declines in the rate of fertility which brought the increase in population down to about one per cent a year.

In the twenty year period between 1975 and 2000, most East Asian countries saw the total size of their populations increase one and half times. Since population growth rate did not eat much into economic growth, the increase in the GDP was translated into a significant improvement in individual incomes. Since the GDPs had increased eight-fold, that meant that income per head of the population increased more than five-fold.

Many of those who investigated the circumstances that produced the East Asian miracle highlighted the role played by leaders. They believed that it was a set of strong political operators — some of them with military backgrounds — who brought economic growth to many parts of East Asia and also ensured a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty in that region. How did they do this? This is an important question not only for economic historians who wish to understand the circumstances that led to the remarkable economic and social transformation of East Asia. This is also a question of considerable import for today’s Pakistan.

The East Asian model had many aspects. Of these the one most critical for Pakistan is the role of the state. The state under the guidance of strong leaders played a vital role in transferring the region’s large savings into several high performing sectors. The state in East Asia was important in several different ways: it helped to allocate resources, it improved the technological base of the economies, and it promoted human development. All these roles are important for today’s Pakistan and, consequently, a word about each one of them is warranted.

The state in East Asia chose the sectors which it supported with much care. It didn’t own them; it only created the circumstances in which they could grow and prosper. Most of the favoured sectors had the potential to capture market shares from industries in developed countries. It was this policy that led to the remarkable growth of Korea’s steel, engineering, ship-building and automobile industries. It was this approach that made the Singapore and Taiwan such power houses in high-tech industries. It was this line of thinking that brought success to Malaysia’s and Thailand’s consumer electronic industries.

And it was under the guidance provided by the state that Hong Kong became the financial and service centre of all of East Asia, including the southern parts of mainland China. Most western economists have disparaged this approach to development, calling it the “picking the winners” approach. They don’t like it since they want winners to be picked by the markets, not by the state. But it worked for a long time in East Asia. And, I believe it could work for Pakistan. This will be General Pervez Musharraf’s real challenge but also an opportunity for him to grasp.

While picking the winners, the state also ensured that the private sector had the technology to compete in world markets. It would have taken a great deal of expense on the part of the private entrepreneurs to equip themselves with the technologies they needed. Most of them did not have the resources needed to bring in modern, cutting-edge technologies to their industries. Accordingly, the state came in to help. An elaborate system of state sponsored research and development was set up that has now become the envy of the world.

Before, the East Asian countries went through their “miracle years”, the state had already made a great deal of investment in developing the region’s human resource. This was done by concentrating a significant amount of state’s abundant resources on education and health. The state deliberately invested not only in basic education but also in improving the skill base of the population.

What lessons should General Pervez Musharraf draw from the patriarchal experiences of Pakistan and other Asian countries? At this stage, I would focus on the following two: creating a representative form of government and strengthening the state.

General Musharraf must move Pakistan towards a political system that provides full representation to all segments of the population. A political system’s durability depends on its ability to give voice to all segments of the population. That did not happen in Pakistan no matter who was in charge, the army or the politicians. Pakistan’s other military presidents left unhappy political legacies since they favoured systems based on extremely narrow bases. Ayub Khan relied essentially on the support of the bureaucratic elite that formed links with the emerging financial and industrial groups. Zia ul-Haq tried to stand on the narrow shoulders of the Islamic groups. In both cases the support base was too small to withstand the shocks when they came.

The East Asian patriarchs erected their systems on what was later described as crony-capitalism. Their approach was not too different from that pursued by Ayub Khan in Pakistan in the sixties. They, like President Ayub, sought to build their support on inter-locking relations among a group of bureaucrats who dispensed favours and the captains of commerce, finance and industry who received them. These structures were not able to withstand the pressures released by economic turbulence. Ayub Khan fell from power essentially because of the failure of the system he had put in place to sustain economic development beyond 1966. Ayub Khan was gone three years later. Similarly, East Asian crony capitalism created extreme distortions that could not be contained by it. It too had to be abandoned.

Tall buildings must have deep foundations. Or else, even mild wafts of wind can topple them. The same is true of political systems. They cannot be built on the narrow bases provided by business, finance and industry. They cannot be erected on the base of support of a bureaucracy. Even a representative system of local government of the type being developed now in Pakistan cannot be the base of a durable political structure. Local governments can help with economic and social development at the community level. But hey cannot do the work of political parties.

Political parties are by far the most important part of the foundation of a political system. Without them, a political system cannot function. Musharraf’s approach to nation-building does not seem to focus on developing political parties into organizations that can aggregate the wishes and aspirations of people. Admittedly most large political parties opposed the plans to hold a referendum. They also gave the military government little support over the last two and a half years. But that should not mean that they should be excluded from the process of political development on which the military government is embarked. As Ayub Khan discovered to his great grief, a system of local government cannot be a substitute for political parties. A major part of the programme aimed at giving Pakistan a viable political structure should involve the strengthening of political parties.

History’s second important lesson is that political patriarchs in the developing world, including those who held sway at various times in Pakistan, ultimately suffered by not emphasizing the importance of a functioning state. A state that works embodies a number of things — the rule of law, an efficient legal system, the ability to provide basic services to all people, regulatory systems to guide the various sectors of the economy.

If General Pervez Musharraf is interested in leaving a legacy of which he will be proud and that will bestow him with a place of honour in Pakistan’s turbulent and to-date unhappy history, he will have to work on at least two fronts: the development of political parties so that they can support a durable political system and providing Pakistan with a functioning state. He now has the opportunity to move simultaneously in these two directions. He must not miss this opportunity.

Concluded

The haze of ambiguity

THE recurring ambivalence of the various statements of the officials of the foreign forces engaged in the “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan could perhaps be overlooked but for their serious implications for Pakistan and its security.

Maj-Gen Rob Fry, commandant-general of the (British) Royal Marines and commander of the British warships in the Gulf, speaking to media persons at the Bagram air base last Friday, stated that the objective of the US-led coalition’s mission in Afghanistan was to create a “viable and enduring state.” He did not quite define what would constitute a viable and enduring state out of the war ravaged country.

According to what Gen Rob Fry went on to say, the most that could realistically be expected was that Afghanistan would have been given “a considerable amount of help”, had consequently become a functioning society in its own right and pre-conditions would then have been created “to allow the Afghans to look after their own business.” The general then qualified his statement by adding that this would not necessarily mean that “Afghanistan would be completely devoid of terrorism.”

He referred to an incident in the Spanish capital the other day in which bombs went off outside the Real Madrid Sports Stadium. How this incident was relevant to the international force’s operation in Afghanistan is not easy to understand. Unless what is being suggested is that even after the guerilla elements had been, by and large, subdued in Afghanistan, there would continue to be incidents of the type in some parts of the world and the “war on terror” in Afghanistan would continue.

Gen Rob Fry also spoke of the possibility that within Afghanistan a guerilla force could evolve which would be “less easy to defeat with conventional forces.” One sincerely hopes he was not apprehending a situation which would entail the use of non-conventional forces or weapons. That would mean unmitigated disaster that may not remain confined to Afghanistan.

However, Maj-gen Rob Fry also spoke of a possible transformation of the “political circumstances” in which the guerillas would not be able to garner support from outside sources. This would imply not only the military situation but would also include steps for providing humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Afghans, creation of an Afghan national army owing allegiance to the state and the convening of the Loya Jirga. The jirga is scheduled to be held next month with the objective to create an interim administration for the coming two years.

The Commandant-General of the Royal Marines then said something quite unexpected: he maintained that for the war in Afghanistan to be declared successful, the arrest or killing of Osama bin Laden was not an essential prerequisite. This is not how the war was originally perceived. Of course, going by what the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had said four days earlier while visiting the Bishkek air base in Kyrgyzstan, the Operation Enduring Freedom, launched in Afghanistan in October, had already been “very successful” and the Taliban no longer governed the country.

Rumsfeld’s statement, too, was not without its touch of ambiguity and ambivalence. He had said: “The people of Afghanistan have been liberated; there is no question.” He also contended that “the Al Qaeda had been training people in terrorist training camps” and even “complimented” them on their professionalism in this regard. It is not quite clear from the official text of what Rumsfeld said in Bishkek whether he was referring to training imparted to the terrorists in the past (although this is presumably what he meant) or that it was an ongoing situation.

He was quite emphatic that the “people of Afghanistan had been liberated.” He stressed the need to keep the potential terrorists under pressure so that they did not reassemble just in the mountains in Afghanistan or in the adjoining territory. In any case, they had to be kept under pressure, so that they would not try to retake Afghanistan or move into other countries.

The fact that reinforcements of men and material continue to arrive in Afghanistan, sometimes under the cover of darkness at night, suggests that the US-led coalition force against terror was not quite certain if the war had been won or that trouble would not erupt again in Afghanistan.

The reported killing of 30 civilians in a rocket attack on Gardez by a “warlord”, Padshah Khan Zadran, a week ago suggests that the situation remains unpredictable.

According to some reports Padshah Khan had once been allied to the coalition force and to Dr Hamid Karzai. The US general commanding the ground forces in Afghanistan, Gen Franklin ‘Buster’ Hagenbeck, confirmed that Padshah Khan had once been an ally, and added: “We have had that (sort of) relationship with a variety of warlords in Afghanistan but no alliances are permanent.” Asked if Padshah Khan was still an ally or not, Gen Hagenbeck said that he would not categorize him either way and that it was up to Dr Hamid Karzai to do so. Incidents such as these could be taken to mean that the situation in Afghanistan continues to be unpredictable, something that is of deep concern to Pakistan.

There are indications that the “international coalition against terrorism” would want to create a standing Afghan national army, for improving the security in Afghanistan. However, the US at the same time recognizes that the security environment in Afghanistan could never be like that in the US or in western Europe. Rumsfeld has gone on record to say that “a country like Afghanistan is used to a good deal of unrest” and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) could at best work towards “improving” the situation.

This appears to imply that the ISAF or its essential elements would indefinitely need to continue to be based in Afghanistan so long as the country and its neighbourhood is unsettled. If that is so, Pakistan too would continue to remain somewhat insecure. In their hunt for the remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the ISAF has been operating on the Pakistani side of the tribal belt in the proximity of Paktia province where trouble erupts every now and then. Is the US looking for permanent bases in Pakistan?

It is widely conjectured that the US and other western countries would want to retain a strategic foothold in, or close to, Afghanistan in the interest of their future operational plans for the region. There is recurrent talk of the US wanting to extend its operations to include Iraq.

For the present Washington has denied that it has any intention to launch an operation against Iraq but it has invariably expressed its lack of trust in Baghdad’s assurances of not possessing any means for the production of weapons of mass destruction, something which the US would never permit. There have also been vague reports of the US deploying “several hundred troops” and Apache attack helicopters close to the Pakistan border. While declining to confirm (or deny) the reports, Rumsfeld has told newsmen that “al Qaeda were still hiding in Afghanistan and along the border in Pakistan.” All this is rather disquieting.

It appears that the Pakistani tribal belt close to Paktia is not the only source of anxiety to ISAF. Unauthorized checkposts have apparently been set up on roads around Mazar-i-Sharif. These are reportedly manned by soldiers who were expected to be replaced by the civilian police some months ago. Gen Abdur Razzak, a deputy police chief, has described the checkposts as “a great problem for the city as they are filled with thieves and murderers.”

Ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras are said to be feuding for the control of the area with rival militias “competing for power.” A special report by Susan B. Glasser of The Washington Post, which was also carried by this paper last week, made the startling disclosure that former Taliban officials still hold “high ranking security jobs” in the area while rival militias run parallel police forces. The veracity of such reports is difficult to verify. However, even if there is a fraction of truth in what Glasser claims, the situation in Afghanistan cannot be said to be fully stable or in any real sense under the control of the ISAF.

The Afghans have a tradition of being fiercely protective of their independence. The tradition has to be respected in the scheme of things which is emerging after the ISAF has cleared the region of Taliban and terrorists.

Enough to make you cry: OF MICE AND MEN

HOW many middle class homes in Pakistan can honestly paste on their door the sticker, that I have come across, saying “This home is child labour free?”

I am not going below the middle class because at the lower levels the householders do not have the education and enlightenment of the modern day that propagates against child labour. Going lower still you reach the stratum where if the children of the house did not work the family would die of starvation.

I have written about child labour before, but what can such sporadic writing achieve as long as there is no strong will on the part of the government and the public to change the system? And the labour part is just one of the numerous ugly facets about the state of children in this country about which many NGOs are concerned, none more so than the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child based in Islamabad, with offices in Peshawar and Lahore. I would need to write a whole book just to acquaint you with what the Society, headed by Anees Jilani, has been doing.

Talking of books, the Society (which has come to be known by the acronym SPARC) publishes an annual report on the State of Pakistan’s Children and has been doing so for the last five years. The latest, for the year 2001, has just come to hand. These five reports are actually full-fledged books, each of more than 200 pages, and tell you all that you may want to know about how the children of the masses are faring — or suffering — and all that the government is not repeat not, doing for them. The public is kept reminded of all this through two periodicals, a quarterly newsletter and the quarterly Discourse.

However the size and contents of these books pale in comparison before the monumental Cries Unheard: Juvenile Justice in Pakistan. You have to see it to believe the amount of hard work, research, visits to prisons and sympathy that have gone into its more than 600 pages. It’s a guide and record that all social workers and lawyers should be constantly looking into. When I say lawyers I mean those lawyers who are ready to strengthen the acuteness of their minds with the prompting of the heart and are willing to forego fees in order to assist hand-to-mouth youthful offenders. If some of them are so inclined here is a case for them in the form of a letter (unabridged) from one Omar Daraz, now pining in Borstal Jail, Bahawalpur. It is published in SPARC newsletter No. 30, March 2002: “I am in jail since 1994 for a murder I never committed. I was just 10-11 years old and a student of Class VI when I was charged with the crime. There were also two other accused persons involved in the case who got released after paying Rs 0.3 million to the heirs of the murdered person. The complainants also demanded Rs 0.1 million from my father, but being a poor man he could not pay the money so I was awarded 25 years R.I. I spent about 27-28 months in the judicial lock-up which were not counted towards my sentence. I continued my education in jail and passed matric exam. For the last six years I have received no word from authorities about my jail appeal.

“After getting remissions announced by the government on national days, and remissions because of education, I believe I have served my sentence, but I am still in prison because the High court has imposed Rs 202,927 as diyat (blood money) on me. That means I will spend the rest of my life in jail. The complainants are rich and very influential. One of their uncles is the Reader of a judge of the Lahore High Court. First he was instrumental in getting me 25 years R.I. and now to keep me in jail for the rest of my life. Please help me to get out of my ordeal.”

Is anyone of my readers moved? Has it made anyone cry in anguish? Don’t you think we should all be ashamed of belonging to a society that permits such merciless laws to govern itself? It is proudly claimed that in Islam the concept of justice is adl-bil-ehsan — justice tempered with mercy. Where is that Islam put into practice? Certainly not in our legal system. Judges of the superior courts have been known to take suo moto notice of irregularities. Will one of them have pity on this boy, and if judicially helpless, appeal for donations to pay the diyat? I laughed in my tears when I remembered the boy’s name is Umar Daraz. Should all of us who are impotent before the law wish him a long life in jail?

It is impossible to even mention in one article the various activities of SPARC which can be translated as little success and much frustrating defeat in the face of an indifferent government and heartless society. Columnists like me can only pick and choose whatever appeals to them most, like Umar Daraz’s letter. In fairness to SPARC, The State of Pakistan’s Children is not all criticism and carping. Every action of the government in the domain of children’s welfare is scrupulously recounted, though these actions are few and far between . As Anees Jillani says in the preface: “It is not a pleasant experience to be writing about the plight of children year after year since there is so little change. In this fifth report one can see innumerable commitments made by the state authorities and few steps taken on the ground.”

Before closing I must refer to a new initiative by SPARC and five other NGOs. People are being asked to send a printed letter to the NWFP Governor, drawing his attention to the plight of innumerable children in Frontier prisons and those undergoing trial, and requesting him to notify the Juvenile justice rules, nominate juvenile courts, release the maximum number of youthful offenders under 18, enact a Borstal schools law and establish at least one Borstal school in 2002, and promulgate a child rights law on the pattern of Sindh and Punjab. The good work goes on.

For peace in the Middle East

BY proposing an international conference on the Middle East, the Bush administration has committed itself to yet another escalation of its engagement in a conflict it long tried to avoid. That in itself is a good thing, and so is the solidification of a diplomatic “quartet” of the United States, European Union, Russia and United Nations behind the latest initiative.

By now it is clear to most Palestinians and Israelis that they will never end the warfare of the past 18 months without forceful U.S. and other international intervention; their aging leaders are better at battling each other than negotiating peace. By broadening the process to include Arab states, and constructing a powerful alliance to drive it, the Bush administration could, just possibly, fashion a settlement that would appeal to the public, if not the politicians, of both sides.

The odds of a diplomatic breakthrough nevertheless remain long. Previous international conference proposals could fill a Middle Eastern graveyard; even the 1991 Madrid conference organized by the first Bush administration produced mixed results.

History suggests that Israelis, Palestinians and Arab governments will all seek to negotiate preconditions for the conference, risking a quagmire of preliminary talks and a renewal of violence.

Even if Secretary of State Colin Powell can somehow manage to leapfrog or bull through this obstacle, the conference format itself may prove counterproductive: Such stages tend to inspire maximalist posturing by Middle Eastern actors, while past Arab-Israeli deals have mostly been cut in secret negotiations.

Aware of these pitfalls, the administration has been low-key in describing the aims of the conference. —The Washington Post

It’s high time Jews stood up for Palestinian rights: WORLD VIEW

ONE of the defining features of Nazism — a malign force whose military defeat was sealed in Germany 57 years ago this week — was its anti-semitism. And there can be little question that Hitler’s determination to exterminate European Jewry made it all but impossible for the major international players of the day to oppose the creation of Israel in 1948.

Pakistan, founded the previous year, had at least been envisaged, perhaps somewhat naively, by Mohammed Ali Jinnah as a secular, Muslim-majority state. Israel’s founding fathers, the likes of David Ben-Gurion, harboured no such illusions: from the very start they had in mind a more or less exclusively Jewish state. And not a few of them regarded the territory gifted by imperialist diktat as a stepping stone to the whole of the Promised Land. The Zionist drive was spearheaded, ironically, not by orthodox Jews but by leaders with secular and even socialist credentials. If any of them encountered any moral compunctions about the profound wrong being done to Palestinian Arabs, they kept their doubts to themselves.

Although large numbers of European Jews moved to Israel, many others preferred to stay put — assuming, reasonably enough, that the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s would not be revisited, while at the same time holding on to the Israeli option as a sort of insurance policy. The first-round success of fascist presidential candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, prompted Ariel Sharon to advise the 600,000 Jews in France that it was time to start packing their bags.

It could hardly be a coincidence that the rise of neo-Nazism across Europe has been accompanied by an increase in anti-Semitic incidents — the desecration of cemeteries, swastikas painted on synagogues, attacks on Jews and obvious symbols of Jewish identity. In Berlin, the police recently advised Jews to avoid wearing skullcaps or Stars of David.

Neo-Nazis are not believed to be the only culprits, however. It is suspected that at least some of the perpetrators are Arab or other Muslim migrants, who are responding to recent events in the occupied territories in Palestine.

That may well be the case, although the extent of the phenomenon remains debatable in the absence of clear-cut evidence. If so, it is reprehensible in the extreme. Racism is an unacceptable response, no matter what the provocation — and in this case there appears to be none. It can safely be assumed that many European Jews support the actions of the Israeli state under Sharon. It may be a perverse, narrow-minded view, but they are entitled to hold it. By the same measure, many others recognize that Sharon’s approach towards Palestinians echoes that of Nazis towards Jews.

In the House of Commons last month, former Labour frontbencher Gerald Kaufman — a prominent British Jew as well as a Blair loyalist — eschewed the tendency to mince words in describing Sharon’s regime as “repulsive”. “His actions,” he went on to say, “are staining the Star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilized discourse include Einstein and Epstein, are now symbolized throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatila camp and now involved in killing Palestinians once again.”

Kaufman condemned Palestinian suicide bombers, but pointed out that it was important to ask why people were prepared to behave in this manner: “We need to ask how we would feel if we had been occupied for 35 years by a foreign power which denied us the most elementary human rights and decent living conditions.”

Unfortunately, voices such as Kaufman’s are not heard often enough. And even when they are, even when they recognize with reasonable accuracy the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by Israel, the penalties they suggest invariably amount to little more than a rap on the knuckles. A temporary suspension of military aid is usually as far as Jewish critics of Israel are willing to go in their recommendations.

As Michael Neumann, professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, points out in a recent commentary in the American dissident magazine CounterPunch, “there are only ugly explanations for this bizarre behaviour. Are Jews still better than Palestinians? Did the Nazi era confer on them an unlimited licence to plunder and murder? Is being Jewish so sacred, so wise, so humanitarian, so warm and cuddly that a Jewish state couldn’t really do much harm, or deserve more than a good scolding? The possibilities are as limited as they are depressing.” On the other hand, such reticence is rare among those who are sufficiently bloody-minded to unquestioningly accept Sharon’s pathetic argument that his aggression is part of the “war against terror” launched by the Bush administration. The US media let it pass without comment when George W’s closest ally on Capitol Hill, House majority leader Dick Armey, told a television chat-show audience last week that he believed Palestinians should be expelled from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that the territories should formally be annexed by Israel. He added that he would not object to a Palestinian state, provided it was set up on land donated by Arab countries. As the Council on American-Islamic Relations noted, “even the most extreme Israelis are reluctant to publicly advocate such an insane policy”. Yet the White House offered no comment on Armey’s indelicate outburst.

And Armey’s deputy, Tom DeLay, contributed the following bon mot to a congressional debate: “Let every terrorist know, the American people will never abandon freedom, democracy or Israel.

All free people must recognize that Israel’s fight is our fight.” One is compelled to wonder whether such declarations, including Bush’s utterly bizarre designation of Sharon as “a man of peace” — stem from sincerely held convictions or are chiefly an attempt to shore up the Jewish vote bank. And it is hard to say which explanation would be less palatable.

Armey and DeLay are intimate associates of an administration that is expected to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It is, at best, highly unlikely that anything approaching a fair settlement will emerge from the conference announced last week by US Secretary of State Colin Powell on behalf of what he described as the Quartet. The Gang of Four may have been a more apposite epithet for the grouping, which includes the European Union, Russia and the UN, but for the fact that the preponderance of American power means that the US is the only member that really matters.

The UN’s inability to investigate a possible massacre at Jenin underlines its impotence as far as Israel is concerned. The EU and Russia have a more balanced view of Middle Eastern affairs than anyone on Capitol Hill or in the White House, but their opinions don’t count for much in the face of the belligerent mood of the Bush and Sharon administrations. Nor does the Saudi role offer any cause for complacency.

Crown Prince Abdullah’s visit to the Bush ranch in Texas is believed to have gone some way towards healing a degree of soreness between Riyadh and Washington, and it is certainly no coincidence that Vice-President Dick Cheney and First Dad George Bush the Elder — men who appreciate the value of oil, and old friends of the Saud dynasty — were in charge of hospitality. This week it was Sharon’s turn to be wined and dined. Israel and Saudi Arabia are sometimes seen as competing for American favours in the Middle East, but whatever antipathy exists between the two can, when necessary, be subsumed in the interests of perceived mutual benefits, as it was during the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. Even less surprising is the fact that Washington’s tightest relationships in that part of the world should be with the two most reactionary regimes in the region.

It would be extremely remarkable for a deal, even moderately fair from the Palestinian point of view, to emerge from this awkward and untrustworthy configuration of powers. What could — in fact, almost certainly would — make a difference would be a popular Israeli reaction against the Sharon game plan, on the scale of the spontaneous protests that greeted Le Pen’s presidential candidacy in France.

For whatever it’s worth, Israel is still a democracy. Israelis can choose not to have a mass murderer at the helm. There is dissidence, but it’s insufficiently widespread. Nor is it loud enough. Opinion polls suggest that Sharon’s bulldozing strategy enjoys too much support. Shortly before he died in 1967, the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, commenting on the Six-Day War, made the prescient observation that the occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank would, far from improving Israel’s security environment, lead to a sharp deterioration. Only when the majority of Israelis (as well as their American mates) recognize that peace is a two-way street, and that a complete and irreversible withdrawal from the occupied territories is the sine qua non of a long-term settlement, will a two-state solution become feasible.

Such an eventuality would also make it much easier to fulminate against anti-semitism in all its forms.