THE most realistic and likely workable solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was presented last week in Geneva. Moderate Arab and Israeli politicians hammered out the Geneva accord, a symbolic plan with no official status, but important moral standing, for a peace that would finally create a Palestinian state and end the bitter, six decade-old dispute between Arabs and Jews.

The plan called for an end to all violence and a demilitarized Palestinian state. Israel would withdraw to its pre-1967 war borders, except for a few territorial adjustments. Three-quarters of the 400,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank and Gaza would remain, under Israeli protection.

Most dramatically, 3.6 million Palestinian refugees would have to give up their right of return to Israel. Jerusalem would be shared; its holiest sites put under international protection.

This deal, if adopted, would be a bitter pill for Palestinians. They would relinquish all claim to their ancestral lands seized by Israel. This historic injustice would be enshrined. Palestinian refugees could only find a home in a tiny, economically feeble state on the West Bank and Gaza. Some 300,000 Jewish settlers, who have expropriated the best land and 74 per cent of the water resources of the occupied territories, would remain, though their presence violates international law.

Militant Palestinian groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, vowed to wreck the accords. Other Arab militants and Islamic groups blasted the deal as a betrayal.

Though unappetizing and unjust, this is the best deal Palestinians could realistically hope to get. Israel cannot be militarily defeated: its has a huge nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal and one of the world’s best military forces. Equally important, Israel has unlimited support of the United States. For Israel, the agreement would mean plans for Greater Israel are finished, and Jerusalem would be shared. The fate of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, would be decided later.

The Geneva accord was backed by PLO leader Yasser Arafat, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, former president Jimmy Carter, concentration camp survivor Simon Veil, and a host of other respected figures. Actor Richard Dryfuss put it right when he said this peace plan was too important to be left to governments.

Nobel Prize winner Carter rightly charged in Geneva that George Bush’s wrongheaded Mideast policies were igniting global anti-Americanism and inciting terrorism.

Israel’s leader, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, immediately denounced the accord as ‘subversive’ and rejected it out of hand. Sharon and his fellow rightists are determined to hold on to the occupied territories and Golan, and to never share Jerusalem. Israel’s extreme far right has its eye on Iraq’s oil: it is talking about a war with Syria that will open an Israeli corridor through that nation to Iraq’s northern oil fields, from where oil will flow down a pipeline to Israel’s port of Haifa.

US reaction to the Geneva accord was pathetic. A few platitudes, then a scurry for cover when Israel warned the State Department not to interfere. The US response to Israel’s building of a massive, East German-style wall to separate Israel proper from Palestinian population enclaves was similarly shameful.

Even though the wall makes an illegal expropriation of Palestinian lands, and undermines efforts to bring peace, hardly a beep was heard from the White House. There was no President George Bush emulating his idol, Ronald Reagan, by telling Israel, ‘Mr Sharon, tear down this wall!’

The US is in an election year, and George Bush has made a major effort to court the Jewish vote, which, thanks to the Iraq war, has now swung solidly behind the Republicans. Congress, as its recent vote to sanction Syria, is far more responsive to PM Sharon’s desires than Israel’s own parliament, the Knesset. No pressure will be brought on Israel. Bush’s talk of a ‘roadmap’ for Mideast peace is just that, talk.

One of the sadder aspects of this depressing situation is that many Jewish supporters of peace in Israel and the US have been drowned out by advocates of expansion and confrontation.

President Bill Clinton’s administration was filled with allies of Israel’s centre-left political spectrum. By contrast, in the Bush administration, almost every key position dealing with the Mideast is filled with ardent neo-conservative advocates of Gen. Sharon’s expansionist Likud Party.

President George Bush’s policies are almost identical to those of PM Sharon. The view here in European diplomatic circles is that Sharon and his Likud Party now command US Mideast policy, and are bent on turning the US against Europe, which is seen on Israel’s right and among its US supporters as pro-Arab. Pakistan is next on the list to be ‘reformed.’

Recently, senior members of Israel’s defence and security establishment took the unprecedented step of publicly accusing Sharon of sabotaging peace efforts and leading Israel into unending strife. They are absolutely correct.

So are demographers who report that today, in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, Jews and Arabs are nearing equality in numbers.

Given the high Arab birth rate, some Likudniks urge Israel either conduct ethnic cleansing or impose apartheid whereby Arabs have no real voting power, and are confined to reservations.

To retain the occupied territories, and remain a democracy, Israel will have to accept a secular state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs, something it will not do. So, short of a miracle, the conflict will go on.

— Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2003

AS the prospects of peace in South Asia become brighter, one waits with bated breath to see the outcome of the recent initiatives in the region. There have been so many false dawns that it is difficult not to feel sceptical.

Didn’t we see the promise of peace emanating from Tashkent in 1966, Simla in 1972, Lahore in 1999 and Agra in 2001, which all came to nought? Each time we were told in a burst of euphoria that it was to be different on that occasion, only to find ourselves back to square one before long.

One may well ask: how is one to believe that 2004 is really going to be any different? The only logical answer to this question would be: because a large number of Pakistanis and Indians now realize that there is no alternative to peace if they are to survive. Today the threat of annihilation is real, given the nuclearization of the two major states of the subcontinent.

Besides, the statements of their leaderships have been quite alarming when they declared while on the brink of war that they would deploy their nuclear weapons if need be. Because of their geographical proximity, the two countries can ill afford to resort to the strategic doctrine of a balance of terror as has been suggested by some quarters. A nuclear conflagration, even if accidental, would be suicidal, irrespective of who starts it.

The need of the hour is to create a climate of peace so that neither of the two governments is tempted to engage in brinkmanship as a foreign policy tool to achieve its political goals in external relations. Brinkmanship is a risky game to play by states armed with nuclear weapons.

Hence for the sake of their own survival, moderate elements in the government of India and Pakistan feel they must not squander the chance for peace - the last one, in Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee’s words — which has presented itself today. This is not the time to look back to the past and allow the distrust and animosities of the gone decades to shape their future course of action. But will the hawks allow it?

There are positive forces operating in favour of peace this time. The threat of a nuclear war and all its horrors have paradoxically created a thrust towards conflict resolution. This has caused the voice of sanity, which had been muted before, to assert. Now that it is being articulated all over South Asia a government would it ignore at its own peril.

The convention of the Pakistan-India Forum for Peace and Democracy, which is being convened in Karachi this weekend, reflects the opinion of not just the 500 delegates from all walks of life. It will be the collective voice of millions in both countries who now feel that enough is enough. It is time to halt the warmongering of the governments.

Although it amounts to the pro-sanity unarmed civil society confronting the forces of authority armed to the hilt with their missiles and weapons of mass destruction, it is felt that the number of rationalists has grown and has managed to moderate the governments’ policies by championing the cause of peace, human rights and democratic freedoms.

It may be reading too much into the results of the last week’s elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh to describe them as a key indicator of the common man’s thinking on peace. True it was the upswing in the national economy, the failure of governance in these Congress-ruled states and the focused style of BJP’s electioneering that paid dividends for Mr Vajpayee’s party But it has also been pointed out by many observers of the Indian political scene that the ruling BJP benefited by not holding up the Hindutva card in its electoral campaign. Its peace overtures to Islamabad were carefully timed and designed to win over the electorate.

The BJP’s win in three states has been massive while in Delhi the incumbent Congress Party managed to stay on in power, albeit with a reduced majority. Although peace with Pakistan was not a campaign issue, it was there as a backdrop contributing to what the Hindustan Times described editorially as “the feel good factor”. The Times of India observed that Mr Vajpayee has shown courage in opting for his “third and final attempt to seek peace with Pakistan against the rabid instincts of the BJP’s hardcore supporters”. These are straws in the wind and the political parties can be expected to take up the peace platform more forcefully in the general elections in September next year.

In Pakistan the democratic forces are not so strong. But the press, in spite of its constraints, has begun to challenge the government’s conventional foreign policy position directly. The private TV channels have refused to toe the official line. As popular pressure for peace builds up, independent analysts have begun to advocate a rethinking of the Kashmir policy.

One can only laud the moves towards normalization that are in the offing. Land, air and rail links are to be restored. Prime Minister Vajpayee is to visit Islamabad for the Saarc summit next month. Pakistan has said that the dialogue with India is to be resumed soon. All this augurs well for their confidence building exercise which one hopes will be sustained steadily and concertedly.

Now that India has agreed to address the Kashmir dispute in a bid to end the insurgency in the valley, one hopes that the two sides will approach it with a degree of pragmatism. Pakistan’s initiative in ordering a ceasefire on the Line of Control in Kashmir has proved to be a positive development. We do not know if this has had any impact on the level of violence in the valley. But one hopes that the dialogue New Delhi has concurrently announced with the Hurriyat Conference will be given a chance. It could provides a framework for talks in which at a later stage Pakistan could also be associated.

Admittedly, this is not how Islamabad envisaged the dispute to be taken up and resolved. But it seems to be the only way in which the Kashmir dispute can be brought to the negotiating table after India had dubbed it for decades as a “domestic issue”. A complicating factor has now been injected into the already complex situation by the split in the APHC with each faction claiming to be the real one which enjoys the support of the Kashmiris.

India has been talking with the Hurriyat led by Maulana Abbas Ansari because it has a moderate stance and is willing to negotiate with New Delhi. The hardline Gilani group which stands for an armed struggle has received Pakistan’s unofficial backing. This is unfortunate because it makes a political settlement more difficult and substantiate India’s charge that Islamabad is instigating militancy in the disputed state. It also locks the two sides in a confrontation by proxy.

One hopes Pakistan will extricate itself from this critical situation as fast as it can. If it doesn’t, it will be challenging international opinion. Moreover, there is need for both sides to be mindful of the changing pattern of international politics in the region as well as at the global level. The events of the last two years have changed the paradigms of international relations. No state can hope to resist pressures from outside or isolate itself on the ground that it will not brook interference in its internal affairs. Most importantly, the use of force to resolve disputes is increasingly being resisted by the international community.

These are matters of higher politics which have to be taken note of. But they have caused the very fundamental issue of economic development, poverty eradication and social progress to go by default. These might appear to be very mundane to our rulers and the intelligentsia but they are basic to man’s existence.

ONE of the strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The “neo-cons” pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government.

But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics — entering organizations and taking them over — appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonized a crucial section of the British establishment.

The organization began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of the opposing factions.

In 1988, it set up a magazine called “Living Marxism,” later LM. By this time, the organization, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a “confident individualism” without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations.

It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate think-tanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for 7,500, to educate their customers “about complex scientific issues”.

In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathizers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organization’s journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the think tank the Institute of Ideas.

All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews, what seems to be a new front in this group’s campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.

Let us begin with the Association for Sense About Science (SAS), the lobby group chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne, and whose board contains such prominent scientists as Professor Sir Brian Heap, Professor Dame Bridget Ogilvie and Sir John Maddox. In October it organized a letter to the Times by 114 scientists, complaining that the government had failed to make the case for genetic engineering. In response, Tony Blair told the Commons that he had not ruled out the commercialization of GM crops in Britain.

The phone number for Sense About Science is shared by the “publishing house” Global Futures. One of its two trustees is Phil Mullan, a former RCP activist and LM contributor who is listed as the registrant of Spiked magazine’s website. The only publication on the Global Futures site is a paper by Frank Furedi, the godfather of the cult. The assistant director of Sense About Science, Ellen Raphael, is the contact person for Global Futures.

The director of SAS, Tracey Brown, has written for both LM and Spiked and has published a book with the Institute of Ideas: all of them RCP spin-offs. Both Brown and Raphael studied under Frank Furedi at the University of Kent, before working for the PR firm Regester Larkin, which defends companies such as the biotech giants Aventis CropScience, Bayer and Pfizer against consumer and environmental campaigners. Brown’s address is shared by Adam Burgess, also a contributor to LM. LM’s health writer, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, is a trustee of both Global Futures and Sense About Science.

Is all this a coincidence? I don’t think so. But it’s not easy to understand why it is happening. Are we looking at a group which wants power for its own sake, or one following a political design, of which this is an intermediate step?— Dawn-The Guardian Service