TWO landmark elections held within nine weeks of each other are likely to make a deep impact on the political landscape of the Middle East. They transform the internal dynamics of the Palestinian and Israeli societies and invest the bilateral dialectic with an altered mix of promise and peril.

The Palestinian election held on January 25 gave Hamas a landslide victory and was an almost revolutionary event insofar as it overturned the historical status of “PLO” as their sole representative. Israel’s election on March 28 realigned several forces that make the Israeli body politic a tangled mosaic of contending ideologies and attitudes and invariably lead to uneasy government coalitions.

With the dice heavily loaded against their aspirations, the Palestinians sent shock waves around the world by giving Hamas a clear mandate to constitute the new Palestinian Authority. The monumental change was driven alike by domestic agenda and by disillusionment with the defunct Oslo peace process. Developments since that fateful electoral verdict have belied descriptions of Hamas as a terrorist organization and have vindicated the Arab-Islamic consensus that the ascent to power would initiate a mellower Hamas approach to the Middle East problem.

Significantly, the Hamas election manifesto had left out the rejectionist formulations of its charter about the Zionist state. The new prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, may not have the option of giving up the armed struggle during this stage of Israeli occupation. But he has reaffirmed the readiness of his government to enter into negotiations with the Quartet and said that Hamas will give talks between Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas a chance. Hamas has also spoken of a long-term “truce” (hudna) if Israel withdraws to the pre-1967 borders.

Hamas continues to face pressures from Israel and its international supporters to first explicitly recognize Israel and give up arms. Financial levers are being applied even though the Arab world can hardly afford to let the new Hamas government collapse. Lurking behind this diplomatic stand-off is the spectre of a third intifada. Kadima’s plans for a unilateral segregated peace for Israel will be challenged strongly by such an outbreak of popular Palestinian agitation. Another intifada will also further strain relations between the rulers and the Arab street.

Before Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke that has kept him in a coma since January 4, 2006, the debate about him centred on the question whether the ruthless soldier who epitomized the lust for the Jewish colonization of Palestinian lands had undergone a change of heart. Moshe Dayan, another veteran of Israel’s expansionist wars, used to be apprehensive that Sharon had too much disdain for human life, including the lives of Israeli soldiers. In a just world, Sharon would have been arraigned a long time ago for war crimes. But just before he fell critically ill, he gave up Gaza and abandoned the hard-line Likud to form a centrist party called Kadima posing the question if the old warrior had finally settled for peace.

A comprehensive review of evidence indicates that Sharon had executed a major tactical manoeuvre. Kadima was to be the vehicle to carry forward his latest plan for a stronger, defensible Israel. He was an exponent of Israel’s self-serving myth that there was no negotiating partner on the Palestinian side and that the Jewish state would have to determine its ultimate frontiers unilaterally.

The introductory documents of Kadima stressed recognition of “demographic reality” and reflected Sharon’s new thinking that Israel needed a period of consolidation. It would dismantle some isolated settlements on the West Bank and resettle up to 70.000 settlers in the main settlements that would be unilaterally annexed. In the aftermath of the failed negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David in December 2000, he had developed the policy of settlers’ “convergence” behind a 450-mile long fence and of separating Israel physically from the Palestinians through unilateral disengagement without prior negotiations with the Palestinians.

The extra land that Israel will annex comprises the larger settlements containing about two-thirds of all Jewish settlers, an extended strip of the Jordan valley and sizable tracts in and around Jerusalem. The substitute for the Oslo peace process — the roadmap drawn up by the Quartet — was hobbled equally by the 14 reservations that Israel had entered about its provisions and the moral and political indifference of President Bush to the fate of the Palestinians. Israel was free to enforce peace not by a political settlement but by retreating into a secure and enlarged fortress.

It was a shrewd calculation that this tactic of armed peace through convergence on defensible clusters of prosperous settlements would find support from important segments of both the Right and the Left. A significant section of Likud shared his view that unrestrained conquest and expansionism were fraught with long-term risks for the Jewish character of Israel.

On the left, the almost instant defection of Shimon Peres to Kadima showed that a part of the labour movement had also despaired of the search for a negotiated two-state solution; it was ready, without formally abandoning a policy of negotiating with Palestinians, to endorse unilateral disengagement in return for long overdue economic reforms. As coalition partners, the Labour Party would expect the new government to correct social imbalances created by Netanyahu’s neo-liberal economics

The formation of Kadima made a profound impact on mainstream politics. A weakened Likud led by the uncompromising hawk Binyamin Netanyahu faced isolation as a party out of sync with present day realities. Deprived of the cadres that Shimon Peres took away with him, the new leader of the Labour Party, Amir Peretz , was forced to rally it around the hope that it would be the principal partner of a fast-rising Kadima in a future coalition.

Israel’s demographic concern extends to Jerusalem and drastic solutions are proposed to frustrate the prospect of the Arab population catching up or even outstripping the Jewish population (estimated at present at 67 per cent) in another 25 years. Israeli strategists feel that they have not been able to erase Arab and international expectations that East Jerusalem would eventually be the capital of an independent Palestinian state.

Two rival trends were dominant on the eve of this election. A hardline version would fill the gap between the city and the large settlements of Ma’aleh Adumim and Givat Ze’ev with Jewish housing estates thus severing a future Palestinian state into disconnected territories. The other solution envisages a compromise in the form of some Arab neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem coming under Palestinian control.

Israel’s election registered the lowest ever turnout of 63 per cent in its history with voter apathy attributed to several factors including the conviction that there was already a Kadima-centred consensus for unilateral disengagement and a more humane economic policy. Kadima, expected at one point to win 44 out of the total 120 Knesset seats, finished with 28, closely trailed by the Labour with 20 seats. Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud won a mere 11 seats and was beaten to the third and fourth place respectively by the Sephardic ultra-orthodox Shas party and Yisrael Beiteinu, the party dominated by tough Russian immigrants.

The decline of Likud from 38 to 11 seats is a major development inasmuch as it represents the decline of the idea of Greater Israel. Shas has a relatively moderate policy on occupied territories while Yisrael Beiteinu opposes abandoning any settlements. The secular Meretz supports negotiations with the Palestinians but is down to only four members in the new Knesset. The stage is set for a centre-left coalition backed by some other factions.

Given this fragmentation, the Knesset election cannot be described as a clear mandate but the majority seems to be lining up behind a unilateral determination of Israel’s frontiers. Ehud Olmert, the Kadima leader, who has been acting prime minister since Sharon was incapacitated, has indicated his willingness to talk to the Palestinians but with the warning that Israel would take its destiny in its own hands if there is delay. He aims at establishing Israel’s new frontiers by 2010.

The withdrawal plan may annex only 10 per cent of the West Bank but Hamas will not find it easy to accept disconnected cantons, the communication network of which is firmly in Israeli hands, as a two-state solution. It will probably reconcile with Israel if the pre-1967 borders are restored, access to Jordan is free and unfettered and East Jerusalem becomes the capital of a viable Arab state.

It is shortsighted to think that unilateral disengagement is anything more than an interim solution and that it will bring lasting peace and stability. As some Israeli analysts point out, it will be the triumph of a racist attitude. It will preserve the Jewish character of Israel but will make it even more difficult for Arabs and Jews to live side by side and engage in creating a co-prosperity economic zone.

With East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state and the easily defined part of the Old City acquiring the attributes of an open city, this holy city, sacred alike to Jews, Christians and Muslims could become a symbol of rapprochement between Arabs and Jews and a global beacon of inter-faith harmony.

But that may be a forlorn hope. Washington has to play a vital role in any future dispensation. Sadly, historic changes in regional politics coincide with an administration in Washington that, in late Edward Said’s words, continues to be inordinately influenced by unbridled extremist Zionists, right-wing Christians, and the military-industrial complex. Ironically, the setback that these aggressive forces have received in Iraq does not lead to a more just attitude towards the larger Middle East question.

There is an opportunity to encourage the transition of Hamas into a political entity and make it a reliable interlocutor but it is being lost with mechanical quotes from its old texts. It is not the Arabs but the decision-makers in the United States who are prisoners of doctrines and prejudices. In the absence of an even-handed Middle East policy in Washington, the perils of the new situation created by the two elections may outweigh their promise. Elections which can narrow the Arab-Israeli gap may end up widening it.

The writer is a former foreign secretary. Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

RECENTLY this writer received a couple of queries. The first came from a concerned citizen who wanted to know why the public never really learned what happened to criminals after they had been apprehended by the police, and why there was never any follow up in the newspaper or on television.

The second letter was sent by somebody who had been desperately trying to get in touch with me over something that appeared in one of my columns and wondered why my email address didn’t appear at the end of my pieces as it once used to.

The first inquiry certainly gave one food for thought. How often do we hear of gangs of carjackers being trapped by the police, criminals being apprehended, thieves being caught red-handed while fleeing from the place they’ve just robbed, mobile phone snatchers being arrested and men surrendering to the police after ending the terminal existence of their wives, sisters, daughters and at times their mothers-in-law on suspicion of infidelity?

The felons get their nine square inches in the newspapers, and the really heinous crimes receive more prominent mention. But the public never really gets to know what eventually happens to the offenders. Are they all brought to justice? Or do some of them escape from the police dragnet and carry on as usual?

It is generally believed that the majority of traffic offenders get off after paying a small bribe, and there is really no way of finding out how much money actually finds its way into the treasury. In the good old days before certain sophistication was introduced into record keeping, negotiations were quite straight forward, if a little crude. A traffic offender after expressing the usual startled innocence and fervent denial was told by a policeman that he had a choice between contributing to the exchequer and contributing to the welfare of a poor, underpaid, undernourished upholder of the law who had a sick mother, an uncle who wouldn’t cut his toenails and six other mouths to feed.

Since the patriotic gesture entailed a trip to a specified branch of a national bank to pay a fine, and another trip to a police station to recover one’s confiscated driver’s license, most citizens opted for the latter course. It saved a lot of time and expense.

Recently the procedure has become more sophisticated and people-friendly. Motorists and motor cyclists in certain parts of the city who cross a red light, turn left against a red signal, park on a zebra crossing or run over somebody sleeping on the pavement are now told their actions have been caught on camera. There is, therefore, little scope for negotiation. But all is not lost. In order to facilitate citizens and avoid a lot of unnecessary hassle, offenders can now settle their differences with the state by interacting with the policeman on duty. The latter then solemnly accepts the fine and enters the amount on a coupon book perforated down the middle. The only problem is the offender never gets to see his part of the receipt.

Traffic offences are, however, only a small part of the crime picture and nobody is really pushed if the cop with the sick mother makes a little on the side. It’s the other part, the part that the public rarely gets to see and only reads about that should be of concern to the citizenry.

What the thinking man is interested in is finding out what eventually happens to the car thieves and the mobile phone snatchers, the white collar and blue collar criminals, the unscrupulous agents who delude job seekers by issuing them fake passports and papers, the rapists and the murderers — once they get caught. In spite of the various arrests and alleged incarcerations the number of these offenders doesn’t appear to diminish in the slightest. In fact, if news reports are anything to go by, they appear to have increased.

All this does give one the impression that in certain types of crime there is a strong possibility of involvement by police. This is endorsed by the number of times policemen are hauled up and suspended pending investigation.

What is desperately needed is an NGO that devotes itself to the task of collecting meaningful statistics which show how many first information reports are filed and what happens to these FIRs, how the police tackle the complaints, how many cases are eventually brought to justice, how long cases languish in the courts and how they eventually end. It would probably be the first time such a venture was introduced in this country. It if did come about, it would provide a tremendous service to the population.

There’s a pretty good reason why this writer finally stopped using his email address at the end of his columns. In the beginning there was absolutely no problem. One tried to call a spade a spade, and readers who felt the need to communicate and to vent their spleen, gamely responded. In the fullness of time, however, after being variously accused of being pro-American and anti-American, a communist and a fascist, as Orson Welles was in his masterpiece ‘Citizen Kane,’ some readers came to see me as some sort of masochist who enjoyed taking up lost causes.

It was the article on Rehmat Masih published in this newspaper which probably did it. It described in graphic detail how officers of the Islampura police station in Lahore, bludgeoned to death a sweeper on suspicion of theft and followed this heinous crime by killing the sweeper’s cousin who led a protest. The next day the Lahore newspapers carried a statement from the chief minister of the Punjab who assured all and sundry that the law and order situation in the province was under control.

The article evoked an angry response from correspondents who lived in places as far away as Bloemfontein, Jakarta and Montreal, demonstrating not only that there are human rights activists who care, but also that Dawn has a wide internet readership. No email, column or article emanated from within Pakistan. No public figure mourned the death of the sweeper, not even the Bishop of Faisalabad. But... the article simply had to be written.

Then there was the piece entitled ‘Who is the greatest Bengali?’ which apparently motivated only four people to write. One was a woman from Kolkata who couldn’t understand how anybody could select Mujib-ur-Rehman for the title when people like Rabindernath Tagore and Nazrul Islam were also in the run. A Bengali doctor who lives and practises in a part of England while agreeing with my conclusions admonished me for quoting Kipling and said that people who reside in the subcontinent should stop referring to this imperialist when writing about the sons of Bengal. The article was eventually picked up by the Satyajit Ray Museum and is now a part of their archives.

Eventually the novelty wore off. Of the 30 odd urgent messages that this writer used to receive every day, only one or two had a remote connection with his articles. The rest had a profound altruistic base, and were repeated ad nauseum. One set was devoted to the task of suggesting how the purchase and use of certain aphrodisiacs would turn this writer into a super stud that would make the chap who danced the tango in ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ look like a rank amateur.

Another set stated how this writer repeatedly won four million euros because his email address kept on popping up in a computer draw out of 20 million addresses. And yet another set centred on how a philanthropic Nigerian had suddenly felt the irresistible urge to share with me the wealth of his crooked exiled uncle who had stashed his ill gotten wealth in the Cayman Islands.

Eventually the emails so clogged up the electronic windpipe in his computer that he couldn’t send or receive a message. Everything, including the 360 emails started to hang. Eventually the computer just gave up the ghost and had to be traded in for a new one which works whenever the KESC allows it to function.

During this hiatus, this writer did receive one phone call. It came from Mr Ahmed Maqsood Hamidi, a former secretary of the Sindh government. He said politics was all right but the piece he really enjoyed was the one on Sartre. It confirmed what he had known all along — not everybody in this city is a philistine.

TONY Blair’s travails seem to be increasing with each passing month, slowly but steadily whittling away his hold on the Labour Party. His government seems to be wracked by one scandal after another.

He had to rely on Conservative votes to get his school reforms bill passed in the House of Commons, as 52 Labour MPs rebelled and did not vote for the bill. Now there is furore over “cash for peerages” as the House of Lords appointments commission blocked four Blair nominees for peerages. It emerged that the reason for this was that each one of them had lent the Labour Party more than one million pounds each and not disclosed it.

According to the prevailing law, interest-bearing loans do not have to be disclosed, so while not illegal, it was regarded as unethical and a case of conflict of interest. Nobody in the party knew about it except Blair, Lord Levy, the fundraiser for the Party, and the general secretary of the Labour Party at the time. Everybody else was kept in the dark, including the treasurer, Mr Dromey, who expressed his displeasure publicly at the revelation.

Now Blair is trying to bring in legislation to cover this loophole. However, the impression of sleaze is sticking, and speculation is rife as to when he will make room for Chancellor Gordon Brown to take over as the prime minister.

The issue of Iraq is not discussed in the parliament. It’s a fait accompli, and Her Majesty’s Opposition, led by the bicycle-riding young David Cameron, is more interested in the National Health Service. Foreign policy seems to be passi. This cannot be said of the more liberal sections of the media which continue to press home the immoral and illegal nature of the Iraq war, not to mention the violation of human rights at Guantanamo and the policy of “rendition”. The media campaign to get two Muslim British residents of UK out of Guantanamo has forced Jack Straw to take up their cases with the US government.

Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary in the Labour government, was the most forceful and articulate opponent of the war but since his death last year there has been no one of his stature to fill the vacuum. In his resignation speech on the eve of the invasion of Iraq he had presciently declared, “None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will ‘shock and awe’ makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands.”

But now everyone seems to have lost count of the number of Iraqi civilian casualties, and the expression being bandied about is “tens of thousands”. The advocates of the war in Iraq have shifted the goal posts, and there is no mention of the WMDs. Instead the favoured explanation is “regime change” and the defence of values. In a speech before the Australian parliament on March 27, Blair ominously declared, “The struggle in our world today, therefore, is not just about security it is a struggle about values and about modernity.”

The hero of the day is Norman Kember, a Christian peace activist from north London. He had gone to Iraq to express his solidarity with the Iraqis, not to proselytize. He and members of his Baptist church are against any kind of violence. This 74-year-old pacifist was kidnapped and held hostage for over four months in Iraq. Luckily for him, in an SAS led operation, he and two of his Canadian companions were rescued without a shot being fired on March 23.

Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the general staff of the British Army, in an interview the next day to Channel 4 news complained that Norman Kember had not thanked the soldiers who had risked their lives to rescue him. Kember did so on landing back on British soil, saying in his written statement, “I do not believe that lasting peace is achieved by armed force, but I pay tribute to their courage and thank those who played a part in it.”

When Sir Mike was asked as to why the need to have British soldiers in Iraq in the first place, pat came the answer, “Part of what we are doing is to take Iraq out of a pretty dark age and help it...” So a century later, we are back to the same “white man’s burden” argument. One wonders whether this noble sentiment and concern for the Iraqis would have been there if Iraq had no oil?

Kashmir does not enjoy the kind of international attention that Iraq does, maybe because it has no oil. However, the continued presence of over 700,000 Indian troops is testimony to the brute force required to suppress the people of Kashmir. The Second International Kashmir Peace Conference was held in London on March 15 to highlight the plight of the Kashmiri people.

The Norwegians after their success in brokering peace between the Tamil rebels and the Sri Lankan government, have acquired a new stature and respect in the international community. They were represented at the Kashmir conference by the vice president of the Norwegian parliament and Larse Rise, former chairman of the Norwegian parliamentary group on Kashmir.

Also present was David Ervine, member, Northern Ireland Assembly, who has played a key role in the difficult and prolonged negotiations between the IRA and the British government. A few British MPs, especially Michael Salter, who is the secretary of the all party parliamentary group on Kashmir, showed seriousness of purpose in pushing forward the Kashmir peace process.

Our high commissioner in the UK, Dr Maleeha Lodhi, gave a very comprehensive and indepth presentation on the India-Pakistan composite dialogue. She pointed out that this composite dialogue had not moved into the conflict-resolution stage and the many initiatives that President Musharraf had taken on demilitarization and self-rule in Kashmir had not been explored. Whether it was Michael Salter, Victoria Schofield or Larse Rise, a consensus has emerged that Kashmir must be demilitarized and granted self-rule.

David Ervine is held in high regard here because of the key role he played in the Northern Ireland peace process. While he was not familiar with the Kashmir problem, he had come to share his experiences of the peace process of Northern Ireland and what he had learnt from those prolonged negotiations. He said that the basic requirement was that both Britain and Ireland recognize Northern Ireland as the number one problem, (read Kashmir in our case); second, that the militants must be involved in the peace process as must the people of that area.

Senator Mushahid Hussain spoke on the global dimensions of the Kashmir problem and stressed the need for a roadmap and the necessity for the international community to play a role. He said the mindset must change and one must be willing to reach out. He gave the example of Ariel Sharon who had decided that the settlements in occupied Palestine must be removed.

Manmohan Singh’s offer of a treaty of peace, security and friendship seems to have been made with the congressional critics of the Indo-US nuclear deal in mind. This diplomatic initiative must be seen as a sop to Pakistan and the deal’s critics in the US. The lessons of the Iraq war should not be lost on the Indians, the humbling of military power by a popular resistance movement.