CAIRO: The spiralling Middle East crisis sparked by the seizure of three Israeli soldiers has exposed deep divisions within the Arab world and forced its leaders into a frank admission of helplessness.
After an emergency meeting of Arab League foreign ministers on Saturday, the 22-member bloc admitted it was impotent in the face of Israel’s deadly retaliation against the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
“Don’t ask me what to do,” the league’s secretary general, Amr Mussa, told reporters after the meeting.
Analysts said the huge rift between Western allies like Egypt and Jordan and radical states like Syria had proved impossible for diplomats to bridge.
“The main structure of the Arab League is the idea of consensus, so meetings always come up with the lowest common denominator,” said Nadim Shehadi, a Middle East specialist with the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Saturday’s meeting “was a bit more revealing,” he said. “There are real divisions at this time especially to do with relations with Iran on the one hand and with the United States and Israel on the other.”
Western allies, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have all tempered condemnation of the scale of the Israeli reprisals with criticism of the “adventurism” of the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah in seizing two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned on Friday of the risk of “the region being dragged into adventurism that does not serve Arab interests.”
Saudi official media have also used similar language.
But for radical states like Yemen, the crisis should force countries like Egypt and Jordan — the only two in the Arab world to have signed peace treaties with Israel — to cut all ties with the Jewish state.
“We must take swift steps with sincere intentions to solve the Arab-Arab differences which create an obstacle to reaching a unified Arab position”, Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kurbi said, calling on all Arab states to “end any cooperation with Israel.”
At the post-meeting news conference, Mussa pronounced the Middle East process “dead” and called on the UN Security Council to take back responsibility from the so-called quartet of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States.
“All the mechanisms, including the Quartet, have failed the peace process or contributed to burying the peace process,” the League chief said.
“The only way to revive the peace process is to take it back to the Security Council.”
His comments sparked an angry reaction from Arab journalists but analysts said he was just playing to the gallery.
“Saying the peace process is dead is just an effort to justify (the League’s) declarations,” said Emad Gad of the Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies in Cairo.
“It’s an effort to please the street. People want to hear that there will be action. The journalists’ emotive and angry questions are an indication of street opinion.”
But for Mohammed Al-Shabba, editor of the independent daily Nahdet Masr, declaring the peace process dead was merely accepting reality.
“Arabs are still talking about peace initiatives, about land for peace,” Masr told state television. “But we are not getting land and we are not getting peace.”—AFP
