PESHAWAR, Sept 20: A German scholar has said that the United States is not sincere in pursuing the peace process in the Middle East. Dr Volker Perthes, Director of German think tank Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik was speaking at a seminar on ‘The Lebanon war: The political implications of different analytical approaches’, at Peshawar University’s Area Study Centre for Russia, China and Central Asia on Wednesday.

He said that whenever any peace proposal was floated by European nations for the Middle East, the Israelis forwarded it to the Americans for approval, who were no longer serious and sincere about peace in the region.

He said mistakes had been made by the US administration under President George Bush regarding military interaction in Iraq and Washington’s policies towards Israel.

He said none of the parties to the recent Israel-Hezbollah war could claim success in the conflict. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had never claimed victory since the end of the fighting and in Israel there was an impression of having suffered setbacks in the war, he said. Israel had failed to achieve its major objectives in the conflict, he said.

He said that there were certain frameworks about the conflict i.e. it was a part of US global war on terrorism, a conflict of Islamic radical fundamentalism with a modern state or Israel, a proxy war between the US, Iran and Syria and a war of asymmetric strategies between a regular army and a guerrilla force.

The war had proved that in a kind of war between a state-controlled army and a non-state actor like Hezbollah, no weight was given to the human rights and laws and brutal force was used to annihilate the non-state actor, he said. He suggested an international conference on resolving the Middle East issue between Israel and the Arabs.

He pointed out that Israel wanted its physical security, Palestinians needed a state, Lebanon was aspiring for regaining its sovereignty within its borders while Syria wanted return of its territories which Israel had occupied in the 1967 and 1973 wars.