The Israeli puzzle

MR Benjamin Netanyahu’s election as Likud chief is bad news for peace in the Middle East. With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon out of Likud, Mr Netanyahu will be the most important challenger to Mr Sharon in elections due in March next. At present, Likud has 40 seats in the Knesset’s 120 members, but opinion polls show both Likud and Labour trailing behind Mr Sharon’s newly-formed Kadima. History will remember Mr Netanyahu for having played a major part in sabotaging the Oslo peace process. After the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the peace accord with Yasser Arafat, Mr Netanyahu fought the election on a hawkish platform and won it. He was opposed to the Oslo accords and did not believe in vacating any part of the territory which Israel had conquered in the 1967 war. It was during his tenure as prime minister (1996-1999) that the Oslo process was derailed. The tragedy for peace was that the man who replaced him, Mr Ehud Barak, fought the election campaign on a peace platform. But once in power, he was more hawkish than his predecessor. With full American support, Mr Netanyahu and Mr Barak had the Oslo treaties virtually renegotiated. The grand finale came in 2000 when the Camp David peace talks failed.

Since the failure of that summit conference, the peace process has not only been moribund; the principle of a Palestine state as part of a peace settlement seems to have been all but abandoned. What forced Mr Sharon to found a new party and quit the one he had helped create was his decision to pull out of the Gaza strip in August last. Mr Netanyahu opposed the move and has pledged that he would not part with any bit of Palestinian territory if he came to power. There is no doubt that he will reoccupy Gaza if he returns to power in the next March election. After all, reoccupying territories vacated as part of international treaties is nothing new for Israel. Mr Sharon himself did this in 2002 when he reoccupied parts of the West Bank from where Israel had withdrawn under the Oslo accords. He not only reoccupied Ramallah but also destroyed Arafat’s headquarters, while the world watched in silence.

Now Mr Netanyahu hopes to do the same about the Gaza strip if he becomes Israel’s prime minister. Mercifully, the Likud party is trailing behind Kadima and the Labour Party in opinion polls. This means that unless there is a change in Israeli public opinion between now and March, Mr Sharon — notwithstanding the minor stroke he had the other day - is likely to remain prime minister. There is thus no possibility that Israel will quit the West Bank and Al Quds. On his part, Mr Netanyahu has pledged to further expand the Jewish settlements already there. In other words, there is hardly any difference between Mr Sharon and Mr Netanyahu on the future of the West Bank. This is the key issue, since there can be no final peace settlement unless Israel quits the occupied area west of the Jordan river so that a Palestinian state can come into being. Even though the Bush administration is committed to the two-state solution, there is little possibility that Washington will be able to make Israel, whosoever the prime minister next year, quit the West Bank and thus pave the way for a final settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Well-merited victory

WITH the rub of the green going their way on most occasions, Pakistan have clinched the one-day cricket series against England as convincingly as they wrapped up the Test rubber recently. England, without their captain Michael Waughan because of injury, were led by their star opening batsman Marcus Trescothick whose personal form has been sadly below par in the ODIs. After their defeat in the opening game at Lahore, Pakistan won the next two games by facile margins. The decider in Rawalpindi on Monday had a nail-biting finish in a low-scoring encounter, with the hosts getting home by 13 runs and 11 balls to spare. The last game is being played once again in Rawalpindi today but its result will have no bearing on the outcome of the series. However, a win may help England salvage some of their pride. Before the tour started, England were rated as the odds-on favourites by most diehard followers of the game at home. Inzamamul Haq and his boys had other ideas, though. The Test series was won 2-0 followed by some heart-warming performances in the one-day matches. It is difficult to pick and choose from among the home players. In young Kamran Akmal, Pakistan appear to have found an opening batsman they have been looking for over the past few years. He is also an accomplished wicket-keeper. Except for Younis Khan, everyone contributed his bit towards making Pakistan a match-winning side. Victory in the one-day series has been no flash in the pan. India were beaten 4-2 last year while the West Indies were whitewashed 3-0.

Pakistan must not rest on their laurels. They have a busy schedule ahead of them in the run-up to the World Cup in the Caribbean in 2007. The Pakistan Cricket Board led by Mr Shehryar Khan is to be complimented for the hard work they had put in grooming the national team. Nor can the role played by national coach Bob Woolmer be minimized A man of few words but with tons of professional experience behind him, he has disciplined a bunch of talented but raw individuals into a competitive outfit which is no mean achievement. In his own phlegmatic way, skipper Inzamamul Haq led the side adroitly. But for him and Mr Woolmer, harder days lie ahead.

Creating jobs in quake areas

AT an international seminar held in Peshawar on Monday, various policy-makers and experts were correct in saying that the government had to invest heavily in the creation of jobs in the quake hit areas. According to the federal secretary of labour and manpower, 496,306 people had lost jobs in the affected districts in the NWFP, with the agriculture sector being the worst affected. While exploring income generation strategies, speakers called on the government to mobilize local communities in the reconstruction process. It makes sense for local communities to be employed in the housing sector in both the NWFP and Azad Kashmir. This should be relatively easy since many men from these areas are employed as labourers in construction all over the country; giving them jobs in their own districts will give them the chance to remain close to their families. At the moment, many people have been forced to take on menial jobs just to make ends meet. From a psychological point of view, the sooner they are employed, the easier it will be for them and their distressed families to resume some semblance of normal life. For this, they will need state support which should be forthcoming.

Perhaps the government can learn some lessons from those countries badly affected by the tsunami last year. According to a report published by the British charity Oxfam, up to two-thirds of the million people who lost their jobs are working again. This is partly because they are employed in schemes that require people to clear debris or desalinate land. This suggests that the Pakistan government will have to come up with similar schemes to generate employment. Before it can put into effect long-term strategies like developing tourism in AJK, it needs to draw up plans to avert high unemployment rates and the poverty that will follow.

Fight them on the beaches?

LAST week, the day after Sydney witnessed some of its worst racial violence in living memory, a woman in the affected suburb answered her doorbell only to find a pair of men, of “Middle Eastern appearance”, wishing to be let in. She demanded to know what they wanted. They reminded her that she had requested the installation of cable TV. They were there to install it.

The alarmed woman toyed with the idea of telling them she had changed her mind and was no longer interested in cable TV. But something told her that the risk of allowing the two men into her home was worth taking. She took it. The installation took longer than might have been expected, and she and the men, who were indeed of Lebanese origin, got talking. She fixed them sandwiches for lunch.

She subsequently told a friend that they were among the nicest people she had ever come across.

The incident underlines an obvious truth: that direct experience is an ideal means of banishing stereotypes. One must, of course, bear in mind the possibility of such encounters producing the reverse effect. However, a breadth of experience is a generally reliable antidote to prejudice.

It does not make any more sense to judge all people of “Middle Eastern appearance” on the basis of crass behaviour by small gangs of second-generation Lebanese Australians than it would to write off all Anglo-Celtic Australians as racists on the grounds that a few thousand of them came across like neo-Nazis on Sunday before last at Cronulla beach in the south of Sydney.

The gravity of the situation was brought home to Sydneysiders when the New South Wales (NSW) government advised them to stay away from the city’s beaches last weekend. The stricture was unprecedented anywhere in Australia. It would have caused concern at any time of year. At the height of summer, on the eve of the Christmas holiday, it was tantamount to sacrilege.

Yet hardly a voice was raised in protest. Even random searches by police and arbitrary checking of SMS messages on people’s mobile phones elicited no resistance, prompting one commentator to point out that Australians are, by and large, fairly obedient. That may be so, but the shock of what happened 10 days ago, and the swirling rumours that followed those two nights of violence, may also have had something to do with it.

The trigger for the Cronulla riot was evidently an attack the previous day on a couple of lifesavers — who are posted on all popular beaches, mainly to assist swimmers who find themselves out of their depth — allegedly by a bunch of young Lebanese men. Details of the incident are murky, but it sufficed to provoke an organized backlash.

Quite a few of the 5,000 or so mostly white Australians who gathered in Cronulla, summoned by a spate of SMS messages, sported T-shirts bearing racist slogans. Others had scrawled similar messages — “We grew here, you flew here” was the politest — across their bare chests. Still others had wrapped themselves in the Australian flag. They sang the national anthem and “Waltzing Matilda” as they ranted and raved and cast around for potential victims, who, not surprisingly, were rather thin on the ground that day.

A young girl got her headscarf ripped off. A few lads required police protection. Unlike most other parts of Sydney, Cronulla is largely an Anglo-Celtic preserve. When news of the events there reached suburbs with a high Lebanese concentration, a convoy of cars, packed with young men and rudimentary weapons, headed south, looking for a confrontation. Fortunately, they were waylaid and disarmed by the police. Some clashes did erupt at other beaches, and there were a few incendiary attacks on churches over the next couple of days, conveniently substantiating the “clash of civilizations” thesis that has inevitably been trotted out by interested parties.

A substantial proportion of Australians of Lebanese origin are Christian — including the highly erudite governor of NSW, Professor Marie Bashir. The Muslims are, by and large, more recent immigrants, having left Lebanon in the wake of the civil war. The extent to which political Islam fascinates the younger generation, mostly born and brought up in Australia, is uncertain; but the Islamists among them are hardly likely to be regular beachgoers. If anything, those seen as troublemakers seem to take their cultural cues from the world of American hip-hop.

One of the most persistent charges against them relates to the intimidation and harassment of young women, especially but not only at beaches. It is not an altogether frivolous accusation. But it’s ridiculous to extrapolate from that the assumption that unacceptable behaviour of this variety is restricted to a particular ethnic group, or that all members of that ethnic group are somehow complicit in it.

The same goes, of course, for overt exhibitions of racism by the dominant ethnic group. At the same time it’s worth noting that this isn’t by any means a new phenomenon. Until 50 years or so ago, governments officially adhered to a White Australia policy: immigration was restricted to those of a particular colour of skin. Even so, there was scope for discrimination and Irish Catholics bore the brunt of it. In the postwar period, the policy was relaxed — and the children of Greek and Italian immigrants grew up with epithets such as “wog” being flung at them.

The Chinese and the Vietnamese went through even worse experiences. During far-right politician Pauline Hanson’s ascendancy half a dozen years ago, the incidence of abuse and even physical violence against Asians increased sharply. Since 2001 it has been fashionable to demonize Arabs and Muslims, with the government of John Howard doing its bit to cultivate disharmony, distrust and fear.

There can be little question that Australia is in many ways a multiracial society: Melbourne has the largest concentration of Greeks outside Athens, and Sydney for the most part is a refreshingly diverse metropolis. Yet there are those who frown upon the multiculturalism that this diversity inevitably portends. It’s un-Australian, they contend. Anyone who comes to this country is duty-bound, they say, to adhere to the dominant culture. Never mind that it’s not very clear what that involves, apart from sun-worship by the seaside and the consumption of copious quantities of beer.

If that sounds facetious, so does the absurd demand for uniformity, which in turn is related to Australia’s identity crisis as a western outpost overshadowed by the Asian behemoth. A decade or so ago it was beginning to get comfortable about its geography. The advent of Howard led to a back flip: since 2001 he has been in friendly competition with Tony Blair for the favours of the lord and master of the Anglosphere. More recently, Howard has made more of an effort to improve relations with his nation’s Asian neighbours, but it is unlikely many Asian governments have forgotten his characterization of Australia’s role as deputy sheriff to the US.

There is something profoundly pathetic about Australia’s eagerness to participate in other nations’ imperialist misadventures, beginning with the First World War: the rout at Gallipoli in Turkey is somehow supposed to have forged the national character, and it is not particularly surprising that this myth resurfaced at Cronulla, with some of the louts referring to themselves as Anzacs. Fifty years later, Australia more or less invited itself to South Vietnam. It now maintains a militarily irrelevant token presence in occupied Iraq, more or less unnoticed by anyone other than the US.

In 1996, at the outset of his reign — which has lasted so long primarily because of the incompetence of the opposition Labour Party and the impotence of its reactionary leadership — Howard announced that he wanted Australia to be relaxed and comfortable. It is anything but that, although the prime minister has had his way all along.

The events in Cronulla served as a rallying call for all manner of racists. Talkback radio, which boasts some of the most obnoxious personalities in Australian media, was first off the mark. The Murdoch press wasn’t far behind, trotting out all manner of disgraced academics and pseudo-intellectuals to push the line that multiculturalism is a disaster and to imply that the White Australia policy ought never have to been abandoned.

One academic has gone as far as to recommend that everyone who does not “fit in” should be offered a one-off payment to leave Australia — including those who have never known any other home.

The dozens of white supremacists who have been arrested in recent days with a variety of weaponry would wholeheartedly concur with that. Weapons have also been confiscated from “Lebos”, and on Monday the NSW government said that it was safe for everyone to return to the beaches. It added that hundreds of extra police would patrol the beaches until the end of January.

Hopefully that will prevent the summer from turning bloody. But throwing police at the problem means tackling the symptoms rather than the causes. A relaxed and comfortable Australia — in every respect, not just the Cronulla context — requires a concerted effort at the community level, supported by every tier of government. There are certainly enough people of goodwill in every sphere of life who would be willing to undertake such a task, but regime change may turn out to be a prerequisite for extracting anything more than empty rhetoric from Canberra.