Israel and Turkey, Wash- ington’s strategic part- ners are in serious trouble, while Islamic Iran, America’s implacable foe, increasingly self-assured, has moved from strength to strength. Also in this oil-rich region, President Saddam Hussein continues to defy both the U.S and the U N.
The resignation of Foreign Minister David Levy and the 58-52 vote on the 1998 budget in a 120 seat Knesset were the clearest signs that his right-wing alliance, assisted by the religious parties, may be doomed. As important surely is the attitude of the Clinton administration. Many a Democrat in the U.S Congress believes that it is time Prime Minister Netanyahu is told quite bluntly that he would not be allowed to cause irreparable damage to America’s vital relations with the Arab world and the increasingly self-assertive Islamic movement.
The Jewish lobby and the Jewish vote in American Congress do not trouble a President who has already completed his first four-year term and has not much left of his final term.
How precisely US-Israel relations stand should become clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu visits the U.S. in two weeks time. The scheduled date for the Clinton-Netanyahu talks is Jan. 20. The crucial role that the United States has always played in the Middle-East will be underlined once more when PLO leader Yasser Arafat, now the “President of Palestinian Authority” (P.A.) the autonomous area or so-called mini-state that the ruling Israel coalition has permitted, visits Washington - a few days after the Israeli Prime Minister’s meeting with President Clinton. Apart from the predictable approach of a White House incumbent whose presidential career will be over quite soon, American stakes in the Arab world would be the strongest card in Chairman Yasser Arafat’s card. But the Arab hand has been weakened by another important change - the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s besieged economy the political disorder and the uncertainty about President Boris Yeltsin’s health.
So the politics of Israel and the region will not be fashioned by the factors that some analysts identified as “the major determinants” of the region’s politics. Apart from oil wealth and the dependence of the leading industrial nations on Middle-East oil.
Arnold Toynbee recognised the main forces and issues that would shape Middle-East politics a quarter century ago when he contributed a foreword to Storm Over The Arab World by Eugene Fisher and Cherif Bassiouni.
“The storm over the Arab world buffets not only the Arabs themselves and the Israelis, but also people all around the globe: for example the diasporan Jewish Zionists in the United States and the European and Japanese customers for the Arab world’s mineral oil. The sudden fabulous wealth of those Arab countries in which oil has been struck while the storm has been lowering is one of the key factors in international politics today.”
Even the great Arnold Toynbee could not have anticipated another force that was destined to increase the enormous influence of the Middle-East.
The Shah of Iran Reza Pahlevi, was known to his people as ’the American Shah’. The oil companies of California and Shell were his friends, patrons and policy advisers. His intelligence service did not serve him well. It did not (or could not) appreciate the impact of “messages” (actually sermons) that were sent secretly from Paris by the exiled Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini.
Neither the petroleum magnates of Texas nor the U.S. navy could suppress the Islamic revolution nor protect the Shah. Moving westward from Tehran, these sermons not only sparked the Islamic Revolution in Iran but introduced a new activist manifesto for the Muslim masses and intelligentsia from Iran to Algeria.
And so the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Organisation of the Islamic (O.I.C). One of the largest organisations of this kind, it claims 54 member-states. So it was hardly a surprise when Iran hosted an “Islamic” summit recently. A statement published in the IRAN REVIEW made it plain that the time had obviously come for a “merger” of Arab and Islamic interests and issues. And which question could dramatise most sharply this union? The answer was plain enough. an editorial stated:
“The Tehran conference was an unqualified success. Even the American press recognised that”.
“As Iranian newspapers have noted gleefully the Teheran meeting has attracted far more Arab states than the regional economic conference last month in the Gulf capital of Doha Qatar which was sponsored by the United States with the aim of promoting ties between Israel and the Arabs”.
There is no Arab leader, politician, professional and newspaper that does not know a simple fact of history, which occurred just half a century ago. Israel was created by the United Nations but only because it was the wish of the victorious United States ( and its less powerful ally, Britain) to please the Jewish community and more pertinently the powerful Jewish lobby. As for the Islamic conference it represented a counter-force, the community of Islamic states. In the age of identity, Islam was a stronger mobilising force than pan-Arabism, or Nasserism some decades ago or Baathism, the ideology of the ruling party in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and quite popular in Syria too. Socialism and pan-Arabism converge to produce this rather ill-defined creed.
Differences did emerge at the Tehran meeting. Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei argued that “ the land-for-peace” formula was a “losing transaction”. This disappointed the pro-P.L.O. delegates. It is only if Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing LIKUD- dominated coalition yields land - even the land recently grabbed by the Israel army - that the P.L.O. can ever hope to establish a “mini-state” which will soon earn the recognition of the Arab Non-aligned states, and start the journey, however, slow to an internationally recognised “Palestine”.
The United States could press, if not persuade Israel, to start the process. But one man and his pressing political problems, will not open the door.Will a frustrated Palestinian leadership surrender its secular politics and march under the banner of Islam? Unless the U.S.”tames” Netanyahu, Israel can look forward to more violence.
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