Belonging to the Middle East

by Rima Merriman

If what is ultimately needed from the Israelis is a concession of wrongdoing and a fair deal for the Palestinians, what is ultimately required of the Palestinians is an acknowledgement of defeat in terms of their ability to define themselves as a people and where they belong (or at least a significant adjustment).

But neither side is likely to make such fundamental concessions. At least that's what observers must conclude after Sharon's comments at the Herzliya Conference a few days ago and Mahmoud Abbas' reaction to them.

In peace, as in war, the stronger party dictates terms to the weaker party. So far, Sharon's terms to the Palestinians are as follows, in that order: Stop armed resistance to the occupation. Under the guise of "democratic elections", legitimise the person who is to sign away Palestinian rights and territory on the dotted line - this time for good. (Israel has allowed the candidates to the chairmanship of the Palestinian National Authority to travel freely in the West Bank and Gaza only three weeks before the election.)

In return, Sharon will allow the Palestinians to have a nominally independent, cantonised, barely viable Palestinian "state". The Jewish settlers and Palestinian refugees will remain where they are or will be moved about cosmetically.

To achieve these ends, Israel is banking heavily on the fact that it has brought the Palestinians to their knees economically. Israel is betting on a Palestinian "technocratic" government emerging that would push past its own public's deep and visceral hostility towards Israel for the sake of economic prosperity.

Think of miles and miles of Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs) in a future Palestinian state, with substantial Israeli shares in a wide variety of products. These would naturally be clustered around the settlements.

Israel's relationship with Egypt is a case in point. The US trade representative has just signed an agreement with the Egyptian and Israeli ministers of industry to create eight QIZs in Egypt (the agreement still needs ratification by the US Congress and by the Egyptian parliament). Goods made in these zones with a minimum percentage of Israeli content (11.7 per cent) would be allowed to enter the US duty-free. Egypt does not have a broad free trade agreement with the US.

The problem is that the Egyptian public, like the public in all Arab countries, is pro-Palestinian and is likely to oppose the agreement unless Palestinian issues are resolved first.

To many Israelis, not to mention the US government, the question then becomes how Arab governments should shape or bypass Arab public opinion, rather than how Israel should change its predatory policies towards the Palestinians.

The theory goes like this: Because Egypt's new technocratic government must focus on Egypt's deteriorating economic situation and put politics aside, it could be made to fall along with US and Israeli politically motivated plans. "Egypt desperately needs jobs, investment and income, and the agreement with Israel offers all these. Moreover, the agreement will strengthen Egypt's position in the US, where there have been calls to reduce the military and economic aid given to Cairo," said Paul Rivlin of the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies and the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies.

And since the media in Egypt, Rivlin continues, are part of the reason why the public is hostile to Israel, and since the government in Egypt largely controls the media, then it follows that the government could and should fall in with these economic plans and change public opinion. It's all simply a matter of choice on the part of the Egyptian government.

The same tortuous reasoning is applied to the Palestinians. Israel will use economic development to pressure a technocratic Palestinian government to place the dire economic needs of its people above territorial and national identity imperatives. Having successfully reduced the Palestinian economy to rubble, Israel has a huge carrot to use. For the PNA, this scenario is a Hobbesian choice: living a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" or suffering under Israeli greed and dominance.

Additionally, whereas Israel has the power to affect the economies of the Arab countries around it, it appears that Arab countries have little effect on Israel's economy, or so a recent paper from the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs was boasting: "Economically, Israel does not belong to the Middle East. Israel's clients are in Western Europe, North America, and Asian countries such as India and Japan. Israel's trade with its close neighbours is not high tech, but oil and simple farm and industrial products."

According to this view, the closure of the Erez industrial zone north of Gaza merely resulted in the loss of 5,000 Palestinian jobs. The closure of the Israeli border to Palestinian labour resulted in the loss of thousands of Palestinian jobs. Differentiating between goods produced by "Jewish settler-entrepreneurs" and Palestinian goods or goods produced in Israel (as the EU does) resulted in the loss of Palestinian jobs. The high-tech, globally connected Israeli economy apparently hardly felt a ripple as a result of closures and withdrawals. But the Palestinian economy certainly did.

Other economists might work out the balance sheet differently, but the fact remains that what is being measured here is a nascent and minuscule Palestinian economy of $4.5 billion (in its heyday) against an Israeli economy of $125 billion.

Unfortunately, in many fundamental ways, what does not belong to the Middle East is Israel itself, not just its economy. So focused it is on its own survival, security and prosperity as a usurper, importing its citizens (like its goods) from outside the region, that the Jewish state cares nothing for what happens to the Palestinians, and never has. All it wants is for them to disappear. Or, failing that, to be pushed into as small a piece of land as possible, and preferably to be walled in.

This article was published in the Thursday, December 23, 2004 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.