Josef Joffe: Why Palestine Won’t Remake the Middle East
[Josef Joffe is editor of Die Zeit and a senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and an Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford. This article ran in the September 23, 2010 issue of the magazine.]
The most durable myth in the Middle East is: "It's Palestine, stupid." It lies at the heart of Barack Obama's Middle East diplomacy, which is why the president has been pummeling the Israelis and pushing the Palestinians to resume talks. According to this myth, the most urgent problem is not the Iranian bomb or Syrian ambitions. It is not Egypt, once an anchor of stability and now slipping into precarious irrelevance. It is not Iraq, which is tottering between occupation and anarchy. It is not Al Qaeda in Yemen, the return of the Taliban, or the ticking time bomb that is Pakistan. Nor is it despotism, illiteracy, and misery, or the oppression of women, sects, and creeds.
No, the problem is three slivers of land known as Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, and this on a geostrategic stage that extends from Ankara to Afghanistan. Defuse that issue, and everything will fall into place. A paradigmatic example of this thinking came in a CNN interview with Jordan’s King Abdullah earlier this year. For him, “all the conflicts lead to Jerusalem.” Iran’s bomb project? Never mind, for “if we solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, why would Iranians want to spend so much money on a military program? It makes no sense.”
Solve the Palestinian problem, the king opined, and then we can “start to unwind all the other pressure points inside of the Middle East.” So let’s start with Iran. The nuclear program goes back to the Shah. Iran was then Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, and the last item on Reza Pahlavi’s far-flung agenda, if it was there at all, must have been Palestine. Today, Tehran is reaching for the bomb for the usual reasons: as deterrent, as badge of great-power status, as keystone of regional supremacy. Will the Khomeinists really ditch their nuclear venture once the Israeli oppressors have been driven from the Temple Mount, with its Al Aqsa Mosque? Of course not....
Read entire article at The New Republic
The most durable myth in the Middle East is: "It's Palestine, stupid." It lies at the heart of Barack Obama's Middle East diplomacy, which is why the president has been pummeling the Israelis and pushing the Palestinians to resume talks. According to this myth, the most urgent problem is not the Iranian bomb or Syrian ambitions. It is not Egypt, once an anchor of stability and now slipping into precarious irrelevance. It is not Iraq, which is tottering between occupation and anarchy. It is not Al Qaeda in Yemen, the return of the Taliban, or the ticking time bomb that is Pakistan. Nor is it despotism, illiteracy, and misery, or the oppression of women, sects, and creeds.
No, the problem is three slivers of land known as Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, and this on a geostrategic stage that extends from Ankara to Afghanistan. Defuse that issue, and everything will fall into place. A paradigmatic example of this thinking came in a CNN interview with Jordan’s King Abdullah earlier this year. For him, “all the conflicts lead to Jerusalem.” Iran’s bomb project? Never mind, for “if we solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, why would Iranians want to spend so much money on a military program? It makes no sense.”
Solve the Palestinian problem, the king opined, and then we can “start to unwind all the other pressure points inside of the Middle East.” So let’s start with Iran. The nuclear program goes back to the Shah. Iran was then Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, and the last item on Reza Pahlavi’s far-flung agenda, if it was there at all, must have been Palestine. Today, Tehran is reaching for the bomb for the usual reasons: as deterrent, as badge of great-power status, as keystone of regional supremacy. Will the Khomeinists really ditch their nuclear venture once the Israeli oppressors have been driven from the Temple Mount, with its Al Aqsa Mosque? Of course not....