Biting the bullet

In your editorial "The road to peace" (May 9 ), you refer to the freeze and dismantling of settlements and the "right of return" of Palestinians as two bullets which Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would have to bite as part of his contribution to the "success" of The Quartet's Road Map for a resolution of the Middle East conflict.

Concerning the first I, for one, have no doubt that a more or less complete dismantling of settlements, and the redeployment of Israeli forces to pre-1967 borders to permit the creation of a Palestinian state, is a sine qua non for Israel to be able to reclaim the moral and political high ground in the region. The majority of the Israeli people have, in fact, consistently indicated their readiness to dismantle the settlements as part of a peace deal. Not so the vociferous minority who favour settlement and the retention of Judea and Samaria as a God-given birthright to the "Greater Land of Israel".

This minority must no longer be allowed to hold Israel over a barrel, although it is unclear how much pressure the US would be prepared to exert on a Mr Sharon who has been committed to settlement for so many years.

Your editorial also suggests that Mr Sharon has another bullet to bite - the right of Palestinian refugees to "return", but I would put it to you that it is Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the Palestinians in particular and the Arabs in general who have to do the biting here.

The birth of nations has typically been a nasty and violent phenomenon which has often resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees. When British India was partitioned into Pakistan and India in 1947, huge massacres occurred in areas where there were minorities while something like two million people fled to where their co-religionists were in control. It seemed then that the matter of inter-communal confrontation had been resolved but it simmers on, punctured by occasional bloody outbursts, often nurtured by unscrupulous politicians.

Closer to our shores and to our times, in the 1950s, Greece had to take in over one million refugees, mostly from Turkey, as a consequence of a pogrom of the Greek minority in the latter. Greece itself promptly expelled 400,000 Muslims from its own territory.

The first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 resulted, directly or indirectly, in hundreds of thousands of people being displaced. Between 500,000 and 700,000 Arabs fled the former Mandate territory for neighbouring Arab countries, while nearly 600,000 Jews from Arab countries whose position had never risen above that of a despised second class minority, moved to Israel, where they were fed, clothed, housed, educated and absorbed into the community.

Arab regimes, characterised by leading Arab intellectual Edward Said as "a corrupt, incompetent lot, able neither to wage war courageously and unhypocritically, nor to conclude a peace with Israel decently", deliberately kept Arab refugees in camps. Indeed, a 1951 United Nations Refugee and Works Administration (UNRWA) plan to spend $100 million to resettle up to 250,000 of the refugees in one year was rejected by these same governments. Only Jordan granted them full citizenship.

In 1996, 48 years after the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, the number of refugees and their descendants for whom UNRWA had responsibility had grown to around 4.5 million. Anybody who seriously believes that Israel should even consider taking in such a large contingent of people, the overwhelming majority of whom would be very content to see it disappear from the face of the earth, really ought to think again.

A short while ago, our own tiny nation was already feeling threatened as a consequence of the influx of about 1,600 refugees. Imagine how we would react if we were suddenly confronted with the prospect of the arrival of 400,000 refugees drawn from a completely different cultural background.

It is time for Abu Mazen, the Palestinians, and Arabs in general, to stop blaming their woes on everybody else but themselves. Writing about Chomsky's Peace in the Middle East, Said notes how the Jewish scholar deals with societies and cultures (the US and Israel) critically, harshly and truthfully and contrasts this approach with the near total absence of any such self-criticism in Arab societies.

As Said points out, vast and recently acquired Arab money finds its way to Fifth Avenue real estate, British and Swiss banks, and conspicuous consumption of appalling vulgarity and short life while he is hard put to find any of this money being used for the endowment of scientific or cultural research on an inter-Arab basis, the consolidation of institutional development or the wholesale eradication of poverty, social and civic injustice, disease and illiteracy.

As Bernard Lewis has put it in one of his most recent publications, it is time for Arabs to stop asking "Who did this to us?" and instead ask "What did we do wrong?" and the second question which naturally leads from the latter: "How do we put it right?"

Until this happens we should not expect much to change in the Middle East, Road Map or no Road Map.