All quiet on the Middle Eastern Front
In each of the last two decades the Middle East has contributed a war to the turbu- lence of the age, and it is a safe bet that in the 1970s it will contribute another. But the characteristics of these wars over the past twenty years have been brevity and bloodlessness. The Far East and Africa have produced conflicts of horrendous savagery. Loss of life in the Middle East from warfare has not compared with loss of life in Europe and North America on the roads.
The region has certainly ended the old decade in typical fashion. The United States produced a blueprint for a settle- ment which was promptly denounced with considerable heat by the Israelis, and earned from President Nasser the bleak response that America was nothing but the recruiting ground for Jewish volunteers.
The French made mugs of the British government by coolly preparing to steal the contract for arms supplies to Libya, and then discovered the Israelis had made even bigger mugs of them by stealing the five patrol-boats which had been built for Israel and then subjected to de Gaulle's embargo. And finally the Arab summit conference in Rabat ended in a demonstra- tion of disunity unusual in its intensity even by the standards of that uneasy fraternity.
It is only charitable to assume that the American peace proposals were well meant: for there is little else that can be said for them. All the premises on which they were based were wholly at variance with the realities of the Middle East situa- tion. They predicated that Israel requires the reassurance of recognition by the Arab governments of her national existence: yet of what use would this be when the Arab governments are so evidently incapable of controlling—or even of preventing them- selves being controlled by—the implacable determination of the Palestinian guerrillas to wipe the name of Israel from the map? They also predicated the ability of the superpowers to impose their will on the principals in the conflict, when both have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to enforce moderation and their refusal to risk conclusions. Inevitably, the proposals received the response they deserved: the indignation of the Israelis, and the con- tempt of the Arabs.
The affair of the five patrol boats re- mains obscure at the time of writing. The Arab capitals have leapt to the conclusion that Paris is reacting to the fiasco of the Arab summit by tacitly scrapping de Gaulle's embargo on arms sales to Israel.
This seems very improbable in the light of the reports, all but confirmed by the French government, of the Franco-Libyan arms deal. A much more likely explana- tion is that some strategically-placed indi- viduals in the higher echelons of the French civil service, which has never made any secret of its abhorrence for the General's policy of reconciliation with the Arabs, had seized the opportunity of the Christmas holidays to execute a cloak- and-dagger coup against their political masters.
For the Israelis the five boats hardly seem worth the damage that their abduc- tion must do to Franco-Israeli relations. But presumably the Israeli government has decided, following the revelation of the projected Franco-Libyan arms deal, that Monsieur Pompidou, like the General before him, was beyond redemption. and that the best they could do was to queer his pitch with the Arabs. In this they may well have succeeded. The Arabs are un- likely to be pacified by a witch-hunt in Paris. They will put the worst interpreta- tion on this bizarre episode—and they can hardly be blamed for doing so.
The Arab summit seems to have pro- duced a confrontation between realism and emotion, with the inevitable result. If the Algerians shared a common frontier with Israel, then the outlook for the Zion- ist state in the 1970s might be bleak. In- stead the Arabs have to look to President Nasser to lead their crusade: and he knows by bitter experience that his army is no more capable of routing the Israelis than it is of getting to the moon.
Paradoxically, and in time, the Rabat summit could turn out to have served the Arab cause well enough. The strategy of the Palestinian guerrillas has been to keep the enthusiasm of the Arabs for the Holy War at fever pitch, and to keep their own names in the headlines of the world's press; and in this they have been highly successful. If the reports out of Rabat are to be believed, President Nasser—still, despite (perhaps because of) all his failures, the hero of the Arab world—has let it be known that he has had enough. He sees no prospect of a successful war against Israel in the near future. and he proposes to tackle the urgent task of mend- ing his domestic fences instead.
This does not promise a Middle East settlement, or even an armistice. It does perhaps render the possibility of direct Russian or American involvement in a Middle East flare-up a little more remote than it was already. And for Israel it is a matter of relative indifference whether or not the Palestinian guerrillas succumb to the rebuff they suffered in Rabat. Prob- ably they will not. But the Palestinian guerrillas do the Israeli cause almost as much good as harm. Certainly their sabo- tage activities inflict a toll on Israel's economy, as her latest troubles with the International Monetary Fund bear witness. But they also serve as a constant reminder to the Jews of the Diaspora of the needs of their national homeland. Every time the guerrillas catch the headlines by hijacking an Israeli airliner or blowing up an Israeli tourist office, they make the task of the Jewish Fund raisers abroad that much easier. Indeed, in the 1970s it is much more likely that they will become an even more formidable threat than they were in the 1960s to the survival, not of Israel. but of the existing Arab regimes.
Given the reliance of western Europe on the oil resources of the Arab countries this might be regarded as a disturbing forecast. It is not necessarily so. After all. Iraq has experienced more than two years of virtual political chaos, and the oil has continued to flow. And what of the Russian menace? The Mediterranean has sometimes been depicted in recent months as almost an open sea for the Russian fleet. Yet when the five stolen patrol boats sailed from Gibraltar to Haifa the Russians made no attempt to stop them. This is not to suggest that the countries of western Europe can afford to take the security of the Mediterranean for granted: simply that the Russian leaders are as reluctant to become directly involved in the Middle East conflict as ever.
As the 1970s open the most sen- sible prediction one can make for the Middle East is that it will continue to be fertile in the generation of the inter- national lawlessness which is the modern (and infinitely preferable) substitute for old-fashioned war: that it will continue to defy the wisdom of those who believe that no part of the world can for long survive in a condition of vacuum from great power control; that if global holocaust super- venes, it will not be sparked off in this area; and that the end of the 1970s will find Israel still embattled against frus- trated and impotent Arabia. In short, all quiet on the Middle Eastern Front.
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