It's easy to think of the situation in the Middle East as intractable, innate and insoluble—as if the current crisis, tensions, war, whatever you wish to call it, had been pre-destined since various improbable events like floods and burning bushes. But it's not. The specific conflict we're seeing now is entirely due to the founding and existence of Israel, which has itself only existed since 1948. Less than sixty years, which is an eternity going forward, but really not so long for historians looking backward. I mean this not to take sides on the question of Zionism or a Palestinian state, but rather that if Israel wasn't there we wouldn't have the current specific conflict. In the end that's a rather trivial statement. I think it fair to speculate, though it could never be shown, that even if Israel did not exist (if the Jewish state has been somewhere in Africa or North America) the Middle East would still not be filled with stable, democratic governments. Countries with borders shaped oddly by departing colonial powers and economies dependent on resource extraction tend that way.
Even going back fifty years you can see how dramatically things can turn. That much is clear from the Guardian's recent retrospective on the Suez crisis. In the current crisis, Israel and the United States are closely allied, with Britain at a small remove, and France seen by supporters of the Israeli government as a potentially duplicitous friend of autocratic regimes. But fifty years ago it was France, Britain and Israel that invaded Egypt while a Republican President in the United States urged caution, and worked to undermine the trio's plan for a military strike on Egypt. And then there's this fascinating backdrop to the whole disasterous caper into the canal: that before they invaded Egypt, Britain had plans for how to invade Israel if that proved necessary to fulfil treaty obligations with Arab states.
You can, if you like, draw parallels between Suez and Iraq, but I prefer to restrict myself to the more banal sentiment that just seeing how much has changed since 1956 show that the current crisis is not intractable, that things can change. Perhaps the current events will be resolved with an unstable truce, but there is always the possibility, at least, of real peace.
Posted by eroberts at August 3, 2006 4:12 PM