Monday, February 13, 2006 8:00 AM

Expect democracy to delay any peace with Israel

By David Hirst

Saturday, February 11, 2006, Daily Star

So, with Hamas set to take control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the destiny of the Palestinian people is now, once more, in the hands of a party that believes in Israel’s dissolution, and violence as a way of achieving it.

This situation effectively takes Palestinians back four decades, to the last comparable change in their leadership and the social structure on which it rested. In 1968 Yasser Arafat and his Fatah guerillas, children of exile and the refugee camps, wrested control of the Palestinian Liberation Organization – a creature of the Arab regimes – from the remnants of the traditional elite, landowners and urban notables who had dominated Palestinian affairs since the Zionist enterprise began. Only the idiom differs: What, in the left-leaning secular nationalist terminology of the time, went by the name of “armed struggle” and “revolution until victory” is now, with the Islamists, “jihad” and saving “the land of Palestine as an Islamic religious endowment until Judgment Day.”

It is a retrogressive political earthquake – but with impeccable democratic credentials. Not only were the Palestinian elections exemplary in themselves, they accomplished, in so far a basically orderly fashion, the most radical such transfer of power in modern Arab history. Perhaps most remarkable of all, wrote Ghassan Charbel in Al-Hayat, “They came from inside the logic of the new world order.” That is to say, from the democratization that is a central mission of the Bush presidency; from its “war on terror”; from all those sicknesses, located primarily in the Middle East, like despotism and religious extremism, that nurture terror; and from the democratization that would, in addition, contribute mightily to that other strategic American purpose, Arab-Israeli peace, for the simple reason that democratic states are said to be good neighbors of other democratic states.

There could hardly be a more dramatic illustration than Hamas’ triumph of the contradiction, the blind spot, at the heart of America’s Middle East policies – ever present, but brought to its apogee under the Bush administration with its proselytizing zeal on the one hand and its unsurpassed devotion to Israel on the other. What American administrations habitually don’t or don’t want to see is that Palestinians, and the Arab world of which they are a part, possess national or patriotic feelings and are apt to react more or less aggressively when these are transgressed by others.

The place where Arab national feelings are most systematically flouted is Palestine. So, in elementary logic, it is also the place where democracy, as both reflection and instrument of the popular will, is more likely to be belligerent than peaceable in character. “Democracy,” says Joseph Samaha, the editor of Al-Safir, “is not an alternative to patriotism, as the U.S. effectively wants it to be. It is one of its tools.” The mound of Western sleights of hand will collapse. The mound quivered in Iraq and Palestine turned it into ruins. “Give us democracy and take resistance.” Or, as Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader, put it, “We will go for arms and a parliament, for there’s no contradiction between the two.”

If the Hamas victory is truly a watershed, it is also likely to be an Arab and Muslim, not just a Palestinian, one. It has long been something of a cliche that insofar as Arabs and Palestinians formally accommodated themselves to Israel, it was Arab despotism, not democracy, that made it possible. To be sure, Arab public opinion might have been moving away, if only in the weariness of repeated defeat and failure, from the “rejectionism” of Israel that was all-pervading in the earlier stages of the conflict, but never far enough for those rulers who did make peace with Israel to do so with anything seriously resembling a popular mandate.

As Aluf Benn has written in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, “Israel could always do business with Arab dictators, a barrier protecting it from the rage of the ‘Arab street.’ That was the basis of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Yasser Arafat and his heirs and the rules vis-a-vis Syria and Lebanon. But those days are over. Henceforth Israel will have to factor into its foreign policy something it has always ignored – Arab public opinion.”

Thus, the more democracy spreads, the more militancy in Palestine will find like-minded support in the region. Hamas began life as the Gaza chapter of the region-wide Muslim Brotherhood movement. And nowadays Arab democracy will mean the ascendancy of Islamism, and its rejectionism, almost everywhere. After the Brotherhood, despite gross obstructionism, won a fifth of the seats in Egypt’s recent parliamentary elections, their leader said that his movement did not recognize Israel, and proposed that the 1978 Camp David peace treaty be put to a popular referendum.

And why is it that just as the United States’ well-known hankerings after “regime change” in Damascus seemed to be taking a serious and purposeful turn, Israel suddenly took to urging Washington against it? Because it seemed better to preserve Bashar Assad, anti-Israeli nationalist despot though he may be, in his weak and beleaguered condition than to unleash the demons of democracy, among them the prospect of Syria’s Islamists, a powerful subterranean force, clamoring for the liberation of the Golan Heights – for 30 years the quietest of all Arab-Israeli fronts, thanks to the efficacy of the despot’s repression.

Some argue that through sheer force of circumstance Hamas will go through exactly the same evolutionary process, from militancy to moderation, that Arafat and the secular nationalists did before it; that it already is, in fact, with its language of “truces” whose legitimacy goes back to the prophet Muhammad himself. That could be, but Hamas will not, cannot, metamorphose overnight as Israel and the West, with their conditions for any engagement with it, seem to expect. That would negate much of the basis on which it was elected. So the plain fact now is that the democracy U.S. President George W. Bush wants for the Arabs will not merely impede any further advance in the Arab-Israeli peace process, which conventional piety has always assumed to be irreversible: It will endanger what the process has already achieved.

It will certainly do so, at least, until America and the West, undergoing long overdue metamorphoses of their own, decide that Israel should become democratic too; not for its Jewish citizens, which it always has been, but for the Palestinians, at whose expense it came into being and has perpetuated itself ever since. If there is any chance of checking the resurgence of Palestinian and Arab rejectionism, it is by checking the persistent rejectionism on the other side, and getting Israel to accept what, in practice, it has never accepted: that very partial restoration of Palestinian national rights embodied in the Oslo Accords and its two-state solution.

It was Arafat who, with his Fatah leadership, persuaded his people to accept the historic concession of a two-state solution, without which there could never be peace or any prospect of it. Reports from the Occupied Territories suggest that, in spite of Hamas, Palestinians largely still accept it. But that is not much use so long as Israel fails to honor the much less onerous, reciprocal concession the world should be urgently demanding of it.

David Hirst was for a long time Middle East correspondent for London’s The Guardian. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.