Information Related to "What Prevents Peace in the Middle East?"

Audio/Video

What Prevents Peace
in the Middle East

Israel's former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, draws attention to a major cause of the conflict in the Mideast in his book A Place Among the Nations. He wrote: "Here, in a nutshell, is the main problem of achieving peace in the Middle East: Except for Israel, there are no democracies. None of the Arab regimes is based on free elections, a free press, civil rights and the rule of law" (1993, p. 248, emphasis in original).

Humanly speaking, Mr. Netanyahu is right. Many Arab regimes border on being outright dictatorships, subject to assassinations and changes of power by coups d'état. Fear of assassination may have been one of the main reasons Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's last peace proposal just before a wholesale return to street violence in several areas of the West Bank and Gaza. According to some reports, Mr. Arafat is said to have told President Clinton that if he accepted that offer he would be killed.

Historical reasons are evident for the lack of democracy in the Arab world. Chief among them is the disorderly demise of the Turkish Ottoman Empire immediately after World War I. The end of that empire left scattered remnants of Arab peoples ruled by various European colonial powers, primarily the British. Then, a quarter-century later in the aftermath of World War II, the withdrawal of the Europeans did not help matters. Few Middle Easterners were properly prepared to rule themselves.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn32/middleeastpeace_prevents.htm