Over the years, many analysts have lost their political periscopes in the treacherous sands of Lebanese politics. First, there were “civil wars” for almost fifteen years that tore the country up and set it aflame. Then, the Taëf Accords ostensibly stepped in to redress the ornery behaviour of its leaders but ended up curbing the powers of the president of the republic or its Christian communities and admittedly placed the country under an Anjar-centred Syrian tutelage. Much later, the country witnessed the Independence Intifada of 2005 when new neo-revolutionary values unfurled on the streets and vied with older realities. But despite all those upheavals, the Cedars of Lebanon have remained a political conundrum as they have wrestled time and again with sectarian uncertainties let alone political infidelities. Lebanon celebrated on 22nd November its much-cherished 65th Independence Day, but unlike the Israeli-Palestinian or Iraqi conflicts that exhibit a set of unflinching core issues, one can never presume to predict what political ghoul would come out of which Lebanese corner at any moment.

Today, I would suggest that there are four largely inter-related and major issues at the epicentre of the Lebanese political discord. They consist of the national pan-confessional dialogue under the auspices of the president of the republic, the future of arms in the hands of different political groups and militias, the future of Palestinian refugees both inside and outside their camps and last but not least the decisive impetus that Christians will in all likelihood inject into the forthcoming parliamentary elections of 2009.

The national dialogue: in some way, it is a by-product of the Doha main deal that facilitated the election of a new president and the formation of a “national unity” cabinet that houses diametrically opposite standpoints. It was also meant to foster reconciliation between the warring factions and address the unresolved standoff about the legitimacy of arms outside the remit of the army. This dialogical exercise, I believe, would only be a cosmetic exercise that does not have much chance for real progress but will nonetheless hopefully keep the peace amongst major players who have committed publicly to the Doha process. It could also be a catalyst in restraining all parties from unilateral and bellicose moves that would wrench the lid off the present insecure calm.

The future of arms that Hizbullah, the Party of God, has in its possession: this is meant to be a central plank for the national reconciliation dialogue. However, most seasoned commentators are aware that this issue cannot be resolved before the parliamentary elections in the spring of 2009. No way will this party, let alone its allies or protagonists, surrender their arms whilst they maintain the need for resistance against an Israel that still occupies small plots of Lebanese land and exhibits what they consider an expansionist threat on the country. So much so in fact that the Free Patriotic Movement leader General Michel Aoun returned from a recent visit to Iran and presented his blueprint for a national defence strategy that is based on his 2005 Memorandum of Understanding with Hizbullah. It called for combining the Resistance and the Lebanese army into a “community resistance” that would command the loyalty and resources of the state along with all its institutions and citizens. What this blueprint for a defence strategy actually imputed is a negation of the need for UNSC Resolutions 1701 and 1559.

But this blueprint that aims to mobilise all the citizens of the state could become another dangerous recipe for further civil wars. As the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party Walid Jumblatt counter-argued in the weekly newsletter al-Anba’a, General Aoun’s proposition would transform Lebanon into a “constant war field, which topples stability, torpedoes investment and increases emigration.” Taken one step nearer toward at least one of its logical conclusions, Jumblatt’s viewpoint translates into the fact that the state is the sole authority, and that any defence strategy that does not respect the pluralism of the state cannot be taken into consideration in any future discussions. After all, was the temporary takeover of the western districts of Beirut by Hizbullah and Amal elements on the fateful night of 7th May not a dangerously implicit manifestation of consensus by coercion?

The future of Palestinian refugees: to start with the tactical considerations, it is helpful to recall that disarming Palestinian factions outside the camps was meant to have already been decided during the first national dialogue in 2006 prior to the war with Israel in July. So their status strictu sensu is not in my legal opinion lite pendente anymore. However, political calculations have prevented implementing its provisions practically on the ground.
Insofar as the Palestinian camps are concerned, it is also important to recall that the idea of tawtin (or the granting of residency through Lebanese citizenship to those refugees in the camps across Lebanon) that would push up the Sunni quota in the country if ever implemented is a political non-sequitur used by politicians as a ruse to prop up their own political ends. The Lebanese government, and the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, have already agreed that no tawtin will occur in Lebanon since such a move would undermine inter alia the validity under International law of UNSC 194 calling for the right of return [to their homelands].

Indeed, the Palestinian-Lebanese Dialogue Committee (LPDC) works pan-politically to defuse such malingering chronicles, as well as to rebuild Nahr el Bared near Tripoli that was destroyed substantially following the battles between the Lebanese army and the Fatah al Islam radical movement. It also strives to improve the long-standing and truly deplorable conditions in some of those camps. Such efforts must not only be maintained, but also re-doubled seriously, without opening rifts between the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples that would be a throwback to the bloody battles three decades ago. Moreover, the issue of tawtin should not be dragged into the electoral ring by the Cassandras of Lebanon who believe that purveying bad news would inevitably strengthen their flanks.

Christian performance in the forthcoming elections: all my contacts with different Lebanese pundits confirm that the battle for Christian votes will arguably be the hub of political alliances or lobbies in the months ahead. The recent Shi’i-Sunni ‘summit’ between Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Sa’ad Hariri resulted in a ‘reconciliation’ of sorts with both leaders excluding any electoral alliance between them. So the Sunni and Shi’i seats are almost clear pickings in most districts - with few notable exceptions. Even a putative future meeting between Walid Jumblatt and Hassan Nasrallah will in my opinion not result in any electoral pact and therefore cannot alter substantially the calculus of their respective seats in the next parliament. All this leaves the Christian candidates to fight it out amongst themselves - cleaved as they are between the March 8th and 14th coalitions.

But the present dynamics are dangerous as they reflect Christian tensions inter partes that have not mimicked the corresponding easing of tensions within Muslim camps. This has led to occasional verbal attacks against the institutional pillars of Christian society, namely the Maronite patriarch and even the president. With baffling alliances so characteristic of Lebanese intra-politics, one way of engendering support seems to be through the dangerous exhumation of past demons and animosities. There is real fear as to the outcome of those votes in view of the way that candidates are being chosen by the different parties. Indeed, with diametrically opposite political platforms, strategies and even expectations, I would suggest that the Christian voter is faced with clear-cut choices that are not solely binary but also organic in their ramifications on the overall future of the country.

This is why we keep hearing alarm bells hither and thither, with dichotomous positions over the impact of the Taëf Accords, and international alliances and regional influences being exercised by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iran, let alone the USA and Europe, over issues that centre upon freedom, pluralism, religion and resistance. Indeed, Christian divisions can even be seen at the micro-level of national governance. Just observe how the small but influential Armenian parties - namely the Tashnag party - have heretofore broken their legendary collective neutrality in support of the presidential powers-to-be and have now forged new cross-party political alliances.

In fact, this sense of constant political realignments is becoming a talking point of the forthcoming parliamentary elections as everyone eyes the stance of President Michel Suleiman. It seems an independent, middle-of-the-road national parliamentary bloc that has a Christian ethos and owes its organic allegiance to the president is an idea that is rapidly gaining currency in the country. In fact, if such a bloc emerges after the parliamentary elections, it could conceivably sway the power politics of the country and affect the clout of both principal coalitions.

However, such an emergent movement could damage General Aoun’s electoral self-anointed position as sole Lebanese Christian leader. After all, the former deputy prime minister and Metn powerbroker Michel al-Murr has withdrawn from his bloc, a move that could tip the balance in the Metn and impact the neighbouring Kesrouan - alongside any probable Armenian shifts in their own electoral platforms. No wonder then that Syrian channels are trying to prevent such fragmentation by bolstering General Aoun’s standing with Lebanese Christian constituents and proclaiming him “leader of Christians in the Orient” with an “historic mission” and an “objective, national Lebanese personality” who harbours “a strategic insight that understands Arab and regional powers.”
Another major underlying focus in all those alliances is the definition of the role Syria ought to play in Lebanon. There is a battle being waged between those supportive of an active role, and those who reject it, and Syria itself is heavily involved in spinning the outcome. All this explains somewhat the reason why an almost surreal episode played out on Syrian New TV quite recently, with the televised confessions of alleged Fatah al-Islam members attempting to discredit the March 14th coalition in the person of Sa’ad Hariri’s Sunni Al-Mustaqbal (Future) party by associating it with terrorism. But this ill-advised and frankly unpolished strategy seems to have yielded no concrete results. I understand that the prosecuting judge of the International Tribunal mandated by UNSC 1701 to look into the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri and 21 others on February 14 2005, as well as a string of subsequent political murders, is close to submitting his report to the UN Security Council.

Mind you, logic would dictate that such allegedly “terrorist members” in Syrian custody should be handed over to the Lebanese authorities investigating those murders. After all, the ‘security coordination’ mooted between Lebanon and Syria following an earlier visit to Damascus by the Lebanese Interior Minister Ziad Baroud should fulfil its coordinating role within a clear judicial remit, or else the whole concept of ‘coordination’ becomes an Orwellian concept that would bear a less edifying intent.

However, all polarisations, reservations and even fears surrounding the pending judgment of the tribunal should not stunt the progress of the much-touted diplomatic relations between Lebanon and Syria. Whether half the Lebanese populace likes it or not, Syria is one of the most critical players in Lebanon and the Arab World. Its larger global geo-strategic interests will not allow it to eclipse entirely - certainly not at the present time. The establishment of embassies between Lebanon and Syria before end-year is therefore quintessential. However, for such progress not to be merely ephemeral, it is important to proceed equally with the demarcation and proper control of borders. And given that Syria opposes such demarcation starting from the litigious zone of the Shaba’a Farms, I suggest initiating the process from the north, followed by a revision by a parliamentary commission of previous bilateral accords, and an enquiry by the International Red Cross into Lebanese citizens in Syrian gaols.

Lebanon today is perched precariously between life and death, facing success and failure in co-equal dimension. It is therefore vital for it to enter into a necessary accommodation with Syria that would introduce an element of stability into the region let alone into Lebanon itself but would definitively not jeopardise Lebanese territorial integrity or sovereignty. I admit candidly that this is a difficult balance in view of the different political variables at play, and I can observe how twisted French foreign diplomacy has become of late as President Nicolas Sarkozy tries to square the political circle by strengthening Lebanon as an independent state whilst re-introducing Syria onto the international scene and re-engaging with its regional responsibilities. But the fact remains that any other skewed outcome would mean that the parliamentary elections could well take place, but they will fail to unravel the Gordian knot that is undermining Lebanon and its hardy citizens.

Perhaps what might be helpful is the introduction of a quality of change that respects the National Pact guaranteeing the coexistence of all communities in Lebanon, whilst also not shying away from the onus of renegotiating the structure of power in Lebanon. Without being a naïve theoretician, I judge that the president of the republic, alongside the UN as guarantor, could provide such a political egress from this standoff. But for such a development to germinate in the country, political leaders must desist from thinking or acting like militia or clan leaders anymore and metamorphose into statesmen who use the appropriate tools to build up government capacity and nation-building in a bottom-up process that reflects the real global architecture of our common future.

Openly put, Lebanon requires an existential choice that would take it forward. Otherwise, what I fear we will witness in this period of electioneering - and also thereafter when the votes have been counted and the stalemates have re-surfaced in different formats and numbers - is not only a status quo ante but a much more perilous and radical heightening of tensions that could result in a screeching collision of the bullet with the ballot box.

Barack Obama achieved what some analysts had doubted until the very last moment: he was elected 44th president of the United States of America after a brilliant campaign that outclassed, outgunned and outmanoeuvred his not-so-maverick rival.

There is little doubt that America’s new president-elect, known in some circles as No-Drama Obama, will take office at the White House on 20 January 2009 on a huge tide of goodwill. So much goodwill in fact that one thousand liberal activists distributed 1.2 million copies of a spoof of the New York Times newspaper earlier this week carrying a fictitious - but significant - date of 4 July 2009 and heralding the headlines that President Obama had ended the war in Iraq and closed the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, and that ex-president Bush had been indicted on a charge of high treason.

Yet, this young and rather inexperienced senator from Chicago inherits a frightful mess! After all, the global markets have crashed, climate change is casting its spectre on the world and two bungled wars - Iraq and Afghanistan - have plunged America into record debt, bruised its military and sapped its moral leadership. Eight years of unilateralism, ideology and coercion have wrought havoc with the world, and Obama now has to exercise soft power to correct Bush-friendly excesses.

But would he manage to pull off this truly gargantuan challenge, and what will happen with the Middle East?

As the political strategist Michael Byers lucidly reminded his readers last week, the priorities of the Middle East will focus first on Iraq, followed closely by Afghanistan and Iran, and only later will the larger Arab-Israeli issues housing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at its epicentre come up. In fact, and with urgent domestic issues notwithstanding, Iraq and Afghanistan alone could easily harness much of his efforts and those of his Secretary of State during the first four-year term. The more regional issues that include Lebanon and Palestine will in my opinion not receive too much hands-on attention in this first term and could end up being relegated to a possible second term after 2012. Besides, the appointments that fill the slots of his future Administration - the likes of Rahm Emmanuel for instance as chief of staff - could also provide us with indices about the orientations of the man as he sets about trying to repair the battering that America has sustained over eight years.

Throughout his short political life, Obama has repeatedly stated that he disapproved the invasion of Iraq and wished to see US troops pulled out or reduced within sixteen to twenty four months. In fact, the relative stability of Iraq in recent months, which has resulted much more from a myriad deals concluded with Sunni tribal leaders constituting the Sahwa or Awakening Councils rather than from the so-called ‘surge’, creates a possible window of opportunity to use the improved security situation as a justification for a notable de-escalation of US military presence in Iraq. In fact, the knots are being unravelled already, with the Iraqi institutions endorsing the revised and improved status-of-forces agreement (Sofa)).

Parallel to American considerations, Obama’s election would also free PM Gordon Brown from the dubious moral commitment undertaken by his predecessor Tony Blair to stand ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with President George Bush in his invasion of Iraq. As such, I would also expect an accelerated drawdown from Basra too, with our troops being perhaps stationed in Afghanistan where at least a real war is being waged against al-Qa’eda to secure future world peace.

However, Obama had promised to send two more combat brigades to Afghanistan and strike within Pakistan if necessary. But with election ague over, I question if he would persist with the NATO-led war. It is not inconceivable that he might re-read the recent Afghan history that repulsed numerous foreign forces and opt instead for a major strategic review that could provide the political cover for a diplomatic and negotiations-led approach with tribal leaders - including the Taliban.

I have often criticised the misjudgements of the current US Administration. Like the majority of Europeans, I too was counting the days until the Bush Administration walked out of the White House. However, I also feel an underpinning of concern at the election of this man since the challenges that confront him are so Herculean he is bound to trip somewhere. This is normal, but I fear his failure would not only translate into a massive letdown of popular expectations, it would also become a severe disappointment for African Americans who have celebrated as president one of their own.

Today, though, I wish to remain optimistic, not yield to niggling concerns or untimely quibbles. So I shall celebrate for now the election of a man who has truly overturned the tables against a stenosed Republican Party let alone against a formidable Hillary Clinton who was a definitive shoo-in for the highest post had Obama not thought big - and thought out of the box.

So what is the future of Barack Obama with the Middle East? Well, just pray with me!

This publicity stunt, with some arguable advocacy weight to it, occurred at the same time that the political landscape between Israel and the Palestinians, let alone within each of those two parties, was being ratcheted up again. Four days of rioting and unrest in the northern town of Acre inside Israel, resulting in the arrest of 64 people, kicked off when an Arab Israeli man drove into a Jewish neighbourhood during the Yom Kippur [Day of Atonement] holiday. He was remanded into custody for three days on charges of reckless endangerment, speeding and harming religious sensitivities although he pleaded in his defence that he was a pacifist who was also one of the founders of a community co-existence committee in Acre. However, the incident highlighted the ongoing acute polarisation between the Jewish and Arab residents of Israel, so much so that the president of Israel called for reconciliation between the two communities, whilst its outgoing prime minister admitted openly that there has been discrimination for years against the Arab Israeli population.

Such riots erupted whilst tensions between West Bank Palestinians and hard-core Israeli Jewish settlers in Hebron also rose to a higher pitch with renewed brawls between the two protagonists. Add the fact that the tastes of decent journalistic freedom were further stretched when two Israeli private television channels - Two and Ten - broadcast previews of their phone interviews with Yigal Amir who is serving a life sentence for the murder of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin [on 4th November 1995] only days before Israel commemorated the 13th anniversary of his premature death.

On a parallel plane, Tzipi Livni showed political uniqueness when she gave up forming a new coalition government in Israel rather than concede to the political blackmailing of the Shas ultra-orthodox party and called instead for a general election on 10 February 2009. Equally, Hamas, in a tactical move that reflects regional overtones, boycotted the Palestinian national reconciliation talks sponsored by Egypt in Cairo, suggesting that the host country had ignored to clarify its objections.

One would think that this is enough to remind my readers that the Middle East remains awash with political turpitude and violent omens. Nothing new there, one might add cynically, were it not for the fact that the outgoing prime minister tapped into his outspokenness about the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations and started admitting to a few belated truths.

Indeed, PM Ehud Olmert surprised pundits by coming up with startlingly soul-searching statements in his ‘legacy interview’ of 29th September with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonoth. In exchange for peace, he suggested, Israel should withdraw from “almost all” of the West Bank and share its capital city, Jerusalem, with the Palestinians. He segued that the Jewish state should be ready to give up the Golan Heights as part of a negotiated peace deal with Syria. He even dismissed as ‘megalomania’ any suggestion that Israel should act by itself to destroy the Iranian nuclear programme.

In a sense, Olmert was repudiating the traditional defence strategies pursued by Israel since 1948. But it was decidedly unimpressive: after all, the outgoing prime minister chose the moment he had lost power as his epiphany for articulating a few salient truths rather than when he yielded it and could have therefore made a difference. It is equally unimpressive that Olmert never applied even the tactical steps necessary to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians or offer them a real stake in peace. No wonder the Annapolis initiative 2007 proved a damp squid, an elegant political sleight of hand, meant to perpetuate a combination of the inertia, bias and ineptitude of the Bush Administration and its political acolytes.

In the midst of all those fears, the Arab initiative that had been adopted at the Arab Summit of Beirut in 2002 and rebooted repeatedly by the Arab League suddenly became popular currency in Israel. Strange really, since Israel had in the past pretty much spurned this pan-Arab offer and continued its colonial policies of Palestinian land whilst the Quartet remained henpecked politically and the Bush Administration had hung a reckless “not available” signpost outside the White House. Yet, even as President Shimon Peres applauded this very initiative at the UN conference on inter-religious tolerance, he was simply picking and choosing the bits of the initiative that suited Israeli interests rather than dealing with a whole package that would lead to peace with the whole Arab World. So does Israel seek at long last a peaceful solution built on a foundation of accepted international law and legitimacy that treats both sides as co-equals enjoying the same rights of statehood, sovereignty and security? Or is Israel again playing at clever prevarication and endeavouring to stall for time again?

Meanwhile, whilst reams of analyses and prolix statements are being churned out annually to lament the lack of peace, the situation on the ground for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza worsens every week and their dreams for a viable statehood based on the much-vaunted two-state solution becomes increasingly more remote and less applicable. Just peruse the 49-page report issued by the World Bank on 23rd October: it is a timely reminder of how the Palestinian economy is suffering from a severe and debilitating lack of investment due largely to Israeli restrictions on movement despite enhanced international aid. The report states that massive foreign aid “has succeeded in doing little more than slowing down the deterioration of the economy, despite ever larger volumes”. It notes also that the Palestinian per capita gross domestic product in 2007 is 40% lower than its peak in 1999, and that investment has “dropped to precariously low levels” with virtually no new public investment in the last two years. It points to the fragmentation of the West Bank into “a multitude of enclaves, with a regime of movement restrictions between them” as a main reason for the economic deterioration. Moreover, the report underlines that “the physical access restrictions are the most visible, with 38% of the land area reserved by the government of Israel to serve settlements and security objectives”. Key constraints include the expanding population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem (totalling roughly 461,000 people), anti-Palestinian violence by settlers that creates a “permanent state of insecurity”, the increasing number of Israeli walls, roadblocks, and checkpoints, and Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ access to their own land and water.

A grave report of this nature brings analysts and commentators out of their offices to decry the situation and assert that what is needed is an impartial external mediator who would bring the two parties together. Not surprisingly, some sources are now mooting that the new American president-elect Barack Obama is the man for the job. But I rue he is not so, since the problem besetting the two peoples runs much deeper than the efforts of one man - even a mighty one.

No American president alone - irrespective of the clout s/he carries with the office - can produce a magical formula for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A key problem for peace lies within the heart of the Israeli political thinking that remains a nation at war with itself as much as with some of its neighbours. We have all witnessed on television screens the way settlers in the West Bank vandalise Palestinian property and clash with the police every time it attempts to remove their illegal outposts. Peace-seeking political or community leaders are now fretful of assassination attempts against them not unlike that of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Last month alone witnessed an attempt to kill Ze’ev Sternhell, a supporter of the Akhshav Shalom [Peace Now] movement that documents settlement constructions. The Israeli government - due to a combination of ideological, political, colonial, demographic and pecuniary interests - has simply been disinclined to dismantle even the remotest illegal outposts let alone the bigger settlements in the West Bank. The majority of those illegal constructions are not rogue constructions; they are government-funded ones receiving water and electricity services. Add to that the recalcitrance of political parties to endorse a viable [just] peace model, let alone to calm tensions on the streets as politicians such as the right-wing Likud party, Benyamin Netanyahu, busily stoke the fires with hard-line rhetoric from the opposition benches of the Israel Knesset [parliament]. Such political mauling is largely for power-seeking purposes, and is being done in this instance so Netanyahu could return to power at the expense of Tzipi Livni, the new Kadima leader.

Today, I suggest we stop using the current Palestinian divisions as an excuse for political indolence. Palestinians are deeply disunited, we know, with fetid ideological posturing by those who are not always amenable to sound pragmatism and whose positions are also exacerbated by regional and global powers averse to a solution so they maintain their own political leverages. We know all this and more, with Gaza almost using its pariah state defiantly against the world, even when the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) states that it had run out of food supplies for the 750,000 Palestinians in the Strip who depend on the UN for their food supplies. Sadly, the Gaza residents have to resort to candles to light up their houses or solicit hospital and food supplies because Israel tartly refuses to allow supplies into the territory. True, Palestinian disunity is a central stumbling block for international mediators to end the violence and lift the Gaza blockade, but one wonders whether we in the West did not also contribute to such disunity with our daft boycott of Hamas.

However, let us not forget in our indecent political haste that all Palestinians - whether in the Hamas bastion of Gaza, in the PLO fulcrum of the West Bank or in east Jerusalem with its new secular mayor Nir Barkat - are an occupied people. Israel, as the occupying power since 1967, should ab initio freeze all settlements and reduce the roadblocks strangulating the Palestinian economy. It should not prop up the Palestinian negotiating leadership with vacuous words and barren gestures alone. Instead, as Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post on 18th July in Hunker Down with History, it should pull out of most of the West Bank to defensible - admittedly not impervious - borders. Simply put, it should implement a solution whose formula has not changed radically since earlier UNSC Resolutions or later Taba negotiations so that an independent - sovereign, contiguous and viable - Palestinian state co-existing peacefully and side-by-side with Israel emerges at long last.

This week, the latest meeting of the Quartet concluded with more futile perorations by the UN Secretary-General and redundant admonitions by its special envoy Tony Blair. Nothing new there, but unless Israel shifts its positions in real terms, the Palestinians start negotiating as one body, the Arab world assumes its collective responsibilities and the Quartet shifts significantly all its four-speed levers, the situation would not only remain tense but the region would continue to be buffeted by political tempests with alarming regularity. Ultimately, more internal ructions and external bushfires would erupt … and I am afraid that neither Barack, nor Hussein, nor Obama would manage to save the day.

The Sirens of Baghdad is a compelling 307-page novel by Yasmina Khadra - pen name of the former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul - about Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. A young Iraqi student, unable to attend college because of the war, sees American soldiers leave a trail of humiliation and grief in his small village. Bent on revenge, he flees to the chaotic streets of Baghdad where insurgents soon realise they can make use of his anger. Yasmina Khadra’s book examines the effects of violence on ordinary people, showing what can turn a decent human being into a weapon, and how the good in human nature can resist and eventually overcome it.

In the next few paragraphs, I plan to mull over some of the latest developments in Iraq that either infuse new optimism or else create further dread in me. But I started wittingly with those two loaded excerpts from the book because they transport me back to the heady days of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Despite five years of sacrifice, bloodshed and suffering, those two foreboding statements continue to echo audibly - whether rightly or wrongly - in a majority of Arab and Muslim ears across the whole world from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and from Egypt to Yemen, about American and broader Western designs toward them. In my opinion, any tangible progress on any front is conditional upon addressing those very perceptions - for as we know in the world of politics, perceptions transform into realities and somehow boomerang against the future.

But more on that later! For now, let me dwell briefly on developments as I see them touching the lives of Iraqis today.

Despite explosions, suicide bombs and people still being blown up or else blowing up others, one piece of good news toward the end of last month was the unanimous passing by the Iraqi Parliament of the Provincial Elections Law. After endless procrastination since last February, negotiation prevailed over violence and this law was passed unanimously by the 190 members of parliament. It is the hope of many pundits that it would help heal the deep-running political, religious and gender-based fissures in the country and shore up the noteworthy security gains that have been achieved of late.

However, one fundamental setback of this law was that it passed not necessarily because of a newly-tapped surfeit of Iraqi goodwill but because it set aside for future debate the most divisive political issue over the control of the ethnically-mixed and oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk that has been a bone of contention between Iraqi Sunni Arabs, Turkmen, Christians and Kurds and exacerbated by the enforced Arabisation policies pursued through waffidins by the late president of Iraq.

However, another clear setback was the removal of Article 50 from an earlier version of the draft law that had secured 13 seats for Iraqi Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks and other minorities in six of the provinces. As the UN special representative to Iraq indicated at a news conference, the minority issue was a “dark cloud”. And this dark cloud has alarmingly manifested itself again over the past few weeks, with Iraqi Christians in the northern city of the Mosul being targeted by a systematic violence that ostensibly seeks to oust them from the area. With almost half the Iraqi Christian population of 800,000 having already fled the country since 2003, many witnesses reported the murder of Christians and the displacement of well nigh 2200 families (roughly 13,000 individuals) toward the Nineveh Plain, as well as nearby towns and villages such as Hamdaniya or Qaraqush and into Syria. It is difficult for me to determine at this stage who stands behind those crimes, or who aids and abets their commission, but commentators have mostly alluded to extremist al-Qa’eda like radical groups (one report refers to written threats by a ‘consultative council of Iraqi combatants’) persecuting non-Sunnis, to unnamed radical elements that have allegedly infiltrated an Iraqi army regiment in Mosul, and even to some Kurdish Peshmergas trying to alter the demography of the region ahead of the forthcoming provincial elections. But with Baghdad and Mosul bearing deep-vein Christian roots for centuries, it is imperative that this long-suffering and largely peaceful minority, as much as similar minority communities across the while country, be provided with their legal rights and safety nets. And whilst I remain resolutely against the formation of auto-defensive Christian militias in Iraq that might yield tactical results but no long-term strategic credits, I believe that it is the duty of the Iraqi government and occupying forces to ensure that those communities are not targeted for political, religious, ethnic or mercenary reasons and that Article 50 affecting their representation be re-instated into the Provincial Elections law at the soonest possible moment.
Such problems of refuge, displacement and fear targeting minority communities in Iraq have become eye-wateringly endemic. Whilst it is true that several hundreds of Iraqis have indeed been returning home from Syria, thousands more continue to register with the UN in Damascus in order to receive vital food aid - underscoring the recent hardships faced by this refugee community. The latest figures from the UNHCR revealed that some 13,000 Iraqi refugees had newly registered with the agency in the past three months (July till September 2008). The Syrian government states that there are 1.2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, down from 1.5 million two years ago, but considerably higher than other NGO-led estimates. They are based largely in the Douma and Sayyide Zeinab suburbs of Damascus as well as the northern city of Aleppo.

Potential returnees receive a number of relatively generous financial incentives from the Iraqi government as well as a small sum from the UN-run Voluntary Return Grant. However, the UNHCR is ensuring that those returnees are fully aware that their refugee file will be closed once they leave Syria and they will require a visa from the Syrian embassy in Baghdad [its ambassador was accredited on 13th October] in order to be re-admitted into Syria again.

Another major issue that is shaping the fate of the country today is the future of the American troops in Iraq once the UN mandate expires on 31st December 2008. As many readers are aware, a draft pact known as Sofa, or status-of-forces agreement, had been reached between both sides which allowed US troops to stay in Iraq for three more years. It required US forces to pull off Iraqi streets by the middle of 2009 and leave the country altogether by the end of 2011 unless they were asked to stay longer. More critically, it ascribed certain conditions under which Iraq would have the right to try US service members in its courts for serious crimes committed while off duty. But the only blocs that have endorsed the pact without reservation are the main Kurdish parties. Crucially, the Shi'i alliance of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has sought amendments to the draft. Moreover, the followers of the Shi’i cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are deeply hostile to the pact and recently staged a massive street demonstration against it as they marched from their stronghold of Sadr City in the east of the capital to a nearby public square at a university.

However, it seems increasingly unlikely the Iraqi parliament would endorse the pact this side of the presidential elections in the USA on 4th November, and Iraqi officials have begun discussing a ‘Plan B’ under which they would ask the UN for an emergency extension of the existing mandate if the draft were not ready by the end of the year. The severity of this potential crisis over issues as far-reaching as sovereignty, state responsibility, legal jurisdiction and detainees was underlined by the US Secretary of State who warned Iraq from Puerto Vallerta that Iraqi forces cannot yet defend the country by themselves, and that Baghdad should accept the pact and the security that its 155,000 troops in Iraq provide not only for the country but also for its leaders. It is worth adding that there are today 17,000 detainees held at Bucca and Cropper Camps, two American detention facilities in Iraq, and their future fate also needs to be agreed upon between the American and Iraqi negotiators.

The Sofa controversy is unfurling at a time when US forces handed over responsibility for security in the Babil province - a vast and primarily Sunni province named for the ruins of ancient Babylon, but also dubbed the triangle of death - to Iraqi forces. This province, south of Baghdad, is the 12th of 18 provinces in which primary responsibility for security has been returned to Iraqi forces. With violence at four-year lows, only the capital Baghdad, four ethnically and religiously mixed northern provinces as well as Wasit province along the Iranian border still require day-to-day American patrols.

What is important in this context is not only that an agreement - Sofa in this case - is being drawn up between Iraqi and US governments. The fact that it is actually happening would show that the rules of engagement are perhaps slowly shifting in the Middle Eastern political sands. No matter what we think about the whole saga of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, or about the Iraqi leadership, it is an instance where an Arab government - beleaguered, and still very much at the mercy of the US troops - is making a stand and drawing a line in the very sand that hosted those foreign soldiers. This is a transmogrification of the colonial era mentality that put Western troops and officials above the law, and kept indigenous national and regional interests subservient to the colonial dictates of powers past and present.

I doubt any Iraqi political leader - certainly no Shi’i politician - wants the stigma of supporting the Sofa deal. As Rami Khouri wrote recently, if an agreement is concluded that tilts in the public eye too much towards the USA and allows troops, subcontractors and modern mercenaries to remain above the law of the land, we could end up suffering for years to come from a worsening of the state of this region, and by osmosis of the world, with more problems in such sectors as ethnic and sectarian strife, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, refugee flows, general security, and economic stress.

This inorganic complicity between American and Arab official interests was also made manifest by the rather abrupt haste with which Arab rulers - from Kuwait, Bahrain and Syria to Egypt, Jordan and the UAE - have almost been queuing up to refresh their ties with Iraq and re-establish diplomatic presences in the country after years of absenteeism and abstruseness. It seems the USA and most Arab regimes are primarily concerned about the spread of Iranian influence in Iraq and are mobilising to extend political recognition as a way of limiting Iranian and Islamist influence over this oil-pumping country.
All pacts notwithstanding, let me also point out that no matter who wins the US presidential election, America can only be on its way out of Iraq. Senator Barack Obama offers the most specific and speediest withdrawal plan, but even Senator John McCain who fantasises about a maverick “victory” will not be able to keep a large number of combat troops there for long. After all, without a major pullback from Iraq, the Pentagon will not have enough troops to fight in Afghanistan where the US is in danger of losing the real - not contrived - war on terrorism against Al Qa’eda and perhaps also the Taliban.
However, before leaving office, the Bush administration has to ensure at least that the Iraqi Shi’i-led government renounces its sectarian impulses and fulfils its commitment to integrate about 54,000 members of the Sahwas or Awakening Councils - Sunnis paid by America to provide security in local neighbourhoods - into the security echelons and other public services.
When all is said and done, I am confident that the savvy of my readers would inform them that the situation in Iraq is still precarious and subject to different political pressure points. One sensitive meter of the danger facing Iraqis is the situation of the media. The New York based Committee to Protect Journalists says about 135 journalists and 53 other media staff have been killed in Iraq since 2003, making it the deadliest conflict for reporters in decades. Recent reports coming out indicate that the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, a non-governmental local organisation that defends reporters, has unveiled a new hotline to protect journalists and reporters fearing for their lives. Already, in the two weeks since it was set up, this hotline helped thwart the killing of a number of reporters in Basra and elsewhere.
So how precarious is the current situation and where do we go from here? As a New York Times commentator opined recently, “Misguided and frightening, US policies have helped change those ordinary human beings into religious zealots and then monstrous terrorists. Iraq, I believe, was a microcosm of this transformation of a whole region. This is why I just hope that a future US Administration would help manage those cleavages and in the process not only help pacify regions of the world but also re-strengthening American presence globally. This is precisely also why I - unlike some people perhaps - would like to see the Iraqi misadventure come to a peaceful and successful conclusion. This conclusion will neither be a new Middle East nor a democratic state, but one where law and order would prevail and in the process disempower those radicals that are not only egging further violence but also hoping that its levels would increase and hence serve their dubious causes.”
When the Iraqis themselves are disunited, it is easier for outside elements to conflagrate the situation further with their own political bags of tricks. But Iraq today stands once more at another crossroads and its hazy future could sway in the direction of further fragmentation or come together toward a common good. What concerns me is that politicians - primarily Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’is, since they are the principal actors - are playing a zero-sum game that discounts the collective interests of the country. Whether by fear, interference by outside actors or self-interest and greed, they are catapulting the country away from a federal sense of cohesion that would usher in stability and are instead sowing further discord.
I started my article with two quotations from The Sirens of Baghdad that highlight the thoughts of many Arab and Muslim streets today. Whether those perceptions are well-founded is not the real issue today. Rather, what matters is for the next US Administration - be it Barack Obama or John McCain - to fathom the reality of the American interest in the region and act accordingly. Anything else would maintain if not strengthen this perception of anti-Arabism and anti-Islam and lead to constant conflicts between political ideologies, cultures, religions and instincts across wide chasms. In fact, any American politician appointed to a responsible position on Iraq / Middle East should read this book and learn from its cogent lessons.
I believe that the Arab and Muslim masses today are expressing their anger more by silence than by strident words. They witness the seemingly wanton hypocrisy of the hegemonies of the region, aided and abetted by local rulers whose interests are sometimes inimical with that of their peoples, and enhanced by meddlesome foreign countries that are either coveting the oil wealth and military harvest of Iraq, or else cross-fertilizing it with more dogmatism and bigotry. Either way, unless the situation is managed intelligently, such silence cannot be maintained forever: the sooner the mandarins of our foreign diplomacy convey the urgency of the new world to their masters, the sooner we might have some hope for peace not only in Iraq or the Middle East but also in the eerily inter-connected global world that is prey to many fault-lines.
I am often too scared to ask whether we need to wait for that next silent implosion to turn into another loud explosion before we learn from our egregious past mistakes. When will we hear the deafening masses that still keep silent as they cry aloud?

Almost in bemusement, my mind wanders to Cicero, one of the most versatile minds of ancient Rome. In one of his four orations against Lucius Catilina in the Senate, he warned cum tacent, clamant - and it might be worth checking out how little our philosophical attitudes have morphed since the pre-Christian times when Cicero uttered this admonition!

It was not so very long ago that the majority of the Lebanese people celebrated joyfully the brokering of the Doha Agreement that promised to put an end to the interminable chapters of political and physical violence.

One of the more unusual ways in which they tasted this hopeful sense of coming together was the introduction by Häagen Daz of the ‘Doha Agreement Ice Cream Cone’. For just LL 10,400, the Lebanese could buy a cone that was the result of a joint venture between the American ice cream giant in Lebanon and Qatar Airways. The promotion was expected to last so long as the mood in the country remained one of reconciliation - or at least until the politicians “started fighting again.”

However, I did not see those cones being sold at any of the outlets when I visited Beirut recently. Did I not look hard enough, or was it likely due to the fact that reconciliation had weakened as a marketable currency in the country?

Over the past three months, much has happened in Lebanon. The Lebanese got a new president at long last, and a national unity cabinet was put together that also amended the previous electoral law of 1960. Mind you, it did not grant Lebanese expatriates the right to vote in the next parliamentary elections, nor did it lower the voting age from 21 to 18 although the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines anyone over 18 as an adult. Moreover, Presidents Assad and Suleiman also importantly agreed - at least in principle - to establish formal diplomatic relations, with Damascus and Beirut opening embassies in their respective countries for the first time in 64 years since independence from French mandate.

But in addition to those developments relating to the Doha Agreement, and even though ice cream cones are not easy to find in the market, there are a few hopeful efforts at reconciliation underway, all the way from the national all-factions dialogue under the aegis of the president, to the parallel efforts aimed at bridging the yawning gaps between bickering Christian political parties to the one-on-one meetings of bellicose political leaders such as those of Al-Mustaqbal and Hizbullah.

Yet, whilst all those sanguine efforts are trying to contribute toward the stabilisation of the country, tensions remain quite dangerously high. There are murderous attacks and inter-confessional spurts of violence occurring for instance across the northern town of Tripoli that is largely a Sunni bastion. An oft-quoted example is the recurrent violence between the Baal Mohsen district (that is pro-opposition) and Bab al Tabbaneh neighbourhood (that is pro-majority). There have also been bloody attacks against Lebanese soldiers as well as civilians on buses or in streets. Those examples exacerbate the fears of many Lebanese that darker clouds could easily re-appear on the horizon again After all, Tripoli is geographically close to Syria, and some pundits harbour the suspicion that an unsettled Tripoli could be used by Syria as justification to extend its influence over Lebanon or even send its army back into the country. Indeed, it is no mere detail that the highest-ranking Salafi Authority in Lebanon, Dai al-Islam Shahhal, warned against an incursion by the Syrian Army into north Lebanon saying it would open "the gates of hell and lead to what is similar to Iraq and its misery."

Meanwhile, in the midst of this ominous rumble of developments, the issue of the arms in possession of Hizbullah is also casting a dark shadow over any genuine reconciliation. Given that one man’s meat is another’s poison, literally half the Lebanese population consider that Hizbullah should disarm with its weapons coming under the control of the Lebanese army. The other half believes that they should stay with Hizbullah and its Shi’i Amal allies since they would be used in resisting Israeli aggression and occupation. And the major - though not exclusive - justification for resistance by those factions insisting on keeping their arms is that Israel detains the Shaba’a Farms as well as the Lebanese part of the village of Ghajar (with recent reports that Israel might return it to Lebanon next month) and Kfar Shouba hills that were meant to be returned to Lebanon - either directly or through an initial UN trusteeship - also in accordance with UNSC Resolution 1701.

But what are those Shaba’a Farms anyway?

The tiny sliver of lush land 25 square kilometres across is located at the junction of southeast Lebanon, southwest Syria and northern Israel. Israel seized those Farms from Syria in 1967 when it occupied the nearby Golan Heights. Ever since then, those Farms have been caught in a tug-of-war over ownership. Lebanon claims them, with the backing of Damascus, while Israel insists they are part of Syria.

The confusion over the borders actually dates back to 1923 when Britain and France, who held the mandates of the League of Nations over the territories now comprising Israel, Lebanon and Syria, failed to outline their borders clearly. Lebanon has accused Israel of refusing to return the Farms in order to benefit from the bountiful natural resources of the region, particularly its water resources. According to officials, the Farms hold 23 natural water sources and also strategic or military importance due to their altitude.

When UNSC Resolution 1701 brought an end to the 33-day war between Israel and Hizbullah in the summer of 2006, it called upon the UN secretary-general to propose a border demarcation for those Farms. The UN ruled that the withdrawal from Lebanon was complete and that the Farms were Syrian.

Nevertheless, in March 2008, the Lebanese geographer Issam Khalifeh published a book full of documents claiming the Farms were indeed Lebanese, including a 1946 deal in which Damascus recognised Lebanon's sovereignty over the territory. Attached to the report was a map with 48 border markers, but Syria has refused to let this paperwork be sent to the UN, perhaps because it did not wish to go down road of recognition and delineation of an international border.

All these are issues that are clearly weighing upon the Lebanese mindset, and in the process retarding any progress from a state of brittle uncertainty to one of relative stability. However, what is also clear to me is that the major objective of all the parties above all else are the parliamentary elections of spring of 2009 that might well decide which parties enjoy the majority of votes - and therefore of seats and of power. So whilst there is a government in place for running day-to-day affairs, everyone understands that the political focus today revolves truly around those elections.

But here is another hitch! In some sense, it is almost predictable what percentages, districts and seats the Sunni, Shi’i and Druze candidates would get in the parliamentary elections next year. The real guesstimate is the future number of Christian seats that will be obtained by the different Christian coalitions since their future is very much in play now - particularly given their divisions in an almost irredeemable - roughly 50:50 - ratio. Only last week, the Maronite patriarch, HE Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, expressed the hope that Christians would respond to the initiatives of the Maronite League and “would sit together because other sects have achieved reconciliation”, adding that “agreement among all the Lebanese is impossible.”

A straw poll conducted by Now Lebanon explored the reason hampering inter-Christian reconciliation. The results revealed that 38% thought it was due to electoral interests and the requirements of electoral mobilisation, whilst 14% thought that it was due to a lack of serious efforts to respond favourably to reconciliation endeavours, and a large percentage of 49% attributed it to lingering personal feuds among Christian leaders.

Those polls notwithstanding, I am convinced that the Lebanese Christians could play a central role in the forthcoming elections and that in the process would also hold the balance of power between the other political parties so they could then perhaps advance those community demands that have been ignored for long. Broadly put, there are now two competing Christian camps. On one side, Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces and Amin Gemayel’s Phalanges are still struggling for an end of Syrian influence and attempting to mobilise support for the need to restore a fully sovereign Lebanese state. They would claim to pursue this strategic choice by pressing Hizbullah to disarm and also by setting up an international tribunal charged with investigating Rafiq Hariri’s murder. On the other side of the Christian political divide, General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement has challenged the inert political system as a whole and broken its isolation by forging a controversial “understanding” with Hizbullah and by allying himself indirectly with the Marada leader Suleiman Franjieh.

The divisions between the two Christian camps are fundamental and stretch back decades in some instances. Today, the leadership of this community is at stake. General Michel Aoun wants to be that undisputed leader, which is why he is attacking the other leaders relentlessly, undermining the role of the Maronite patriarch and even sniping at the president. However, his position is becoming increasingly untenable. He is gradually losing the support of key allies in the form of the Metn leader Michel Murr and of the Armenian Tashnaq party, and as a consequence is trying to compensate his losses in Mount Lebanon by winning over some areas in the South (that he visited recently), as well as in Ba’albek and Hermel.

A third option to this bipolar configuration still remains unclear. What are President Michel Suleiman’s own plans? In his inaugural speech, he emphasised demands and concerns that are significant to the Christian community in Lebanon. Other than rejecting the naturalisation of the Palestinians and facilitating the return of the displaced, he highlighted administrative reform, decentralisation, empowering the presidency and ensuring better Christian representation in high-ranking civil positions. If he were to field his own parliamentary list, or support such a list, it would weaken Aoun considerably and lead toward the re-formation of the Christian camp. In fact, with his stewardship of intra-Christian reconciliation, the President holds a few cards and his influence could grow considerably and make significant differences in the forthcoming elections.

In fact, what is remarkable to me is that Christians and Muslims are seemingly reconciling more easily in Lebanon than the Christians themselves - a fact that not only underlines the virile tussle for power and control, but also that their continued bickering would run the risk of leading even further to their gradual erosion. After all, the political landscape keeps changing with the almost cyclical re-balancing of outside powers that are playing the Lebanese card of pitting the Lebanese against each other. In fact, the recent difficult hopes for conciliatory moves between the Lebanese Forces and Marada can only benefit the whole country politically even thought there is a lot of bloody history between both sides.

I am being cautiously optimistic that things will not change too dramatically in the country this side of the 2009 parliamentary spring elections. Barring any major eruptions of terror and mayhem, and with the parties using their networks to consolidate their own positions, I would argue that Syria is also waiting for the results of the 2009 parliamentary elections to see what leverage it will have internally. While internationally, it is also awaiting the results of the US presidential elections, as it knows that the US alone can determine Syria’s position as a regional player, its role in Lebanon, the advancement of its negotiations with Israel, and of course, its position vis-à-vis the international tribunal. I also suspect that Syria will probably make no concrete moves for now on diplomatic relations, and on most sensitive issues, including border demarcation, the Shaba’a Farms and Lebanese detainees. But one key concern for me is the fact that Iran might still prove to be the wild card that would interfere and upset the political applecart.

Ever since 11 November 2006, when a number of ministers resigned from the cabinet, Lebanon has witnessed assassinations, demonstrations, sit-ins, internal and external threats, a temporary military takeover of west Beirut, exacerbated tensions in the north of the country, attempts at re-enforcing the mechanisms of government and many internecine feuds that have been followed by attempts at dialogue and reconciliation. So what is all this doing to the whole country?

Lebanon is simply being weakened in major dribs and minor drabs, cleaving parts of the country from each other whereby different politicians claim to work for the one nation but pledge their allegiances to their own factions. Confessionalism, always a Lebanese misfortune, is increasingly overwhelming the political apparatuses, and in the process widening the chasm between different politicians and the ordinary people and altering facts on the ground. My constant dread is that a combination of internal divergences and external threats would lead to new rounds of bloody fighting.

After all, has this not happened before? It often saddens me that Lebanese politicians are so gifted in splitting hair and believing in the absolute truths of their own arguments let alone those of their regional or international supporters that they act as clan leaders rather than global politicians and in so doing turn deaf ears to a vox populi that aspires for peace, coexistence and harmony in the country. A divisive blend of religious myopia, political self-interest and nefarious outside interferences from all sides are together rending the country apart and stymieing the creative gifts of a people that talks about the oneness of Lebanon but ends up shaking that oneness at the seams. Does anyone pause to think of the whole picture?

Last week, following an agreement between Al-Moustaqbal and Hizbullah parties, the Lebanese have taken down the provocative posters. This is a move in the right direction, but will it augment the chances for peace? Or is it simply that the Lebanese sagas will continue until such time as there is a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement? Has Lebanon lost all control over its own geopolitics and is now a fallible pawn on the chessboard of international politics? The Arab World (no matter how one defines this amorphous term) is too divided in its interests to buttress up Lebanon, and the West is too greedy to care much about it either. So this small country is paying the price of international politics and local power plays.

Given such realities on the ground, is it surprising that the song Khalas (Enough) by the Lebanese musician and singer Nicholas Sa'adeh Nakhleh has become a chart-topper? After all, ordinary people are saying khalas, and I suspect they will also rally round his next song Unity once it comes out since it too will speak volubly to the majority of Lebanese instincts.

Torn between war and peace for so long, will Lebanon finally find peace? More to the point, will it be allowed to find it?

Have you ever felt as if you are moving forward in time, even in full motion, but that objects around you remain stock-still? I am not talking here about some arcane theory of quantum physics but more basically about the political dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that affect willy-nilly everyone in the Middle Eastern region and well beyond.

Over the past three decades, numerous meetings, negotiations, pledges, declarations and frameworks of agreements have come and gone but the political situation between Israel and the Palestinians has remained stubbornly intractable. The Camp David Accords of September 1978 and the Oslo Accords of September 1993 are both illustrations of this cheerless reality. At the time, many people thought that those uncertain agreements would become beacons of hope, and yet they are now part of the disappointing political lore of the region. Subsequently, the USA, Russia, the EU and the UN came together in Madrid in 2002 and constituted the Quartet in order to shepherd Israelis and Palestinians toward peace. Five years later, on 22 November 2007, the Annapolis meeting tried once more to energise the sluggish and faltering efforts of the Quartet.

Yet, despite those boosters, things today are as uncertain, as volatile, treacherous and roadmap-unfriendly, as they have ever been in the past. The Quartet Berlin Statement of 24 June 2008, for instance, had expressed “the urgent need for more visible progress on the ground in order to build confidence and support progress in the negotiations launched in Annapolis”. But only yesterday, at the latest meeting of the Quartet in New York and in the presence of its part-time envoy Tony Blair, only verbal husks were offered in the shape of a mild encouragement that negotiations between the parties could still yield an agreement before end-year. Mind you, the final statement also expressed deep concern about increasing Israeli settlement activity, which it said has a damaging impact on the negotiating environment. As such, it called upon Israel to freeze all settlement activity including so-called natural growth, and to dismantle settler outposts erected since 2001. By the same token, it also condemned acts of terrorism against Israelis including rocket attacks from Gaza and stressed the need for further Palestinian efforts to dismantle the infrastructure of terror and to foster an atmosphere of tolerance.

But let me roll back the months slightly in order to define more clearly the perilous stasis affecting those events. On 27th May, the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad addressed a letter to the European Union in which he conveyed his reservations over the potential upgrade of EU-Israel political and economic relations. In his letter, he admonished that construction has continued in at least 101 settlements (not including Jerusalem-area settlements). Similarly, Israeli authorities have issued tenders for 847 new housing units since Annapolis, as compared with 138 housing units tendered in the 11 months prior to Annapolis. Meanwhile, Israeli authorities demolished at least 185 Palestinian structures, including 85 residential structures, in the first four months after Annapolis. The number of checkpoints, roadblocks and other physical barriers to movement now exceeds 600. And, of course, Israel has yet to comply with the 2004 ruling of the International Court of Justice, which held that settlements and the Wall that are built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) are illegal, and which requires Israel to stop constructing the Wall, remove those parts already built and provide reparations.

Barely a week later, on 2nd June, a press release following a three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories by a European Parliament delegation highlighted those same deep concerns about the overall situation. Although the delegation affirmed [correctly] the beginnings of Palestinian economic recovery, it added that the movement of people and access of goods needs to be ensured. Palestinian compliance in this field is not enough; a change in Israel’s policies is required. The existing policy of roadblocks and the impact of the route of the “separation barrier” seriously hamper on-going efforts, strongly backed by the European Union, to achieve economic recovery. We have observed considerable and continuous expansions of settlements [such as Maskiot, a former military outpost, in the Jordan Valley] which are illegal, and incompatible with the objectives laid out in Annapolis, and with the Road Map, making a two-state solution impossible.

On 10th June, an Open Letter was sent to the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, by a large number of Non-Governmental Organisations. In it, the signatories highlighted the centrality of human rights to EU-based values, and added that Palestinian citizens of Israel and the occupied territories continue to be denied equal access to services such as water, education, housing and land. Israel continues to forcibly evict and displace Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including through the construction of the Separation Barrier, as well as in the Gaza ‘buffer zone. Israel continues to deny Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens, as well as spouses and family members from a number of other Arab states, from obtaining full legal status in Israel.

Much of this is “old cheese” to many veterans of the Middle East. Yet, an additional - dangerous and divisive - component has now crept into the equation in the form of a highly combustible feud over Gaza whereby Hamas wrested control of this strip from the Palestinian Authority and in the process split it from the West Bank. In so doing, this tiny and overpopulated plot of land has alarmingly become not only a nemesis to the Israeli government but almost in equal measure to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and many Eurocentric powers. Yet, irrespective of negotiations, handshakes and even hugs between the Palestinian incumbent president and the Israeli outgoing or incoming prime ministers, almost everybody acknowledges that no peaceful solution could be concluded inter partes without Gaza. In the meantime, and irrespective of this political standoff, a strangulating blockade of Gaza by Israel is also leading to a humanitarian implosion that is coupled with a massive breakdown in trust between the Palestinian leaderships of Fateh and Hamas. Given such truths, even the most well-meaning efforts remain moribund and exacerbate further humanitarian dramas and political tensions.

It is true that the Palestinian Authority has made some noteworthy strategic security gains in the past twelve months, largely in terms of re-establishing law and order in some parts of the West Bank such as Jenin (which has become the new role model for good governance). Yet, Israel has not relaxed its security measures in return, and the Palestinian economy has not witnessed much growth. Instead, Palestinians in Gaza have been left to struggle with a blockade that left homes, hospitals and factories without electricity, crippled the water supply and sanitation infrastructure, with raw sewage in evidence in several neighbourhoods, and emptied hospitals from essential medicines.

However, things have taken even further turns for the worse. Despite a hudna (or truce) brokered between Hamas and Israel on 19th June, the economic blockade against Gaza continues unabated on the one hand, and relations between the Palestinian factions have deteriorated on the other. The recent major confrontation between the large PLO-friendly Hillis family in Gaza and the security forces loyal to Hamas further strengthened the latter’s firm control over the strip. Prospects for inter-Palestinian reconciliation, and for a concomitantly sustainable peace process that would embrace all Palestinian factions, has become increasingly elusive. Ever since June 2007, the West Bank and Gaza are tugging in opposite directions, with each faction entrenching its positions in the territories. No wonder the Palestinian people are being bedevilled with increasing socio-economic ills and a gnawing sense that their leaders are absent from their mundane realities.

So where does one go from here today? Could a seriously weakened Palestinian leadership in the West Bank negotiate peace with Israel when it is engaged in a war of attrition in its own backyard in Gaza? And could a fractious Israeli leadership - with possibly a new prime minister and more difficult potential allies - muster the political will to move forward with the peace option as a strategic choice that addresses the core issues of the conflict?

It is clear for me that there are two matters here. The first one is that of inter-Palestinian reconciliation at a time when the geo-political cleavage between Fateh and Hamas is creating a dangerous sense of drift that could well lead to a civil war given that the stakes are constantly being ratcheted up by both sides. The second one is whether the Israel of Tzipi Livny and the Palestine-to-be of Mahmoud Abbas are reading from the same political script and ready to conclude real peace.

True, there is no shortage of mediators such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Yemen endeavouring to facilitate reconciliation between both factions. However, such efforts have not yet come to fruition since Hamas and PLO / PA goals have become increasingly more incompatible - with the latter asking for a restoration of the status quo ante that existed before the Hamas forceful takeover of Gaza in June 2007 and the former refusing to play second fiddle in the intra-Palestinian camp. My own rather low-spirited assessment remains that such reconciliation will be quite tough, at least in the present circumstances, as both sides are busy attracting patrons and backers and wagering over who blinks first. In fact, the Islamist Hamas camp seems in a somewhat bolder position due largely to the inability of the Palestinian leadership to make the Israelis budge from their positions on key issues and produce any palpable solution that addresses the Palestinians’ woes or at least assures them that the endless talks are not merely an Israeli tactic to avoid a settlement by simply perpetuating its micro-management of the conflict. This is sad in human terms - to put it mildly - because it is rending the Palestinian hopes for statehood and dooming a whole people - along with its Israeli neighbours - to more tears, fears, tensions, provocation and exasperation.

In fact, the much-publicised setting sail on 5th August of a first boat with sixty Palestinians, Israelis and internationals from fifteen countries carrying medical supplies to Gaza highlighted the deadly impact and nefarious consequences of the Israeli blockade upon well over one million Gazans. But it also underscored the fact tat Gaza is now truncated from the West Bank and paying the price of Palestinian brinksmanship over power, control and secular versus religious allegiances.

However, those internecine problems between ideological adversaries should not distract us from the occupation of Palestinian land for over 41 years. In fact, upon the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches underlined the moral ills of this occupation when its ‘action week’ It’s time for Palestinians and Israelis to share a just peace called for equal rights and an end to discrimination, segregation and restrictions on movement.
Parallel with this ecumenical initiative, a Letter to the Independent daily newspaper signed by a host of influential leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Baroness Jenny Tonge postulated, To acknowledge and respect these dual histories is not, by itself, sufficient, but does offer a paradigm for building a peaceful future. Many lives have been lost, and there has been much suffering. The weak are exploited by the strong, while fear and bitterness stunt the imagination and cripple the capacity for forgiveness. We therefore urge all those working for peace and justice in Israel / Palestine to consider that any lasting solution must be built on the foundation of justice, which is rooted in the very character of God.

A more hands-on approach for peace entitled European Strategy for the Stabilisation (ESS) of Israel-Palestine (2009-2024) was proposed earlier this month within the context of the EU Neighbourhood Policy by the upcoming pan-European Newropeans political movement. Stipulating that the Israelis and Palestinians should themselves be the driving force behind the process, it suggested eleven principles that will focus on the final objectives, the main points and the general way of proceeding and produce the levels of stability and coexistence necessary for a culture of peace within future generations. This long-term strategy, the ESS added, would cooperate with local partners toward reaching an agreement in two decades.

As a supporter of Newropeans and its pan-European objectives, I consider that this initiative is laudable, more so since the EU to date has been more of a financial payer and less of a political player. However, it remains subject to unfortunate flaws that are inherently not new either. For instance, it tends to overlook the harrowing fact that there will be nothing left to make peace over in one or two decades since the Palestinian territories will have been gobbled up or split up entirely by 2024. A quick reference to Alain Gresh’s Israel-Palestine: Verités sur un Conflit, Sari Makdissi’s Palestine Inside Out or even Ilan Pappe’s The Israel / Palestine Question define the critical matrices of control impacting the conflict now - not in fifteen unpredictable years. Moreover, I am quite familiar with a number of similar initiatives - from Oasis of Peace to One Voice - that have already been operating on grassroots levels and with younger generations in Israel-Palestine. As their leaders would tell us, their projects are credible and helpful, but they do not yield per se substantial political dividends.

Palestinians are facing two challenges, one that necessitates sorting out their own messy backyard and another that they pursue the thankless task of negotiating peace with Israel. As President Mahmoud Abbas stated in an interview with Stephen Sackur on BBC World earlier this month, one of his roles is to instil hope in his people despite the hopelessness of their actual situation. But hopes and frustrations aside, what is the political crunch? Will Palestinian statehood ever come to fruition given the political speculators we deal with today? Will international will, or international whim, prevail in the end? Does the Quartet - or the onetet, as the Palestinian General-Delegate to the Russian Federation Afif Safieh describes it in the sense that the USA often pilots the process alone - have anything to contribute toward peace?

There are many different ways of looking at the impasse we face today, but one overarching principle is to avoid the vagaries experienced during the Oslo and Taba processes when the considerable progress achieved painstakingly over many long years was deleted and resulted in a complete breakdown of trust, tit-for-tat violence and an unyielding occupation. The focus should centre on four components, namely consolidating the ambit of Annapolis by including the indirect Israeli-Syrian negotiations into the process, giving up on the illusory belief that the wholesale decimation of Hamas is feasible, freezing all Israeli settlement activities and finally reviving the historic Arab Initiative adopted in Beirut in 2002 and re-adopted by the Arab League in Riyadh in 2007 as an overarching basis for full peace between Israel and the Arabs. In a nutshell, this proactive initiative would offer Israel full-scale Arab recognition in return for its implementation of UNSC Resolutions.

Would those four components move the process forward in earnest? I often feel perplexed and exasperated by the inability of Israelis and Palestinians to bridge the gaps separating them in order to reach an agreement, let alone by the animosities between Hamas and Fateh that keep reaching new crescendos whilst their leaders pledge dialogue and brotherhood. But I also often remind myself of Richard North Patterson’s novel Exile that remains to my mind one of the best tutorials of this conflict. In the book, two central characters articulate their own views over what is happening at the heart of this conflict.

Zev Ernheit, the Jewish character, muses sorrowfully “that so many Jews and Palestinians don’t give a damn about one another’s stories. Too many Palestinians don’t grasp why three thousand years of death and persecution make Jews want their own homeland, or how suicide bombings alienate Jews and extend their occupation. Too many Jews refuse to acknowledge their role in the misery of Palestinians since 1948, or that the daily toll of occupation helps fuel more hatred and violence. So both become clichés whereby Jews are victims and oppressors; Palestinians are victims and terrorists. And the cycle of death rolls on.”

Conversely, Fatima Khalil, the Palestinian character, suggests, “I sometimes think of all these young people - our students and the Israelis sent to be their jailers, both frightened of each other - and imagine them on a tragic collision course from which neither can find an exit. But, except for the soldiers who die here, the young Israelis can leave their nightmare behind. Our nightmare never ends.”
This week, a weighty coalition of twenty-one leading aid agencies and human rights organisations released a damning report in which they stated that “the Middle East Quartet is failing - making inadequate progress towards improving the lives of Palestinians [and not] improving the prospects for peace.” They added that “the visible progress on the ground” had not materialised, and that “unless there is a swift and dramatic improvement, it will be necessary to question what the future of the Middle East is for the Quartet.” The report equally highlighted the dire Palestinian situation centred on settlements, access and movement both within the territories and outside them as well as conditions in Gaza.

This fourteen-page report is essential reading that highlights the lamentable failure of the Quartet for effective peace-making or even objective peace facilitation. It stresses that there has been no change in a number of the ten main objectives set by the Quartet to help improve the daily lives of Palestinians and an actual deterioration in five of them. But the inertia of the Quartet is partly due to American recalcitrance in nudging Israel by deeds rather than by words to move forward with peace. Yet, like any international grouping, the Quartet is as strong, or as weak, as the collective political will of its members. Sadly enough, the political will for painful decisions is sparse and as a representative of CARE International indicated, “We are facing a vacuum in leadership. The Quartet’s credibility is on the line”.

Given all those negative developments, a number of pundits opine that the Palestinian struggle for self-determination can only be fulfilled through a bi-national (one-state) solution. In this context, unity, rather than separation, is being mooted anew by some Arab and Jewish intellectuals. It reminds me of the ideas proposed by the Hashomer Hatzair movement in the 1930’s and later discussed by some Jewish academics within the framework of the Brit Shalom movement. It acknowledges the existence of two national groups, with each forming a distinct entity within a single state, yet this alternative is anathema to the Jewish identity of their state and would not expressly be more amenable to a large rump of Palestinians either.

Hand-in-hand with this trend suggesting a bi-national solution, I would argue that if the continuing stalemate is not shaken with a breakthrough soon (as promised rather obliquely yesterday for the umpteenth time by the US Secretary of State), the degradation of the overall situation would reach such a high pitch that it could even lead to the collapse and dismantlement of all the structures of a Palestinian Authority that is increasingly being viewed by a number of Palestinians as nothing more than a convenient fig-leaf for occupation. If this were to happen, in itself another unfortunate regression for peaceful aspirations, a civil war could well loom in the horizon and presidential as well as legislative elections could bite the dust. In the meantime, the burden of the occupation would again shift to Israel in accordance with the Fourth Geneva Conventions.

Am I being far too gloomy - perhaps even a touch radical - in my analysis of the situation and its attendant consequences? If the Palestinians of all political persuasions and confessions are serious about their state-to-be, they should first knock their heads together, renounce their own jingoistic agendas and aim for a national consensus in the face of the existential challenges staring at them. However, parallel to the Palestinians doing their homework, the world community should also wake up to its peace-making responsibilities and address concretely - not only verbally and at times financially - those issues that are the hub of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that have been hashed and re-hashed ad nauseam but remain unresolved to date due to Israeli intransigence and an anaemic political will by the US, the EU and much of the Arab World.

Yesterday, at Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, Sir Paul McCartney rocked Israelis with a whole string of Beatles songs - and the song Give Peace a Chance (that has almost become an unofficial peace anthem worldwide) got a spectacular reception. Earlier, he had met with ten staff and youth leaders from the One Voice Israel movement that attempts to empower Israelis and Palestinians to push for peace and a two-state solution. He informed them that his father had once told him “that regular people don’t like wars and don’t want conflict” and that he brought with him “a message of peace”.

I used to be a fan of the Beatles during my student years in France, and I hope that Sir McCartney’s sincere echo that most people want peace and spurn conflict would indeed reverberate at long last amongst Israelis and Palestinians alike, empower both peoples toward peace-making and lead toward a [re]solution of the conflict on the twin axes of justice and security.

After all, could anybody truly suggest a viable alternative? Lest we resolve this conflict soon, would the future not become even bleaker? Would we not open more Pandora boxes that spawn extremism, cause bloodsheds and come to haunt us even more? Would it not become inevitable that the mounting tensions would lead to implosions let alone explosions?

We do not have the right to sit idly by, shirk our responsibilities and in the process taunt the hazards of political meltdown.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness
Martin Luther King, Jr

J’ai vu ces images pour la première fois sur le site de partage de musique, blogs, photos et vidéos Mtaemsa’s Multiply Site.

Je fus capté par la tristesse de cet humour noir … il y a en elle de l’ironie , un humour jaillissant des cendres de la détresse et du drame quotidien.

Alors que le monde suivait avec joie les jeux olympiques a Beijing, les Palestiniens restaient embourbés dans leur amère existence sous l’occupation - des images qui expriment plus que jamais la tragédie de ce conflit israélo-palestinien qui sévit. On y lit l’âme de tout un peuple toujours fier de son identité, même lorsque le monde entier jouit d’un répit des conflits politiques.

En tant qu’arménien croyant et engagé en politique, j'ose encore espérer malgre tout que les prochains jeux olympiques qui se tiendront a Londres en 2012 ne reproduiront pas les mêmes images car les palestiniens, les israéliens et le monde entier mérite mieux .”

If memory serves me right, I have been contributing to SOMA for well over three years now. And every time I put my thoughts down on paper, I tend to inject an optimistic note into the most pessimistic scenarios. This is not a case of “pessoptimism” that disguises itself in the form of the fabled ostrich hiding its head in the sand, or even of foolhardy pietism in the face of adversity, but simply one of compelling forward any items of good news that add hope to the daily afflictions or ordeals of ordinary Iraqis from all backgrounds.

So today, again, I do not wish to indulge my pen with the horrible stories of bloody attacks and sorrowful deaths screaming out of many parts of this once-fertile Babylonian land. What I wish to do instead is to explore the fresh hope that is highlighted by the latest UN analytical report on the different territorial disputes in Iraq - including those between Kurds and other communities in Iraq. The publication of the comprehensive multi-chapter report is slated to be completed by next October and will endeavour to facilitate a UN-brokered deal that could defuse tensions over Kirkuk let alone over other regions of Iraq.

According to the UN mission chief in Iraq, this report being drawn by lawyers, academics and diplomats is the fruit of extensive field investigations into the history and make-up of thirty to forty parts of Iraq where local government is in dispute. The UN hopes it would produce a document that adjudges the merits of competing claims - including those in the oil-rich and demographically challenged Kirkuk. In so doing, its methodology also argues against holding a referendum on the future of the city that would inevitably pit Arab and Turkmen residents against Kurds. Rather, it adopts the more judicious approach of negotiating a broad political deal for the whole area that would be sanctioned by all political parties and then put to a ‘confirmatory referendum’.

I, like many of my readers, am acutely aware of the simmering tensions in Kirkuk. It is about oil, of course, but not about oil alone. Although any local governance of Kirkuk would effectively control oil supplies and tap important revenues, there is another potent psychological factor at play here. It is a throwback to the times when former president Saddam Hussein “arabised” this city and its environs with the import - sometimes forcibly - of many Iraqi Arabs from other governorates and cities in order to shift population numbers. It is also about raw control and sheer power, as evidenced by the fact, for instance, that the provincial elections of October 2008 have been stalled again since the Iraqi parliament failed to pass the necessary electoral law.

Yet, my overriding fear for Iraq today is that such critical tensions could lead to renewed outbreaks of violence between Arabs and Kurds and cause more dehumanising carnage at a time when the devastating sectarian feuds between Shi’is and Sunnis have noticeably begun to subside despite occasional deadly outbursts.

Much like elsewhere, it is clear that coming up with sensationalist media headlines by revved-up journalists or facile political assessments by supine politicians are both dangerously redundant. After all, there are multiple facets to the Iraqi equation, which is why the UN - not the current coalition government headed by PM Nuri al-Maliki or the occupying forces headed by the USA - is the most appropriate body to deal with this dispute.

At the expense of being labelled naïve once more, let me come back to my initial premiss in order to caution all major political players in Iraq of the political “boomerang” theory, whereby the constant pursuit of maximalism eventually rebounds on its claimants - if not now, then in the future. History must have surely taught us all this much by now? Cleaving Iraq, dismembering its federated adhesion and sapping further its natural strengths for the sake of partisan interests would hurt everyone and render the country prey to more - not less - instability. Would it not be wiser - and politically more astute in the long term - to learn from the Arabic maxim that one bird in the hand is better than three on a tree? Otherwise, Iraqis of all persuasions might end up losing not only the birds they hold but also the whole tree. Would it not also be wise to avoid creating fragmented and bellicose parts to define an Iraq that struggles to move from the past into the future?

Last week, a radio journalist called me and inquired whether I had spotted an article that had been published on page 19 of the Daily Telegraph. When I professed ignorance - I am not much of a Daily Telegraph reader - she proceeded to inform me that this piece was authored by a foreign affairs correspondent called Damien McElroy with the title Iraq's Christians form new militias to combat Islamic extremists.

Although I was a tad dismayed by the tabloid-style sensationalism of the title, I have no grounds to doubt the overall integrity of the information. After all, I am quite conscious of the precarious situation impacting indigenous Christians in Iraq today. The village of Karamlis that McElroy refers to in his piece lies less than 20 miles east of the northern provincial capital of Mosul which has become increasingly inhospitable to Christians. Readers might perhaps recall that Archbishop Paulos Farai Rahha was kidnapped and later died there, and this area contains many churches - the likes of the Chaldean Catholic Mar Addai church - that constitute ineradicable signs of Christian witness. Yet, the many kidnappings, as well as constant threats and coercions against Christians, simply negate the sanguine picture we are fed of unstoppable democracy-driven and freedom-friendly values that are ostensibly spawning all over Iraq.

Indeed, many of us who have been following the daily staple of tragedies experienced by all Iraqis of all confessions, including the ever-shrinking minority communities, would surely admit that the plight of Christians has been alarming. Here is a community that is two millennia old and counted over 800,000 members in 1993. Yet, today, its numbers have at least been halved and many of its harassed members have either emigrated to the West, are refugees in neighbouring Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, or have become internally displaced in safer zones.

However, despite those recurrent incidents targeting Christians and other minorities, it is one thing for me to admit that they are caught up in the midst of ferocious Sunni-Shi’i political-ideological wars for the future profile of the country, and another to suggest that Iraqi Christians should take up arms and form militias in their (admittedly distressed) efforts to defend their beleaguered communities from an onslaught by Islamist extremists. Why?

Unless Christians are careful as to how they react to the hardships challenging them on a daily basis, they could end up as cannon fodder and be sacrificed on the altar of expediency by the major players in the country. After all, indigenous Christians are small in numbers, and do not have access to the kinds of arms and wherewithal that would protect them against onslaughts from extremist elements. Upping the ante is most likely to provoke more retaliation and engender more isolation, especially when neither Western powers and coalition forces, nor Islamist radicals and salafist bullies, are truly interested in those communities that have kept the mosaic of the Middle East so diverse, and therefore so rich, for centuries. From the invaders and occupiers of Iraq to its own political factions, religious extremists and self-serving bigots, hardly anybody is paying much attention to their welfare since doing so might well intersect larger political agendas. True, previous petitions for help have fallen on deaf ears, yet militias that espouse a show of power might exacerbate the situation further let alone amplify internal dissensions amongst Christians.

Does this mean that I am advocating submission, or attempting to deny communities across the whole country their inalienable right to self-defence? Not really, since my biblical interpretation of Jesus’ teachings on meekness does not translate into an unfettered invitation to turn the other cheek, be mistreated, brutalised and violated by others - be those “others” next-door community neighbours, unwelcome Samaritans or total strangers. However, one major concern relates to the broader long-term consequences of such protectionist tendencies - whether through the taking up of arms, or the carving out of Christian zones in, say, the Nineveh Plain - and the dreadful probability that they could boomerang and worsen the current plight of Christians with nobody willing or able to succour them.

Yet, this is where mainline Muslim religious scholars and practitioners as well as human and minorities’ rights organisations, must spare no effort to help tackle the critical perils facing communities such as Christians who are being viewed as power-building and money-making pawns in a vile and irreligious game entitled ‘the future of Iraq’.

Sadly, Christians in some parts of the Arab Middle East - from Iraq to Egypt and even Gaza today - are increasingly finding themselves in overcharged sectarian environments where religious identity, no longer common citizenship, has become the norm. In radicalised settings, those local Christians whose ministry has always been one of bridge-building and reconciliation could one day become ‘open season’ for victimisation. This is why it is imperative to find ways whereby all those Muslims and Christians of good will together claw their way out of this quagmire. Otherwise, everyone could be sucked into an untenable situation that would eventually rebound against the whole region, re-map its myriad realities and drag all its peoples into the creeping pitfalls of danger, despair and darkness.

Harold Wilson, a former British Prime Minister, once remarked that “a week is a long time in politics.”

In Lebanon, and contrary to the expectations of some political pundits, the majority 14th March Coalition last week proposed the outgoing Fouad Siniora as its choice to head the new government of national unity. He was duly asked by the newly-elected president to start his consultations for the formation of a cabinet on the basis of 16+11+3 ministers from the different parties as discussed amply in my previous article (http://www.epektasis.net/2008/2008article9.html. Yet, a veritable political tug-of-war, with sporadic outbursts of hostility, has already marred the selection of ministerial names, and there is an almost undignified scrum for some of the “weighty” posts such as health or finance.

But let me start off with the new president: there are some lingering misgivings about his even-handedness with the two opposing political camps in Lebanon. Yet, over the past 18 months, I believe he has demonstrated a deep understanding of Lebanese inter-politics and has applied a careful choice in favour of a sovereign Lebanon and against factionalism - whether during the Nahr el Bared confrontations of May 2007, or the more recent sectarian violence. As he indicated in the presidential address at parliament immediately after his confirmation, I believe the president will use his credibility to try and re-affirm the sovereignty of Lebanon. In so doing, he will doubtless face serious challenges, and I hope that his equability and experience as commander of the army would both stand him in good stead and allow him to deal not only with the immediate after-effects of an unfinished Doha Agreement but also with the future stability of a riven and raddled country.

Is Fouad Siniora the correct choice for prime minister? In answering this question, it is important to underline that the new government - once it is painstakingly cobbled together - would be regarded not so much as one of ‘national unity’ but of ‘national transition’. As Dr Ghassan Salamé, former Minister of Culture in Lebanon and lecturer in International Affairs at Sorbonne University opined in his post-Doha interviews, this government will in essence aim to steer the country toward the parliamentary elections of 2009 that will configure the numerical and political influences of all the major players on the Lebanese scene. Although I might personally have opted for a less disputatious political bureaucrat from the Sunni camp to fulfil this transitional task if only to defuse any unnecessary polarisation from the opposition parties, I believe Siniora is a well-meaning player whose role will nonetheless be quite finite and will therefore not hugely impact the national agenda.

Hizbullah is a savvy grassroots movement that overplayed its hand in the bloody acts of violence in West Beirut and elsewhere last month. By turning its weapons against the Lebanese populace, it created deep-seated fissures, resentment and suspicion amongst many people - be they Sunni, Druze, Christian or even Shi’i. Today, nobody truly knows whether this movement - and to some extent its Shi’i allies from the Amal movement - stands in full solidarity with Lebanon as a nation-state or views its role more through the prism of its own sectarian-based political interests. This is a risky attitude for Hizbullah, especially when its secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivers a fierce speech claiming to belong to Wilayat Al-Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist) which under Shi’i Islam would grant him strictu sensu guardianship over non-litigious matters (al-oumour al-hesbiah) like religious endowments or judicial matters as well as governance of the country. I hope that the public relations success Hizbullah achieved last weekend with the release of Nasim Nisr from an Israeli gaol would help re-prioritise its orientations rather than lead to its alienation from the state structures.

However, what concerns - and baffles - me in those cyclical Lebanese standoffs is that the sense of confessionalism (al-na’ra al-ta’efieh) remains deeply ingrained in the Lebanese psyche. No matter how much they extol democracy or speak of equanimity, the Lebanese almost always base their conversations, arguments and decisions on confessional benchmarks - with their clear demarcation lines of identity and therefore allegiance. True, this has been a feature of other countries in the past, not unlike Northern Ireland, but people have tended to wean themselves away from such debilitating modus operandi in order to nurture democracy and lead toward pluralism, development, social cohesion and ultimate stability.

So can Lebanese politicians, having just emerged from a Doha compact, attain this political liberation and therefore refrain from political navel-gazing? Or are their fears too inveterate, their psychoses too scarred, their agendas too solipsistic? I find it quite telling that the most frequent question any Lebanese asks these days is whether the Doha Agreement would hold together or whether the parties would inexorably slide down the path of confrontation and civil unrest (fitna).

What about Palestine? Two signal events focused my attention again on this non-state that remains willy-nilly the epicentre of the Arab-Israeli conflict let alone being the core of much of the volatile tensions between the Muslim and Western worlds.
The first event was the visit by the Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Gaza earlier last week as part of an UN-led fact-finding delegation investigating the killing of 19 Palestinians by Israeli shellfire at Beit Hanoun in November 2006. At the conclusion of the two-day mission, Archbishop Tutu described as an ‘abomination’ the Israeli blockade of the strip that is now home to almost 1.5 million Palestinians. He also strongly condemned the international community for its ‘silence and complicity’ over a blockade which he suggested was comparable to the behaviour of the military junta in Burma. Describing the deaths that had resulted from the Israeli shelling of the two houses in Beit Hanoun as a ‘massacre’, he added that the report from the delegation would be submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Having met the archbishop in the past, I am humbly aware of his powerful charisma and religious compass as much as of his implacable contribution to peace - largely within the format of the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission that followed the expiry of F W de Klerk’s apartheid regime in 1994. So although the UN had vetoed overt contacts with any Gaza-based Hamas member, I was not seriously astonished when the archbishop decided to meet with the dismissed Ismaïl Haniyyeh. After all, as he put it passionately, conflicts are resolved with foes and certainly not with friends. In fact, his approach seems to be emulated today by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, whose recent call by for a national dialogue (hiwar watani) with Hamas is not only an attempt to rescue Palestinians from their debilitating internecine confrontations but perhaps also a tacit admission of failure in achieving any putative progress toward peace with Israel.

However, one source of befuddlement for me was the fact that the archbishop omitted addressing the attacks that have of late been targeting Christian Gazans. Since the Palestinian political interests cleaved rather injudiciously between those of the West Bank (with the Palestinian Authority) and those of Gaza (with Hamas) one year ago, Christian priests, laypersons and institutions have increasingly been harassed or attacked in Gaza - examples being Rami Iyyad’s killing or the torching of the Rosary Sisters’ school less than a fortnight ago. Those are dangerous developments perpetrated by unknown individuals (aydin athema seems to be a getaway euphemism) that need to be taken in hand so those who are accountable for them - directly or indirectly - be identified, apprehended and punished with the due process of the law. Pursuing the policy of the ostrich is sinfully slipshod: anything less is a disservice to a Palestinian cause that has always underlined its secular ethos.

The second event that vivified the desperate conditions for Palestinians in the occupied territories was an interview with the author and traveller William Dalrymple on the More 4 digital channel. Dalrymple spoke knowingly about the origins and current stasis of the Palestinian conflict and the affliction visited almost daily upon Palestinians - all the way from 1948 when 750,000 were made refugees following the creation of the state of Israel to our contemporary times. In fact, his facts, figures and stories about dispossession can also be verified in the authoritative, comprehensive and pictorial tome All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 by the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi who has written extensively on the Palestinian exodus and taught at Harvard, Princeton and Oxford universities.

In http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1184614595/bctid1568033784, Dalrymple provided a 17-minute interview that linked the root of tensions in the Middle East with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and underlined the global strategic importance of assisting Palestinians establish their long-overdue state. Mind you, most well-meaning people had grasped those realities long ago. However, in a region where power-plays are being waged by different ideologues, demagogues and interest groups, it remains a sad fact that the constant prevarication in the inevitable creation of a viable Palestine adjacent to a secure Israel will either cause more conflagrations, upheavals and tensions or else put the accent on a bi-national solution that would be less helpful for Israel than the concessions it would need to offer in return for a genuine and durable peace.

Palestine today is a spatial idea that is frittering away. Despite the lofty pledges of Annapolis, the changing nature of this tiny parcel of land with its increasing illegal settlements (882 new ones were authorised last week in Pisgat Ze’ev and Har Homa) fills me with dread as waves of Israeli subjugations driven by fearful bravado are met with corresponding waves of Palestinian radicalisation rooted in angry despair. Notwithstanding, I have a novel suggestion for the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert whose own political future today is decidedly anaemic. Could he not reverse the jaundiced realities of the region by evincing a radical pragmatism that is conducive to peace with the Palestinians? Could he not overturn the tables of orthodoxy and walk into the pages of history by adopting those robust decisions necessary for the implementation of a real peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours? Not easy, I know, for there is a lack of trust between the so-called partners despite their chummy meetings, an overwhelming disparity in the leverage they exercise upon each other and gnawing internal weaknesses corroding the structures for any peace. Yet, would the irony of success not be inescapably potent?

Lebanon and Palestine are two countries tagging self-evident question marks: they could either move forward or conversely slide backward. A lot depends on the politicians’ choices and whether they are guided by vision and action or blindness and inertia. Verily, as Martin Luther King, Jr, once reminded the world, the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.