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When politics is the art of the counter-intuitive

9 June 2003

If peace is to come in the Israel-Palestine conflict the Israelis are going to have to keep on giving, and only the Americans can make them. Bush had better be up for it, because it's a stance that only a right-wing administration can hope to sustain.

It is one of the paradoxes of politics that it can take an administration representing one side of the political spectrum to achieve a reform the appeal of which is all on the other. Like the Duke of Wellington, a true blue, Church of England Tory if ever there was one, who emancipated the Catholics as Prime minister in 1829. It was a controversial issue, the duke himself instinctively opposed. But the knowledge of this and his otherwise unimpeachable political credentials did much to persuaded the Tory side of the pragmatic necessity of so unpalatable a measure.

Something similar happened in the latter years of the last Conservative government. The Conservatives are, strictly speaking, the Conservative and Unionists, so when John Major began to talk turkey with the IRA there were deep misgivings in his party ranks. He had to go slowly, insisting on IRA disarmament as a pre-condition to the process. That didn't happen, so the talks consequently stalled. But a door had been opened, and when Tony Blair subsequently passed through it proffering a more flexible approach there was a good deal less fuss than there would have been if he, as a Labour Prime minister, had carried the process from the start.

This phenomenon is an aspect of something that all party managers know, that it may be necessary to upset one's natural constituency in order to achieve a policy having wider appeal. The hope is that these core supporters will have nowhere else to go come election time and will stay in the fold. Tony Blair does it all the time in the domestic arena. Watching George Bush play peace broker in Jordan last week was an interesting reminder of how it works with the big play. A reminder that, if any American politician is going to sort out the Israel - Palestine problem, somebody from the right wing of the Republican Party has a better chance than most.

Much depends upon the reasons why he might want to do so. Bush's presidential style and his home-spun, folksy wisdom conceal an army of more-or-less machiavellian types who cook up his policy. The record suggests that the Cheneys, the Perles and the Wolfowitzs on the dark side of Bush's world are ideologically pro-Israel, which is odd because Israel has absolutely nothing that America wants. Strategically it's a disaster: all it does is keep the oil-rich Middle East in a ferment and prevent the U.S. from making useful friends in that region. Meanwhile the president himself weighs in with a paternal bonhomie, projecting the idea that the two sides should simply shake hands and agree to rub along together.

This common-sensical style suggests that there may be a slightly moral element to Bush's thinking. This analysis bears down heavily on terrorism but acknowledges that in terms of the balance of power it is the Israeli side who will have to do all the giving. But the moral apple-cart is easy to upset, and Bush won't want to upset his pro-Israeli constituency if (for example) he doesn't look like getting any "peace-maker" kudos out of the situation before the election comes round.

If morality won't do it, what about power, prestige and commercial advantage? The dilemma about Israel goes to the heart of the right wing agenda, cooking up a heady mix of religion, ideology, oil, commerce, military power and political prestige, all topped with a heavy dusting of cultural racism. Somewhere in that little lot are the raw national interests of the United States, waiting to pop out. It will take a crisis to trigger that - something to force the subject up the agenda of the middle American public for whom it registers at present as a minor tremor.

Because middle America is not thinking about it, it naturally takes a superficial view. When it looks at Israel it sees something that it recognises - a pioneer state, predominantly white, democratic, English-speaking (more or less) technologically advanced, economically developed - surrounded by a sea of something it does not recognise - ancient, sometimes nomadic cultures, Arabic-speaking, politically authoritarian (if not despotic), technologically and economically underdeveloped and riddled with graft and corruption. In the shorthand dictated by television attention-spans, the Israelis are "people like us", and their neighbours are not.

Such sub-racist but unthinking assumptions are prey to religious and political ideologues of the American way of life. So effectively have they been incorporated into the conservative-Christian agenda for America that it is this movement rather that the traditionally Democrat-inclined Jewish community that the administration has to fear. And, precisely because it is seen as a liberal-ticket item, the Palestine-Israel conflict offers nothing to the Democrats if they bring the issue to the fore.

So why has George Bush suddenly got involved? Partly because it's traditionally a late-in-term issue. Clinton's best efforts came in his last few weeks, when presumably his legacy as a statesman was in the forefront of his mind. But also because, in Bush's case, the issue is now getting right in the way of the grander aspirations of his strategic policy wonks. They may not be saying so in public, but someone must have spotted that the Palestine question and international terrorism are connected not only in the mind and utterings of Tony Blair.

The U.S. is expending significant and increasing resources to project its power in predominantly Muslim countries where the issue is a running sore. Surveys consistently show that the American "way of life" remains eternally popular in these regions but the conflation of America with American policy in the Middle East is doing enormous harm to that country's interests. And all for what? For a colonial population on the losing end of a protracted war of independence - losing because the economy, the demographics, the political identity, the post-holocaust moral ascendancy (in the light of the behaviour of the Israeli military) and, above all, the sense of success so crucial to American identification, are all suffering and cannot recover through the exercise of force.

There is nothing in this for the U.S., but after decades of unthinking assumptions about Israel it will take an ultra-right-wing president to tell the American people that.