Editorial: For a new Arab agenda

The Jerusalem Post ^ | 26 February 2003

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Feb. 26, 2003
Editorial: For a new Arab agenda

The 15th annual heads-of-state meeting of the 22-member Arab League is scheduled to take place on Saturday, March 1, in Sharm e-Sheikh, Egypt.

When Bahrain, which chairs the meeting, strikes the gavel the agenda will focus on Iraq and "Palestine." On Iraq, the members agree that war is a bad thing, but they disagree on what to do about it. On Palestine, they agree that Israel is a bad thing, but they can't agree on what to do about it either.

What they won't be talking about is democracy, or how Arab political systems can find a middle course between anarchy and repression.

In a world under siege by the forces of Arab and Muslim disorder, the league meets not to take responsibility, but to shirk it. It is arguable whether the Arab states need Western-style democracy, but it is self-evident they need representative government.

The Arab League was founded, with British encouragement, in Cairo on March 22, 1945, to foster Arab unity. Despite a hefty budget, its neurotic focus on Israel has left virtually no time for the league to come to grips with how to make the Arab world where modernity has outpaced political development a better place to live.

Put simply: Countries like Egypt have a blue-water navy and F-16s, but no mechanism for citizens to air legitimate grievances.

When not paralyzed by internal rivalries, the Arabs are unified in their anti-Zionist sentiment. The results have been catastrophic for the region. The league opposed a two-state solution to the Palestine problem. Azzam Pasha, its then secretary-general, predicted on May 15, 1948, that the War of Independence "will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

It was the league that spearheaded the Arab boycott; issued the infamous "no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations" declaration after the Six Day War; in 1974 declared the PLO "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" and endorsed the phased plan for the destruction of Israel.

In 1977, following the Menachem Begin-Anwar Sadat talks at Camp David a break in Arab unity the league called for the isolation of the Zionist entity and termed Sadat's Jerusalem visit a "flagrant violation of the principles and objectives of the pan-Arab struggle against the Zionist enemy." In March 1979 the league suspended Egypt and quit its Cairo home.

But by 1981 the league had become more public-relations savvy. It offered the Fahd Peace Plan, which never mentioned the Jewish state by name.

Hosni Mubarak's Egypt was readmitted in 1989, just in time for the league to champion the first intifada. A 1990 summit termed "the immigration of Soviet Jews and others to Palestine and the other occupied territories a new aggression against the Palestinian people."

But unity predicated on anti-Zionist animosity was torn asunder by Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and Gulf War I.

When the Palestinians unleashed their onslaught of violence in October 2000, the league offered encouragement and ostracized members who maintained post-Oslo relations with Israel.

Last year the league said that if Israel returned to the 1948-1967 armistice lines, the Arab world would reciprocate with "normal relations." Simultaneously it declared that members would never "patriate" the Palestinian refugees.

Indeed, the Arab League deserves much of the credit for "helping" the Palestinians get to where they are today.

The league thus has a long history of mishandling crises and mismanaging the Arab relationship with Israel, but it has no record of fostering civil society. Indeed, the UN's Arab Human Development Report 2002 argues: "Arab countries have not developed as quickly as comparable nations in other regions. More than half of Arab women are illiterate. The region's infant mortality rate is double that of Latin American and the Caribbean, and four times that of East Asia. And over the past 20 years, growth per capita income was the lowest in the world except sub-Saharan Africa." As it tries to forge an illusive united position on Iraq, Saturday's summit perpetuates the old Arab agenda. The league dreads the prospect of a free and democratic Iraq.

Dictators resent regime change. The league cannot champion freedom when its members abhor it. It cannot favor a resolution of the Arab war with Israel when it was born to oppose Zionism. It cannot lead the Arab street, because its leadership is illegitimate. In the Arab world unity means blending paralysis and extremism. It is not out of altruism that our wish for the Arab elites gathering in Sharm e-Sheikh on Saturday is that they will assume responsibility for building civil society in their countries.

Doing so would make them better neighbors, and the world a safer place.