Whenever I tell people that I've just come back from two years in the Middle East, they immediately ask me about Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. And all of their questions have the same general import: Why can't there be peace in the Middle East?
The truth is, I know nothing about it; I've just spent the last two years in the Sinai Desert, the one area in that part of the world where the peace process is working.
It's kind of a shame, though perhaps only to be expected, that most of the media's attention is focused on those places where attempts to bring peace keep breaking down. The Sinai used to be like that--it was the scene of three major wars between Israel and Egypt between 1956 and 1973--but today it looks like a pretty good model of what can be accomplished, even in the Middle East, when both parties decide that a nervous peace is preferable to a series of bloody and expensive wars.
There is a popular tendency to assume that if only a treaty among unfriendly parties could be effected, a climate of agreement would eventually follow. In fact, the opposite is much more often the case. A treaty can be successful only if it is preceded by the establishment of friendly relations or, at the very least, a mutual spirit of tentative cooperation. Numerous formulas for peace have been tried repeatedly in places as disparate as Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon. Some of these attempts have been highly detailed, extremely sophisticated, and in each case accompanied by the highest hopes for cessation of hostilities. And in each case they have met only with yet another round of frustrations.
On the other hand, among nations with no underlying foundation of hostility, there are numerous examples of agreements that have held up for centuries, even in the absence of a formal treaty.
The present situation in the Sinai is a useful example. As a results of the 1967 war, the entire peninsula was in the hands of Israel for more than 10 years. Under the terms of the Camp David accord, the Israelis agreed to peacefully and voluntarily turn over that territory to Egypt in exchange for recognition of Israel's right to exist. After some preliminary stages, the Israeli withdrawal was completed on April 25, 1982. At the point, however, only the framework was in place; there still remained the problem of monitoring the agreement or risking the possibility of seeing it go the way of its more celebrated counterparts in the Middle East.
The basic problem confronting Israel and Egypt was that two hostile powers shared a border. Whether that border was closer to the main body of Israel (as it had been from 1948 to 1967) or to the Suez Canal (as it was after the 1967 war), it was still the only thing that separated two countries that had already fought four wars in a 25-year period.
The Sinai could serve as a buffer, but the border still had to be somewhere. And even with each side devoutly wanting peace, neither one was yet fully ready to trust the avowals of the other.
The solution lay in artificially dividing the Sinai into four zones. Zone A, closest to Egypt, was to be occupied by the Egyptian army. Although it would be part of Egypt's
...
Read Full Article
|
