Middle East - Anthony Ham [43]
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Middle East History & Resources (www.mideastweb.org/history.htm) is a balanced examination of many of the region’s thorniest political issues, with a rare commitment to fairness and accuracy.
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In September 2000, after Ariel Sharon, by then the leader of the right-wing Likud Party, visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, riots broke out among Palestinians. This was the trigger, if not the ultimate cause, for the second Palestinian intifada that has continued in the years since. The election of that same Ariel Sharon – a politician as reviled by Palestinians as Yasser Arafat was by Israelis – as Israeli prime minister in 2001 was another nail in the coffin of the already much-buried peace process. Although the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004 offered some signs for hope, the violent occupation of Palestinian land and bloody suicide bombings targeting Israeli citizens continued.
But by then, the hope that had spread like a wave across the Middle East in the early 1990s had come to seem like a distant memory.
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THE MORE THINGS CHANGE
The Middle East may have a reputation for instability, but some things remain unchanged in the last 60 years. Israel and the Palestinians still trade accusations of bad faith and no solution has been found to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees (including second- and third-generation exiles) languish in refugee camps, many still holding on to the keys of homes they left in 1948 or 1967. And wars great and small continue to flare around the region.
In 2003, US and UK forces, with support from a small band of allies, invaded Iraq. Their military victory was swift, driving Saddam Hussein from power, but the aftermath has proved to be infinitely more complicated. With large communities of Shiites, Kurds and the hitherto all-powerful Sunnis vying for power, the country has descended into a sectarian conflict with strong echoes of Lebanon’s civil war. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Iraqis have fled the fighting, placing huge pressure on the resources of neighbouring countries.
In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a bitter month-long war that shattered the Lebanese peace, while fighting broke out between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government in 2008. The power of Hezbollah, and the shifting of Palestinian power from Al-Fatah to Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, has confirmed a process that had begun with the PLO in the 1960s: the rise of nonstate actors as powerful players in the Middle East. Governments of Arab countries have singularly failed to meet the aspirations of their people, from bringing about a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians to providing the basic services necessary to lift them out of poverty. Little wonder, then, that many Middle Easterners have turned to organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas who, in the eyes of many Arabs, have matched their words with actions. Both groups have built up extensive networks of social safety nets and, with some success, taken on Israel on the battlefield. That these groups are avowedly Islamic in focus, enjoy the support of arch-enemy Iran and have gained militarily in part through attacks on Israeli civilians has only served to widen the gulf between Israel (and the US) and its neighbours.
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The 33-Day War: Israel’s War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and its Consequences, by Gilbert Achcar and Michel Warschawski, makes an interesting read on the 2006 Israeli offensive in Lebanon.
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Peace talks, like war, come and go in the region without much ever changing on the ground. In 2008, Syria announced that it was holding indirect talks with Israel through Turkish mediators, Syria was talking increasingly with Lebanon and the seemingly endless talks between Israel and the Palestinians continued. But with Israel