OPINION:
Since its rejection of the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan that would have divided Palestine in a fairly equitable manner between the Jewish and Arab population, Arab powers have frequently miscalculated their geopolitical options. It remains to be seen if the recent peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will elicit new examples of Arab blundering.
The legacy of geopolitical missteps by Arabs is long. In 1948, they rejected out of hand a partition plan that — on balance — would have benefited Palestinians. After the Arabs walked away — naively thinking they could fashion a better deal — Israel declared its statehood, was recognized by the United States and armed conflict erupted between Arabs and Jews in and around Jerusalem. The result? Israel won that bout and wound up with more territory than it would have had under the partition plan it supported that Arabs discarded.
In 1956, it was Israel’s turn to blunder into a war with instigators Britain and France, both angry at Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser hated the British present in Egypt as well as Israeli statehood. And while the Arabs were regarded as the victim, their military response was a disaster, adding to the view that they were inept when it came to power politics in the region.
In 1967, they attempted to set that record straight in the Six Day War. They lost miserably to a better armed and led Israeli Defense Force (IDF). In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Arab surprise attack of Israel turned into a rout with the IDF surrounding the Egyptian 3rd Army on the western front and shelling the outskirts of Damascus, Syria in the east.
And in both wars, the international community, particularly in the West, saw the Arabs as the unambiguous aggressor. Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 made clear that both sides were capable of aggression, but Arabs seemed to have cornered the market on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Now enter the UAE agreeing to a peace treaty with Israel. In reality, there are some parallel interests for both countries to make peace, in particularly their mutual dislike of a militant Iran. Both countries are powerhouses in technology and financing in the Middle East. Moreover, both are fed up with Palestinians who seem incapable of agreeing to any peace short of Israel returning to pre-1967 borders, a consistent and frankly unattainable goal.
Saudi Arabia also is warming to better relations with Israel. President Trump has made no secret of his effort to maneuver Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations toward peace with Israel. Even when Saudi Arabia was complicit in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the president tempered his remarks concerning the likely involvement of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in the gruesome affair, seeking to keep alive the prospects for a wider peace initiative involving the Saudis.
That pragmatic patience may pay off richly if Saudi Arabia soon follows the UAE’s lead. Indeed, the UAE may well have been the test case for such a move later by the Saudis who are more reserved and conservative in their geopolitics.
But like the UAE, Saudi Arabia has grown weary of Palestinian intransigence concerning peace initiatives. Consider MBS’ words — explicitly stated in March 2018 — that “It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiation table or shut up and stop complaining.”
It seems that some Arabs have decided that the legacy of geopolitical missteps vis-a-vis Israel should cease. Realpolitik is at work. Israel is not going away. But there’s also another certainty. The Palestinians will assuredly blunder in responding to this latest peace agreement.
Indeed, radical Hamas, the Palestinian cabal that runs the Gaza Strip, is already fulminating. We should not be surprised to see acts of violence against Israel by militant Palestinians to provoke Israel into retaliating, thereby disrupting the peace agreement.
Nor should anyone be startled to see assassination attempts on Arab leaders who signal their support for this agreement. Just two years after signing the 1979 Camp David Accords with Israel, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was felled in a hail of gun fire by jihadist elements angry with Egypt’s move toward peace. The potential for a similar outburst of irrationality by Palestinian militants — or for that matter Iranian militias seeking to register their outrage — is a distinct and ominous possibility.
The time is approaching when the Palestinian people need to replace the feckless and irrelevant power cliques in Gaza and the West Bank with rational leaders who can see clearly what Egypt, the UAE and soon Saudi Arabia leaders already see. That peace with Israel is better than an endless legacy of conflict, particularly with a malevolent Iran over the horizon.
• L. Scott Lingamfelter is a retired U.S. Army colonel, former Virginia state legislator and author of “Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War,” published by University Press of Kentucky and the Association of the U.S. Army.
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