According to Reports: Debunking a Long-Held Falsehood
Posted on: July 30, 2009

In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,” Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, reviews an excerpt from a new book on the Arab-Israeli peace process.

On July 8, the New York Times printed an excerpt from Myths, Illusions, and Peace, a book on the Arab-Israeli peace process by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky.

In the excerpt, headlined “Linkage: The Mother of all Myths,” Ross and Makovsky confront head-on one of the most persistent misunderstandings about the Middle East: the idea “that ending the Arab-Israeli conflict is prerequisite to addressing the maladies of the Middle East. Solve it, and in doing so conclude all other conflicts. Fail, and instability – even war – will engulf the entire region.”

This notion has been advanced for decades by not only Palestinian and Arab leaders, but also key European and American officials. “The problem with this premise,” Ross and Makovsky argue, “is that it is not true.”

The authors list numerous Middle East conflicts and coups that had nothing to do with the Arab-Israel conflict: for example, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88); the Persian Gulf War (1990-91) and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Ross and Makovsky continue: “Since the origins of so many regional tensions and rivalries are not connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is hard to see how resolving it would unlock other regional stalemates or sources of instability. Iran, for example, is not pursuing its nuclear ambitions because there is an Arab-Israeli conflict. Sectarian groups in Iraq would not suddenly put aside their internal struggles if the Palestinian issue were resolved. Like so many conflicts in the region, these struggles have their own dynamic.”

They also point out that, while the Israeli-Palestinian must be resolved, contrary to widespread misperception, “it has not spilled over to destabilize the Middle East.”

The excerpt concludes with some rhetorical questions: “Yet the argument of linkage endures to this day, and with powerful promoters. Why does it persist? And why has it been accepted among top policymakers as if it is factually correct?”

One reason is that the conflict has been a convenient excuse for Arab and Muslim leaders to avoid  problems with their own inept and often corrupt, repressive governance, and shift the blame to Israel. Even in Egypt and Jordan, countries that have reached peace agreements with Israel, anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) vitriol has abated only somewhat – again providing an outlet for oppressed citizens to vent their frustrations, while keeping the ruling regimes above the fray.

Also ignored is the fact that Islamic powers and parties like Iran and Hamas may trumpet the “plight of the Palestinians” but do not want to see a peaceful resolution to the conflict. For them, the final outcome can only be the disappearance of Israel. A two-state solution or any reconciliation with Israel as a Jewish state is only a cause for further conflict.

Thus, the oft-heard complaint that the failure to provide a Palestinian state is fuelling Islamic radicalism in the Middle East and beyond has inverted the truth: this radicalism feeds on the perpetuation of the conflict and would not be assuaged by any resolution that leaves Israel in place and in peace.

Yet, according to Howard W. French in a review of Myths, Illusions, and Peace (“Debunking Commonplaces About a Singular Region,” New York Times, July 8 ) the Ross-Makovsky argument against linkage is “somewhat overstated.”

In a May 28 review of the book, The Economist magazine also found the anti-linkage argument not without merit but “overdone.”  It argued that the authors want the United States to pursue peace to defuse a conflict that “is stoking Islamic radicalism and anti-Americanism.”  The Economist failed to note that, for Ross and Makovsky, the pursuit of genuine Arab-Israeli peace is important in its own terms, not because it will neutralize a mythical reason for a rise in Islamic extremism.

Ross and Makovsky have pointed Middle East analysts in a useful direction: toward clear, factually based thinking, and away from blind, persistent myth-making.