Examination of Witnesses (Questions 37
- 39)
THURSDAY 8 FEBRUARY 2007
MR YOSSI MEKELBERG AND DR AHMAD KHALIDI
Q37 Chairman:
Mr Mekelberg and Dr Khalidi, we are very pleased to see you. What
I would like to do would be to ask you if you would like to introduce
yourselves, just briefly, to the Committee and if you have brief,
initial statements, if you would make those before we go on with
our questions: Mr Mekelberg?
Mr Mekelberg: Yossi Mekelberg. I am Associate
Fellow at Chatham House on the Middle East Programme and I am
also, with my students here, Head of the International Relations
Department at Regent's College.
Q38 Chairman:
Have you got a short statement you would like to make or would
you like to go straight to the questions?
Mr Mekelberg: I think, straight to the questions.
Q39 Chairman:
Dr Khalidi?
Dr Khalidi: I am Ahmad Khalidi. I am a Palestinian
from an old Jerusalemite family. I am a Senior Associate Member
at St Antony's College, Oxford. I live and work in this country.
I have been active in Palestinian peace-making and writing and
observing the Middle East for three and a half decades. I would
like to make a short statement, if I may. Surveying the wreckage
of the Middle East as it is today, based on my 35 years of experience
of the Middle East, there are three points I would like to highlight
today. The first has to do with the use of force. Force, as we
know, is a very blunt instrument, to use a cliché; nonetheless,
it is true that, particularly in the Middle East, the use of force
in many guises has been very counterproductive. Force is blunt,
and in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as demonstrated
by the war in the Lebanon in the summer, I think the Israeli use
of excessive force has only demonstrated to us how, rather than
being instrumental, this is counterproductive and elicits a response
which is based on revenge and retaliation. The second element
which has to do with force is that when it comes from an external
power and tries to reshape the region almost invariably it fails;
we have the example of Afghanistan and Iraq. Force, and particularly
when it is used by the West, is seen to be biased, pro-Israeli,
self-serving and, in the case of the United States, oil-seeking.
To cast a pearl of wisdom in your direction, My Lord Chairman,
force gets you many places but nowhere ain't one of them. Very
often you end up using force and finding yourself in a position
which really you did not want to be in. The second point I would
like to make has to do with the politics of exclusion. In the
Middle East there are natural forces, forces of nationalism, Islamism,
local regionalism, pan-Arabism, but they are part of the natural
fabric of the area. If you are trying to exclude these forces
from the political process, if you try to crush them, if indeed
you try to use force against them, you will not succeed; they
have to be incorporated into the process. You need to engage,
contain and then constrain these forces; these are the fundamentals
of dealing with the area and avoiding the politics of exclusion.
Finally, on the issue of peace-making, we have potentially, and
I will get back to this later, an alignment of forces that just
might be opening up for a new attempt at peace-making in the area.
My pearl of wisdom here is that unless the outside world is determined
to help and determined to make this succeed it is better not to
try than to try and fail, it is better not to try at all than
to try and fail again. We saw the cost of failure in 2000; another
failure this time would have an even higher cost. Unless the international
community is really determined, including of course the United
States and the EU, to bring about an effective peace process which
ends this conflict, it is better, in my opinion, to scale down
the prospects of the peace process rather than enlarge them, because
failure has a very, very high cost.
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