Time for Arabs to adopt a new language
Something called the “Arab Peace Initiative Follow-up Committee” is meeting in
Beirut on Saturday to build on the ideas presented at the Arab League summit in March. The
Saudi-inspired proposal is a fair one, but solving the Arab-Israeli conflict has
incalculably less to do with egalitarianism than with marketing. Despite the Arab
plan’s being based exclusively on resolutions passed by the United Nations, Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government have ruled it out as “extremist”
and Washington, in its capacity as overlord of the peace process, has done nothing to
convince the Jewish state otherwise. If the foreign ministers meeting in Beirut want to do
something other than waste their time, they should abandon the failed methods of the past
and adopt a language that the rest of the world can understand and perhaps even begin to
accept.
Given the facts of the case, the Arab argument before the court of world opinion should be
an easy one to make. Unfortunately, however, regimes in this part of the world are so
accustomed to treating their populations like either criminals or children that they have
yet to learn that communicating with the international community requires a very different
set of skills. Governments that matter i.e. rich and influential Western ones
are only slightly less likely to be persuaded by flowery rhetoric than they are to
sympathize with (thankfully rarefied these days) threats to “push the Jews into the
sea.” Unless our point is communicated civilly and peaceably, advanced societies and
the politicians who lead them will continue to ignore us for generations.
Saturday’s talks will bring together the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan,
Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen. Surely they know that nothing
they can do will make the Arab Peace Initiative more palatable to an Israeli government
whose only redeeming feature is that its leading figure is somehow not the most repugnant
individual in his own party. What they can at least begin to accomplish, though, is a
long-overdue process via which the Arab world can finally start to plan for a media war in
which it has been soundly trounced for more than five decades.
The claim at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that of usurped Palestinian rights, is
neither so weak that its proponents have to use stale rhetoric nor so empty that its
champions have to defend attacks on innocent civilians. The Palestinian cause is just and
can stand with ease on the merits of its own history, but only if we communicate in a
vernacular that rings as true in Ohio as it does in Oman.
If the Beirut summit is ever to achieve anything, it will be because those responsible for
furthering its efforts realized that at long last, the Arab world must unreservedly
embrace both the letter and the spirit of the principles it has long espoused in support
of Palestinian rights. Doing so will help not only to end the tragic saga of Arab vs. Jew
but also to prepare the ground for straight talk within the Arab world itself and so to
open the way toward an entirely new chapter in the region’s history.
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