MIDEAST: After Kenya Attacks, Moderates Seek Space for Dialogue

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

N Janardhan

DUBAI, Nov 29 2002 (IPS) - The latest attacks in Kenya and the continued conflict between Israel and the Palestinians signal more violence, but they are also giving moderates in the Middle East another chance to push for dialogue over the hardliners’ agenda of hostility.

Though retaliatory bloodshed by the Israeli government is on the cards after Thursday’s suicide bombing at a Kenyan hotel and a failed missile attack on a plane carrying Israeli holidaymakers, calls for truce and peace are starting to get a better hearing now compared to just a few months ago.

It is yet to be established which of the three suspected and claimant groups – al-Qaeda, Al Aqsa Brigades or the Army of Palestine – are behind the Kenya attacks. But analysts say each had a message to send in Thursday’s attacks, which came less than two months after the October car bomb blasts in Bali, Indonesia that killed nearly 200 people.

According to Nabil Abdel-Fattah, assistant director of the Cairo-based Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, if it were the Palestinians, the timing appeared to coincide with Israel’s Likud party primaries , in which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon defeated his more hardline rival, Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

”It was to show that the Sharon option, the Likud option, was not a solution to the Palestine problem,” he told the United Arab Emirates’ ‘The Gulf Today’.

If al-Qaeda were behind the Kenya attacks, it would probably have been trying to mobilise support from Arabs who have questioned why it had hit U.S. targets but not Israel or Israelis. In this case, Abdel-Fattah said, the objective would have been to produce ”a new wave of supporters for al-Qaeda network”.

But whatever group is responsible for the attacks, the emphasis on violence as a means to achieve a political end may cut little ice even among Arabs, because of concern about retaliatory attacks by the United States and Israel against Muslims.

Even conservative Saudi Arabia had reservations about the Kenya attacks.

Friday’s ‘Arab News’ editorial, reflecting official thinking, was scathing: ”To target and kill civilians is the worst of crimes against humanity. Killing Israeli holidaymakers, or those waiting for buses in Israel, is no different to Serbs slaughtering the innocents of Srebrenica, other than in scale.”

”Those who organised the Mombasa (Kenya) attacks are on a par with the Milosevics and Karadzics of this world – just as cruel, vile and culpable,” it pointed out.

The Kenyan tragedy was also accentuated by an attack by Palestinian fighters outside a Likud party office in the northern town of Beit Shean Thursday.

Sharon has ordered the intelligence agency Mossad, which has a reputation for ruthless pursuit of opponents, to track down those behind the Kenya attacks. ”Our hand will reach them,” Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said on television.

But this week also carried reports about significant comments by Mahmoud Abbas, deputy of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, that sharply attacked Palestinian resistance groups and said the armed uprising against Israel was a mistake and must be stopped.

The comments by a possible successor to Arafat, made at a closed meeting last month and reported Wednesday, were seen as a milestone in the debate on the two-year ‘intifadah’ or uprising.

”We should … ask ourselves, not by beating ourselves up, but by reviewing the mistakes we made, where we are headed,” he said.

Polls predict that continued violence will give Sharon a better chance of retaining his job as Israelis could shift to a more hardline stance in the Middle East conflict and take the line that Israel’s moves against the Palestinians is part of the global ‘war against terror’.

But Labour challenger Amram Mitzna – who argues that a peace process, not military might, is the only long-term answer – has forced the Palestinian National Authority to deviate from its declared policy of not intervening in the Israeli domestic politics.

For the first time, Palestinian officials are openly urging Israelis to vote for Mitzna if they want peace and security. In an unprecedented move, Palestinian newspapers are full of paid advertisements calling for an end to attacks inside Israel in order to help Mitzna and his Labour Party.

A poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research released on Thursday found that majority of Palestinians want their police to crack down on those attacking Israelis.

The poll showed that although 53 percent of Palestinians still support attacking Israeli civilians and 90 percent support attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 76 percent said they backed efforts to reach a mutual ceasefire.

This is a sharp rise from the 48 percent who wanted an end to violence three months ago.

For many, dialogue may be worth trying since the ‘intifadah’ has yielded little in the last two years. But for this to happen, Israel has to relent from its position of ”no negotiation until violence ceases”, because Palestinian resistance will never stop, and by that logic, negotiations will never begin.

The same applies to the United States. Analysts say that rather than harp only on a military solution to end terror, it needs to initiate genuine political dialogue in the Arab world to strengthen the moderates’ argument against violence.

”Washington needs to remember that terror is impossible to root out until there are political solutions on the ground. It only takes an individual to wreak havoc. Such individuals can be stopped only by a just and fair solution to the Middle East crisis, not by military power,” said political analyst Salim Al Jashi of the UAE’s ‘Al Itihad’ in an interview.

”The United States also needs to realise that Iraq is not the immediate danger. If it needs to tackle terror, al-Qaeda must be the target because it has a global reach, not Baghdad,” Jashi said.

But there is ample scope for the hawks, who put al-Qaeda and the Palestinian campaign against Israeli occupation in one category, to gain ground as well.

According to an Israeli government statement Thursday: ”Whether in New York or Washington, Bali or Moscow, Mombasa or Beit Shean, terrorism is indivisible, and all attempts to understand it will only serve to ensure its continuation.”