The most under-appreciated achievement of Labour’s second term is in foreign policy, where our government has been making history in the Middle East. It is because of our Prime Minister that an American government – and the most pro-Israel government in history, at that – is committed to the creation of a Palestinian state within just a few years. This will be debated in the history books long after Saddam’s anthrax and foundation hospitals are forgotten, nothing more than unread cuttings in crumbling archives.
After the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the descent of Israel and Palestine into the evil twins of the Intifada and intensified occupation, the Israeli left had a collective nervous breakdown. The cause to which they had dedicated their political lives – dialogue with the Palestinians to exchange land for peace – seemed to be discredited. Some, like Shimon Peres, joined a national unity government in a desperate attempt to moderate the actions of Ariel Sharon. Others, like Labor leader Amram Mitzna, stayed outside and called for Israel to withdraw unilaterally from the occupied territories in the absence of any Palestinian interlocutor.
Without outside intervention, it is hard to see how the situation could have moved beyond the bloody logjam of endless tit-for-tat violence. The Bush administration had been famously reluctant to engage with this crisis even as it spiralled to once-unimaginable depths. They had seen their nemesis, Bill Clinton, dedicate great chunks of his presidency to the cause of dialogue – to apparently no avail. And, besides, Bush was committed to a less ambitious foreign policy. He was more worried about Kansas, his aides boasted during the election campaign, than about Nablus.
So what happened? The answer can be summarised in one word: Blair. Of course, there were other players in Washington DC urging Bush to get involved in the crisis, not least Colin Powell; but it is widely believed that Blair named the vigorous pushing of the road map to peace as his price for involvement in the second Gulf War. Downing Street insiders say that it was less explicit than that, and we will probably have to wait for the memoirs to find out what really happened. Either way, Tony Blair’s weight behind the road map was central to it being pushed from the State Department’s basement to the top of the US agenda.
Some might be surprised that Blair engaged seriously with this crisis, since he cannot expect any domestic political gain from the massive amount of time and effort he has invested in it. Besides, the Palestinians were not seen until recently as a Blairite cause. For too long, young über-Blairites saw unquestioning support for Israel as the only acceptable New Labour route. Support for Palestinian self-determination was considered terribly old left, and Labour Friends of Israel became a crucial Blairite networking hub. This attitude, still worryingly prevalent in the modernising wing of the party, lags far behind the Prime Minister’s thinking, and that of other key New Labour figures like Peter Mandelson.
A number of factors drew Blair to his current position of supporting the creation of a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel. One is the lobbying of his friend Bill Clinton, who believes that the Oslo process came agonisingly close to success under his supervision, only to be scattered to the winds by Bush. Another is the crucial influence of Michael Levy, the entrepreneur and famously successful fundraiser for New Labour.
Levy belongs very firmly on the Israeli left, and he is so despised in Likud circles that Ariel Sharon’s team insisted that he should not be present when the Israeli leader visited Downing Street this summer. Levy’s last meeting with Sharon ended in a shouting match so severe that Levy left just before he would have been thrown out.
He went on to play an important role in helping Blair to court the Israeli left, in particular by inviting Amram Mitzna, then the Labor candidate for Prime Minister, to Downing Street during the 2003 Israeli election campaign. This was rightly interpreted by Sharon as an attempt by Blair and Levy to bolster Mitzna’s campaign, and with it the chances for peace.
Blair has also become convinced that the Arab world will forever view the Western powers as hypocrites unless the running sore of this conflict is seen to be dealt with justly. But perhaps the most important determining factor in shaping Blair and Mandelson’s approach to Israel and Palestine was their long and often agonising experience of the Northern Ireland peace process. Blair has seen in the province how – as he put it recently in his speech to the US Congress – peace processes can often be frustrating and are always irritating, but they are always better than no peace process at all. While the parallels can be over-stated, both conflicts involve an entrenched sectarian divide and a dispute over territory. The same clichés are used about Israel and Palestine that were jeered time and again back in 1993 when John Major launched the process that led to Good Friday: it’ll never work, they can’t live together, the conflict has been going on for generations… you can fill in the blanks.
When President Bush recently visited Belfast at Blair’s invitation, the Prime Minister played a key role by explaining to him how the Northern Ireland process had worked. In his press conference with Blair that day, Bush said that he would apply the lessons of Northern Ireland to the Middle East. For a president who was virtually written off as hopelessly one-sided and vehemently anti-Palestinian, this was an amazing achievement.
It is a sign of how bold this move is that Blair is now heartily despised by the Israeli rightwingers who want perpetually to deny the Palestinians a state. Blair has always had bad relations with Benjamin Netanyahu, the former (and probably future) Israeli Prime Minister, ever since they first met in 1997. Peter Mandelson so despises him that last year he left the platform at a pro-Israel rally after his own speech so that he would not be seen to appear alongside Netanyahu. The government was so appalled by the rightward shift under Netanyahu and, later, Sharon that it instituted a soft boycott on selling some military products to Israel. Blair is repeatedly attacked as naïve or worse in the pages of the Jerusalem Post and other hyper-Zionist publications.
Just as in Northern Ireland, Blair is calling on both sides to make painful compromises. The mirror-image dreams of a Greater Israel or a Greater Palestine‚ where one side manages to expel the other, must be surrendered. Israelis must dismantle their offensive, illegal settlements; Palestinians must accept Israel’s existence and stop armed resistance. The Palestinians are, on balance, asked to make more compromises – such is, unfortunately, the reality of power politics – but there is no question that if the road map works, both sides will be far better off and the Palestinians will, for the first time, have a homeland of their own.
It is still possible – indeed, some would say probable – that the road map will go up in flames. Ariel Sharon’s decision to press ahead with a security wall that is three times the size of the Berlin Wall and cuts deep into Palestinian land is contrary to the spirit of the road map and a clear provocation. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have already broken the hudna (ceasefire).
But for the first time in three years, it is possible to be both sane and a little optimistic about the Middle East. As Shimon Peres told me in Tel Aviv this July, they are very grateful to Blair. He has had a huge influence on Bush. Another senior member of the Israeli left, speaking privately, said, ‘Thank God for Blair. Without his influence out here, I just don’t know where we’d all be now. Nobody should underestimate the role he has played in Middle Eastern politics.’