There are those in the international community who claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of the Middle East's problems. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been among the most prominent of these voices.

In his article "A Battle For Global Values" (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007), Tony Blair reiterated what he has expressed in previous public statements: "How can we bring peace to the Middle East unless we resolve the question of Israel and Palestine?" Achieving peace, he continues, "would not only silence reactionary Islam's most effective rallying call but fatally undermine its basic ideology."

More recently, in a speech at the Istanbul Forum in October, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan named the lack of a Palestinian state as the crux of all problems in the Middle East. In so saying, he echoed a speech by his own Foreign Minister, Ali Babacan, at the Annapolis conference, who declared that “the Palestinian question is at the epicenter of all problems in the Middle East. The resulting climate of despair, hatred and pessimism continues to haunt the region and create a breeding ground for extremism."

Similarly, Aijaz Zaka Syed, a columnist for the Dubai-based, English-language newspaper Khaleej Times, wrote in November that “the key to…world peace lies in Jerusalem."

True, genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians would remove one of the long-standing conflicts in the Middle East. Moreover, to state the painfully obvious, peace would serve the best interests of those involved.
But the suggestion made by Prime Ministers Blair, Erdogan and others that such a settlement is a necessary precondition for wider peace in the Middle East and would take the wind out of radical Islam's sails is unsupported by the facts.

Let's assume for a moment that Israel did not exist. Would that have changed the basic story line of the bulk of events in the Middle East?
Would Yemen today be fighting a war on three fronts against its own rebel movements and al Qaeda?

Would Iraq and Iran have chosen not to pursue an eight-year war that cost more than a million fatalities? Would Iraq have decided not to invade Kuwait in 1990? Would it have rethought its use of chemical weapons against both its own Kurdish population and Iran?

Would Syria have refrained from slaughtering over 10,000 of its own citizens in Hama in 1982? Would it have withheld its central role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri?
Would Saudi Arabia have stopped exporting its Wahhabi model of Islam, with its narrow, doctrinaire view of the world and rejection of non-Muslims as so-called infidels, across the globe?

Would al Qaeda not have attacked the U.S. in 2001, when, it should be remembered, the Israeli-Palestinian issue was never even mentioned among Osama bin Laden's list of "grievances?"

Would the danger posed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan magically disappear absent the Israel factor?

Would Iran today abandon its nuclear and hegemonic ambitions in the region?
Would the Shi'ite-Sunni split, with its profound political and strategic ramifications, evaporate into thin air?

Would the Sudanese government have stopped its collusion with the Arab Janjaweed militias to end the massive murder and displacement in Darfur?
Would the desperate poverty and widespread illiteracy that dampen hope and create a fertile recruiting ground for radical Islamic movements suddenly be alleviated?

Would Saudi women instantaneously have the right to drive, would non-Muslims finally enjoy equal rights in all those Arab countries where Islam is the official religion, and would the Baha'i no longer experience persecution at the hands of the Iranian government?

In reality, the destabilizing factors in the Middle East run far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Strikingly, while most Western political leaders mince their words, the courageous Arab authors of the annual Arab Human Development Report have not. They have spoken of three overarching explanatory factors for the region's unsatisfactory condition: the knowledge deficit, the gender deficit and the freedom deficit.

Unless these three areas are addressed in a sustained manner, the Middle East, which ought to be one of the world's most dynamic regions, is likely to continue suffering from instability, violence and fundamentalism, irrespective of what happens on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

Consider some of the important findings in recent Arab Human Development Reports and related studies:

• The total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated in Spain in one year.
• Greece – with a population of fewer than 11 million – translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined – with a total population of more than 300 million – translate into Arabic.
• According to a Council on Foreign Relations report, "in the 1950s, per-capita income in Egypt was similar to South Korea, whereas Egypt's per-capita income today is less than 20 percent of South Korea's. Saudi Arabia had a higher gross domestic product than Taiwan in the 1950s; today it is about 50 percent of Taiwan's."

As Dr. A.B. Zahlan, a Palestinian physicist, has noted: "A regressive political culture is at the root of the Arab world's failure to fund scientific research or to sustain a vibrant, innovative community of scientists." He further asserted that "Egypt, in 1950, had more engineers than all of China." That is hardly the case today.

A recent UN Human Development Report revealed that only two Egyptians per million people were granted patents (for Syria the figure was zero), compared to 30 in Greece and 35 in Israel.

In the same UN report, the adult literacy rate for women aged 15 and older was 43.6 percent in Egypt and 74 percent in Syria, while for the world's top 20 countries it was nearly 100 percent.

And finally, according to the current Freedom House rankings, no Arab country in the Middle East is listed as "free." Each is described at best as "partly free" or, worse, "not free."

The sad truth is that it is precisely political oppression, intellectual suffocation and gender discrimination that explain, far more than other factors, the chronic difficulties of the Middle East.

To be sure, there exist no overnight or over-the-counter remedies for these maladies that would allow the region to unleash its vast potential, but let’s be clear: they, not the straw man of Israel, are at the heart of the problem.

It would be illusory to think otherwise.

 

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