A raw deal

Since the late 1960s, the European community has tried to bring about a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exerting its influence on the world stage.

By JONNY PAUL
Sadat Begin 224.88 (photo credit: Archive photo)
Sadat Begin 224.88
(photo credit: Archive photo)
Rory Miller’s Inglorious Disarray: Europe, Israel and the Palestinians since 1967 tells the engaging story of Europe’s attempt to become a political player in the Israel-Palestinian conflict over the last half-century.
Miller, an esteemed professor at King’s College London, shows clearly how generations of European leaders have shared ex-German foreign minister Joschka Fischer’s belief that “solving the Middle East and developing a real vision of peace is the major, major challenge for Europe.” But he also shows something else, no less interesting, but much less well known: how, from the late 1960s onward, the European community used the Israel-Palestine conflict as a way of building up its political solidarity and foreign policy credentials in order to establish itself as a major global player.
Indeed, one of the author’s key arguments is that European cooperation in the foreign policy sphere did not simply develop as a response to its involvement in the conflict.
Rather, engagement with the Palestine issue was singled out by European leaders as the most suitable way of bringing the continent together politically as well as economically, precisely because it provided the lowest common denominator for getting into the business of politics. This has remained the case.
The problem is that despite investing huge amounts of money and political capital in the effort, Europe has not been able to deliver the local parties to the negotiating table. At every key moment – in the wake of the 1967 and 1973 wars, at the time of the US-brokered Camp David process of the late 1970s, following the Madrid Conference of 1991 and in the Oslo and post-Oslo years since then – Europe has failed to challenge the US as the dominant external party.
This failure has been most apparent since the beginning of the Oslo process. As Miller shows, Oslo represented a vision of peace much closer to that promoted by Europe than that of the US over the previous decades. As such, it appeared to offer Europe, which had championed Yasser Arafat and the PLO for years in the face of US and Israeli condemnation, the opportunity to establish itself as a key external party in Middle East peacemaking.
But it never happened. Instead, when it came to the crunch, the Palestinians, like the Egyptians before them in the 1970s, embraced the US as an outside sponsor, and there was nothing that Europe could do. Instead, it has been forced to play the role of banker to the peace process, grudgingly pumping in aid and development funds in the hope that one day the local parties will take it seriously as a political partner.
Europe’s unwillingness to accept American dominance of the Arab-Israeli dynamic is a constant theme of this book.
At every point since former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy of the mid-1970s won over Egypt and eliminated Soviet influence on this key Arab player, Europe has looked to compete with Washington on the Palestinian issue. As Miller shows, this was especially true from the late 1970s, when in acrimonious scenes that bring to mind the Euro-American relationship during the Bush years, the Carter administration and its European allies came to blows time and again over the Camp David agreement. Following this, Europe set out to capitalize on Washington’s alienation from the vast majority of Arab states opposed to Egyptian-Israeli peace by providing an alternative Western voice. But even this failed to gain Europe a seat at the table.
As the book reminds us, all this has taken its toll on European confidence and has directly challenged the European claim that it has succeeded in transforming its economic power into political influence on the world stage. And while the EU, as the Palestinians’ lead donor, will in all likelihood play a crucial role if a Palestinian state is established, it is unlikely to play a serious political role until then, regardless of the protestations of its leaders or the efforts of the External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s new-look foreign ministry.
Meticulously researched, backed up by factual evidence, and extremely well told, Miller’s book does an outstanding job of explaining the issues surrounding the EU’s playing a secondary role to the US in the region.
INGLORIOUS DISARRAY By Rory Miller Columbia University Press 244 pages; $35