Gilles Kepel: Despair: the terrorist's best recruiting officer

The 'road map' for peace cannot succeed without respect for Palestinian claims, says Gilles Kepel

While the governments of the United States, Europe and Russia, together with the UN, have put the Middle East "road map" for peace back on the table, watchers of Arab satellite television see quite a different picture. Day in day out, two juxtaposed stories unfold on al-Jazeera or Abu Dhabi television. On the one hand, there are images of suicide attacks in Palestine, followed by scenes of Israeli repression, and of the burial of "martyrs" watched by angry crowds of bearded youths and close shots of veiled female mourners. And on the other, images of Iraqi hostility towards American troops, scenes of armed retaliation and, again, burials where turbaned sheikhs chant defiant slogans against America, and followers praise Allah the Almighty, as well as close shots of spilled blood on the streets.

These distressing images are a far cry from the virtuous circle the Americans wanted to implement in the Middle East as a result of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (or OIF – preferred to "Operation Iraqi Liberation", which bore the somewhat embarrassing acronym OIL). The toppling of a brutal tyrant in Iraq was meant to engineer gradual prosperity and democracy in the whole region, and facilitate the re-floating of the sunken Israeli-Palestinian peace of the 1990s via the process known as the "road map". This would involve a restoration of Palestinian democracy mixed with Israeli territorial concessions, and would lead to mutual recognition of the two states, while appeasing political and religious tensions between the Mediterranean and the Gulf. Cheap oil would flow securely to consumer markets of the West and Asia, while petro-dollars, Arab workforce and Israeli know-how would combine to shape a new and strong economic region.

This dream of a reconciled Middle East is, up to a point, nothing new. President George Bush Snr had tried to make it come true in the aftermath of another war against Iraq won by US forces, Operation Desert Storm of 1991. Then, Saddam Hussein's armies were pulled out of Kuwait following a strikingly victorious blitzkrieg, although no effort was made to get rid of the master of Baghdad. George Bush Snr had used the wide consensus of nations that backed America and took part in the military operations as a lever to put major pressure on Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Shamir. Both were coaxed into the peace process that would lead to the Madrid conference, and then to the Oslo agreements, by American muscle-flexing. Both were unable to resist: one ruined politically by his backing of Saddam, with a Palestinian society exhausted by the first intifada (which started in December 1987), the other unauthorised to retaliate to Iraqi scuds falling on Tel Aviv, and morally damaged by the severe blows inflicted upon Israel's image by this very same intifada.

Today's "road map" process also builds upon American victory in Iraq to achieve peace in the Holy Land – although the picture rather differs from 12 years ago. First, President Bush Jnr's military success in Iraq was a lonely one, with little backing from a fragmented Western alliance, from Russia and European public opinion, and ambivalent hostility emanating from most US allies in the Arab and Muslim worlds. But the "road map" is deemed to be the outcome of a global consensus. Second, while his father was eager to put equal pressure on Palestinians and Israelis, "Dubya" seems reluctant, to say the least, to hurt any of Ariel Sharon's vested interests and, instead, all the pressure has been exerted on Palestinians. Arafat, never to be forgiven by Washington or Tel Aviv for his political mistake of launching a second intifada in September 2000 that was soon taken over by Hamas and Islamic Jihad's repugnant suicide attacks against civilian Israeli targets, has been forced out of the scene.

Though there is little doubt that a failed political leader is bound to disappear, Palestinians are left with no figure of standing, let alone charisma, as they begin a final negotiating process. They are not even made to believe they make their own decisions in this matter: they are being cornered, and obviously so. The belief in Washington and Tel Aviv is that the Palestinian prime minister designate, Abu Mazen, will be a more amenable negotiator. But one also needs domestic legitimacy to convince one's own people that they have to make major concessions in a negotiating process, something that Mazen still lacks.

Instead, Washington, right after the fall of Baghdad, twisted Syria's President Bashar Assad's arm with a combination of threats and economic sanctions. This was because the Americans considered that the major obstacle to peace was the action of armed Islamist movements, such as Lebanese Hizbollah, Palestinian Hamas and Jihad. Without Syrian backing those groups would soon enough become inefficient and innocuous. Such a strong-arm approach is certainly bound to weaken the Palestinians' hand, and quite possibly lead to political concessions by Mazen, such as complete renunciation of violence. It is not without its own logic.

But, as the latest deadly attacks on Israeli territory – perpetrated by Britons converted to radical Islam – show, political despair is still a fertile ground for terrorism, and resilient terror is enough to ruin all efforts, unless there is a clear-cut rejection of violence by the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. They won't do it just because they are beaten on the head until they yield. Instead they need to be convinced not only that terror is a dead end, but also that they can reap political, social and economic benefits of peace. The past decade, however, is more of a liability than an asset. They also need to be persuaded that the peace brokers are honest, and that brutal Israeli re-occupation of Palestinian territory in the course of the second intifada, together with its targeted "elimination" of Palestinian activists and "collateral damage" calling for an endless vicious circle of bloody revenge, is condemned on an equal footing in Washington.

Can the present American administration deliver? President Bush will soon begin the re-election race, and he is torn between domestic, short-term tactics and international, long-term strategies. For what it is worth, common wisdom in Republican circles maintains that Bush Snr, in spite of the 1991 military triumph, lost re-election because he had alienated the pro-Israel American lobby by forcing too many concessions on Tel Aviv for the sake of the peace process. Though non-partisan political analysts rather tend to think that Clinton's victory in 1992 stemmed from the incumbent's poor economic record, it is fair to believe little will be implemented by the United States in the Middle East today if it jeopardises the Republicans' 2004 re-election prospects. Alienating the pro-Israel lobby, strongly "embedded" as it is in the neo-conservative Pentagon civilian elite, therefore seems totally unrealistic.

On the other hand, so much was invested, and so many lives of young American soldiers were exposed to danger that Dubya risks his political future if no significant breakthrough is achieved to bring the whole Middle East region back to normality. This involvdes the ccurbing of terrorism, comforting Israeli security, belittling Saudi Arabia, enhancing Iraqi democracy and ensuring a steady flow of cheap Middle East oil into America's fuel tanks – an ambitious international agenda indeed. More suicide attacks in Tel Aviv's streets, leading to a stalemate in the Holy Land, would be enough to ruin the whole building up of this grand strategy and precipitate an infamous electoral defeat in 2004. As such, the implementation of the "road map" is a crucial issue for the Israeli, Palestinian and, not least, American political leadership. But the sound and fury of weapons won't suffice: nothing durable can be achieved without a negotiating process that takes into account legitimate Palestinian claims for a state. In the Middle East temporary losers may prove, in the long run, a major impediment to any form of lasting peace, unless they are treated with dignity.

Gilles Kepel is chair of Middle East Studies at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, and the author of 'Jihad' (London, IB Tauris, 2003, updated edition) and 'Bad Moon Rising: A Chronicle of the Middle East Today' (London, Saqi, 2003)