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In discussions of the contemporary Middle East, few arguments have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of observers, than the claim that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict constitutes the source of all evil and that its resolution will lead to regional peace and
stability. No sooner had the guns fallen silent on the Israel-Lebanon border than Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, fresh from his summer vacation in the Caribbean island of Barbados, announced his intention to embark on a mission to the Middle East next month in an attempt to both stabilize the situation in Lebanon and to resuscitate the stalled peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. This sense of urgency was echoed by the American former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who claimed that "Today, it's becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other." And the Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri put it in even stronger terms: "Every major tough issue in the Middle East is somehow linked to the consequences of the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its bitterness kept seeping out from its Palestine-Israel core to corrode many other dimensions of the region."While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is demonstratively, even invidiously, wrong.
See the article for more on this line of thought. So what is the author's solution?
Only when the local political elites reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism and forswear the false notions of pan-Arab and pan-Muslim solidarity, let alone the imperialist chimera of a unified "Arab nation" or a worldwide Islamic umma, will the long overdue regional stability will be finally attained and the Arab-Israeli conflict resolved. Not the other way round.
An interesting notion: the Israel/Palestine conflict, which has been made the central issue for at least the last 20-30 years (if not more) and is still blamed as the root cause for all regional problems, may itself me the reason why the conflict refuses to end.
