Europe's Failed Romance With the Arabs
By Daniel Johnson, a columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph.
From The Wall Street Journal 2000-10-19

One of the most troubling aspects of the present Middle East crisis is the unquestioning support offered to the Palestinians by the Europeans.

At the United Nations, Britain and France back a resolution that blames Israel for the collapse of the peace process. French President Jacques Chirac indulges his penchant for grandstanding by torpedoing the Paris summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with his last-minute proposal for an international commission of inquiry into the violence. The British and French foreign ministers, Robin Cook and Hubert Vedrine, strut across the Middle Eastern stage, putting the Palestinian case. The European Union pours hundreds of millions into Mr. Arafat's coffers, without any tangible gain to anybody except the chairman and his cronies.

Europe's love affair with the Arabs has lasted for more than a generation. It has lasted so long, in fact, that few can now remember a time when Europe supported Israel. Yet until 1967, the major West European states were at least as close to Israel as was the United States. This was partly strategic, a consequence of the Cold War alignment of the Arab states, led by Egypt, with the Soviet bloc. But it was also based on a residual sense of obligation: the Holocaust happened in Europe. Israel might not have won the Six Day War without French aircraft, British tanks and German reparations.

Yet their enthusiasm for the dashing victories of Moshe Dayan proved to be short-lived. After 1967, the European governments abruptly abandoned Israel.

During the Yom Kippur War, Israel found itself cold-shouldered by Western Europe. The oil crisis, triggered by that war, caused European states to panic and led them to lend legitimacy to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization.

Despite the alarming rise of Arab terrorism in the 1970s, often state-sponsored and often conspiring with European terrorist groups, the European governments increasingly backed Palestinian nationalist claims, wooed Arab regimes and acquiesced in the anti-Zionist stance of the U.N.

Even European leaders who happened to be Jewish, such as Chancellor Bruno Kreisky of Austria, cultivated the Arabs and snubbed the Israelis.It was, however, a one-sided love affair. However hard Europeans pressed the Palestinian cause in Israel and the U.S., the frontline Arab states never reciprocated by forcing the Palestinians to moderate their demands.

It was a combination of Israeli military strength and American, not European, diplomacy that persuaded first Egypt and later Jordan to sign treaties with Israel.

The two former colonial powers, France and Britain, have failed to use their influence for any constructive purpose other than to promote their own economic interests in the region.

Syria, for example, has still not done a deal with Israel, more than three decades after its defeat and despite the fact that the casus belli, the Golan Heights, is on offer. So much for French influence.

What are the motives that drive this undignified European pursuit of the Arabs? They are a mixture of greed, vanity and fear.

Greed is its own justification. The profits to be made from the minority of oil-rich Arab states explain (but don't excuse) such dubious adventures as the creation of Saddam Hussein's military machine. But American trade has prospered too, without affecting Washington's attitude toward Israel. The trouble is that the vast majority of Arabs are poor: not because they have no oil, but because they are kept in penury by their rulers. Hence the assiduous cultivation of Arab dictators, including Israel's bitterest enemies, by such machiavellian figures as Hans-Dietrich Genscher, German foreign minister for nearly two decades, has not benefited European economies very much, with the exception of the British and French arms industries.

If Europe had supported the U.S., which pursued a more even-handed Middle Eastern policy, the Arab world might have jettisoned its paranoid hatred of Zionism more readily, and come to terms with the post-Cold War world of democratic capitalism. The command economies of the Middle East need to be opened up to globalization if they are ever to escape from poverty and corruption.

Vanity has always vitiated European policy in the Middle East. The catastrophic Suez invasion did not, unfortunately, cure the British and especially the French of their post-imperial delusions.

France continues to believe it has a special mission in the Muslim world to preserve the French culture and language. Though Charles de Gaulle was conscious of a debt to the French Jews, so shamefully treated under Vichy, Francois Mitterrand and Mr. Chirac have cast aside such scruples. Anti-Americanism combines with a tendency to identify French with European prestige to produce the folie de grandeur which marks President Chirac's regular attempts to cast himself as spokesman for the Arab world.

Ever since T.E. Lawrence, the British military and diplomatic establishment has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Arabs. Despite the Balfour Declaration, the prevailing ideology of the Foreign Office has been anti-Zionist, if not indeed anti-Semitic.

Though prime ministers such as Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher were personally sympathetic to Israel, their governments toed the Arabist line. Even a Jewish foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, could do nothing to change this institutional bias. And the "ethical foreign policy" of the Blair government turned out to mean siding with despots and mobs against the only democracy in the region.

Fear is the underlying motive, however. Oil may have diminished in relative importance, but recent European petrol-tax revolts suggest that it is still a potent Arab weapon. No less significant has been the emergence of large indigenous Muslim, and in some cases Arab, populations in France, Italy, Germany, Britain and other countries. European governments must take account of these Muslim minorities, which now greatly outnumber their Jewish counterparts, and some politicians are tempted to pander to their more militant spokesmen. The specter of intercommunal violence, of which the present rash of attacks on synagogues and individual Jews is a foretaste, may be a more sinister threat even than old-style terrorism.

Whatever its motives, Europe's pro-Arab policy has never been popular. Ordinary Europeans identify much more readily with Israel than with the Arabs, particularly now that Israel has become a thriving member of the global knowledge economy.

Yasser Arafat has deliberately sabotaged the peace process in which Israel and the West invested so much political capital. Europe has wooed the Arabs and received precious little in return. This should be the end of the affair.

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