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An Oasis of Peace in a Turbulent Region
| Article
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10989 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
1,503 Words |
| Author
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Norman Antokol
Norman Antokol is a professor of history and political science
currently serving in the Foreign Service as a political officer. His
posts have included Venezuela, London, the multinational
peacekeeping force in the Sinai, and the Officer for Combatting
Terrorism. |
Whenever I tell people that I've just come back from two years in the Middle East, they immediately ask me about Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. And all of their questions have the same general import: Why can't there be peace in the Middle East?
The truth is, I know nothing about it; I've just spent the last two years in the Sinai Desert, the one area in that part of the world where the peace process is working.
It's kind of a shame, though perhaps only to be expected, that most of the media's attention is focused on those places where attempts to bring peace keep breaking down. The Sinai used to be like that--it was the scene of three major wars between Israel and Egypt between 1956 and 1973--but today it looks like a pretty good model of what can be accomplished, even in the Middle East, when both parties decide that a nervous peace is preferable to a series of bloody and expensive wars.
There is a popular tendency to assume that if only a treaty among unfriendly parties could be effected, a climate of agreement would eventually follow. In fact, the opposite is much more often the case. A treaty can be successful only if it is preceded by the establishment of friendly relations or, at the very least, a mutual spirit of tentative cooperation. Numerous formulas for peace have been tried repeatedly in places as disparate as Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon. Some of these attempts have been highly detailed, extremely sophisticated, and in each case accompanied by the highest hopes for cessation of hostilities. And in each case they have met only with yet another round of frustrations.
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