EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

• The Mecca Agreement served the function of not renouncing violence along with the generic demands of the international community. It also created a fusion between the alleged moderate branch of the Palestinian Authority headed by Fatah leader Abbas, and Hamas that maintains links with the Muslim Brotherhood.
• It was precisely whilst the US was actively engaged in conflict management between Israel and the Palestinians that al-Qaeda was planning terrorist attacks.
• Islamist organizations, like al-Qaeda, may raise specific political grievances at times from the Balkans, Chechnya, or Kashmir, but what empirically has really helped these organizations surge in strength is their sense of victory from the battles in any of these clashes. Withdrawal in the face of radical Islam only strengthens the present worldwide militant wave and empowers its adherents.
• Recent apocalyptic Sunni and Shiite literature perceives the recovery of Jerusalem as a trigger to a new wave of global jihad. This doctrine predicts an imminent clash between the Mahdi – a Muslim saviour – and the Islamic antichrist, known as the Dajjal in the Holy City. Thus begins a new stage of worldwide violence extending to Rome and the entire West.

The recent diplomatic flurry about an imminent breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli peace process after the Arab Summit in Riyadh is truly confusing. True, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and some European leaders spent the last few weeks going out of their way to praise Saudi Arabia’s peace initiatives. But ultimately any real forward diplomatic movement requires first and foremost an agreement between Israel and a willing Palestinian partner.

It is common knowledge that this is not on the horizon. Since the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, there has been a twin-headed Palestinian Authority government which has been dominated by Hamas, on the one hand, that still remains an international terrorist organization tied to the radical Muslim Brotherhood. It is also headed by a president, Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, known in the West for a more moderate political stance.

The Mecca Agreement that these two heads of the Palestinian government struck on February 8, 2007 did not forge a new common stance of renouncing violence, recognising Israel or firmly committing all Palestinian parties to previous peace agreements, as the international community has demanded. The Gaza Strip, in particular, has just deteriorated under the Hamas-led regime to become more like Somalia in the early 1990s.

In short, Rice and her Quartet partners from the EU, Russia, and the UN Secretariat have little to work with even if Abbas now has regular meetings with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.

So why go through the motions of a new peace initiative and raise international expectations under such difficult circumstances? And why all of a sudden should the Bush team become more engaged today in Arab-Israeli diplomacy than in the recent past? What is pushing Washington when the situation on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank looks far from ripe for any serious diplomatic initiative? Doesn’t this create a credibility problem when serious diplomatic efforts are undertaken that seem completely out of touch with the harsh reality on the ground.

One has to go back a few months to understand the roots of the current US moves. For these were preceded by a steady chorus of voices encouraging the Bush administration to adopt this course by linking forward movement on the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic track with US strategy on Iraq and successful prosecution of the war on terrorism, in general.

It was the Iraq Study Group, also known as the Baker-Hamilton report, that originally kicked off this current wave of commentary when it asserted that “the United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.” The point of diplomacy is not necessarily to advance to stable peace but rather to serve broader regional interests.

Something more fundamental has been underpinning this kind of analysis. For example, Brent Scowcroft followed up the Baker-Hamilton report when he added in a New York Times op-ed: “A vigorously renewed effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict could fundamentally change both the dynamics in the region and the strategic calculus of key leaders.” Almost simultaneously, Richard Haas, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Newsweek that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was not only “the issue” that “shapes public opinion across the Middle East,” but adds that it also “radicalises” opinion in the region as well.

Much of this thinking could be traced back to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who in November 2004 called the revival of the Middle East peace process “the single most pressing political challenge in our world today.” It was an astounding assertion from one of the West’s leading statesmen in the war on terrorism. Did he really believe that the Middle East peace process was more pressing than the Iranian nuclear program, the lingering al-Qaeda presence along the Afghan-Pakistani border, or North Korea’s challenge? After the July 2005 terrorist bombing in the London underground, he would make the same charge yet again.

The underlying logic in most of these commentaries is that the rage of radical Islam that is presently afflicting the entire Western alliance is caused and indeed fuelled by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In other words, it is believed that the flames of this rage can somehow be lowered if there was only a sustained diplomatic effort on the Israeli-Palestinian front. Even if the chances of a real breakthrough are negligible, it would be argued; just making the effort at obtaining new Israeli pullbacks can be beneficial.

But are any of these contentions that are driving the diplomats really true?

Historically, of course, al-Qaeda was not established in the aftermath of a single Arab-Israeli War – not in 1948, 1956, and not in 1967, 1973 or 1982. It was founded in 1989 in response to the Soviet defeat in and withdrawal from Afghanistan. During a lengthy time-span when the US actually invested enormous presidential energies in the peace process during the Clinton presidency, along with the various Israeli-PLO agreements of 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, as well as the Camp David Summit of 2000, did this have any effect on al-Qaeda?

While peacemaking has a value in its own right, empirically, it did not disrupt al-Qaeda’s escalating offensive. There were continuing al-Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia in 1995, East Africa in 1998, Yemen in 2000, and finally 9/11 in 2001. In other words, there was no correlation between US peacemaking efforts and the rage motivating radical Islam to attack the US or its interests abroad.

Nonetheless, the myth still persists that further Israeli withdrawals can extinguish the heat of radical Islamic rage, despite the continuing evidence to the contrary. In southern Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided in mid-2000 to pull back from Israel’s self-declared security zone without obtaining any concessions from Hezbollah or its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.

On the contrary, territorial concessions act as a promoter of terrorism in that location and elsewhere by other Islamist groups. Not only did Hezbollah interpret the Israeli withdrawal as a victory, but those around Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat declared that if a few thousand Lebanese Shiites could chase the Israeli army out of Lebanon, they could do the same in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As a consequence, several months later the Palestinian Authority launched what Arafat called the al-Aqsa intifada, which was accompanied by a sharp escalation of devastating suicide bombings in the heart of Israel’s cities. Israeli withdrawal did not put out the flames of terrorism; they actually shot up.

Moreover, when the unilateral Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip was undertaken in 2005, it was hoped that the Palestinians would seize the opportunity to build the foundations of a stable Palestinian state in the evacuated area and that a new moderation would take hold among the Palestinians. But since Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006, it has allowed Gaza to become a launching pad for ongoing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians in Sderot and the villages of the western Negev.

The Hamas regime has facilitated the flow of weapons, illegal funds, and volunteers into Gaza, including members of al-Qaeda, as Mahmoud Abbas admitted last spring. The US and its Western allies embraced Israel’s Gaza pullout as a bold initiative, and received the foundations of a new al-Qaeda sanctuary in return.

The cardinal error being made in the West in this case is in understanding what actually feeds terrorism. Those pushing Secretary Rice to secure even more Israeli concessions on the Palestinian track often believe that terrorism primarily emanates from political grievances. In fact, the history of the rise of al-Qaeda and its affiliates demonstrates that they have grown due to the momentum of victory.

When Osama bin Laden established al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the war against the Soviet occupation was over. Rather than being motivated by a political grievance against the original Soviet invasion, al-Qaeda’s founding members were empowered by the Soviet withdrawal and by their proven ability to defeat a superpower. True, al-Qaeda’s recruiting tapes make reference to alleged acts of injustice to Muslims, for which it sought redress. But its most vivid instruments for building up its following were scenes of its attacks on US and coalition forces or its beheadings of prisoners in Iraq, Chechnya, or in the Balkans. Any western retreat in the face of radical Islam is simply viewed as weakness.

What the last Israeli withdrawal demonstrated is that what often seems as a well-conceived plan can completely backfire when it comes to calculating what will diminish the present radical Islamic wave. Most of those who are seeking to link the war on terrorism with Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy are additionally making yet another huge mistake. They are labouring the point that a final peace settlement must be based on the 1967 lines. In effect, their proposals call for a re-division of Jerusalem, in the spirit of the Clinton parameters of 2000. It is absurd to take peace proposals from the late 1990s, that didn’t work then, and apply them in an entirely new Middle Eastern reality, in which radical Islam and Iran are plainly on the ascendancy.

What none of these new architects of peacemaking seem to understand is the new role of Jerusalem for this radical Islamic milieu. While it was never a high priority for al-Qaeda, should Israel be compelled to re-divide its Old City, there is little doubt that this would re-ignite Jihadism, far more than the withdrawals from Lebanon or Gaza. Putting Jerusalem on the “political horizon,” the new term being adopted in Washington for the Bush administration’s upcoming initiative, could be an enormous blunder.

Unknown to the vast majority of Western policymakers, there has been a broad undercurrent appearing in extremely popular apocalyptic Sunni and Shiite literature in the last decade, which actually considers the recovery of Jerusalem as a trigger to a new wave of global jihad. Many of these bestsellers atop the news-stands advance that there is an imminent clash between the Mahdi – a Muslim saviour – and the Islamic antichrist, known as the Dajjal in the Holy City, that begins a new stage of worldwide violence extending to Rome and the entire West. As far back as the 12th century, Jihadist theories contended that the fall of Jerusalem would portend the eventual fall of Byzantium, which Islamic armies had failed at that point to conquer.

Today, the new apocalyptic speculation is found in the writings of senior officials in Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood; they have been adopted by elements of the Sunni insurgency in Western Iraq. Sheikh Yusuf Qaradhawi has made such references during his al-Jazira television program. They have also gained new currency with the Mahdist speculations of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The last thing the US and its western allies should do now is to feed these speculations with policies that appear to confirm them to the impressionable masses that consume this literature.

Misreading the nexus between the Israeli-Palestinian issue and global terrorism has been costly in recent years. When it comes to Jerusalem, such errors could be catastrophic. Do policymakers have any idea what would happen to Jerusalem’s holy sites to all religions if they were placed under a radical Islamic regime? Moreover, Western diplomats who might think they are extinguishing the roots of Jihadism by putting the re-division of Jerusalem on the current agenda, could unleash, through yet another careless initiative, a terrorist tsunami sweeping their own capitals in Western Europe and even reaching as far as the shores of the US, as well.

Reaching an eventual peace between Israel and the Arab world is very important. But peacemaking should not be designed to serve the short-termed war on terrorism alone; especially when it cannot relieve the West of the growing threats it is now facing and may only exacerbate them in the years ahead with the unleashing of an evolved Islamist doctrine accompanied by another more lethal wave of global terrorism.

Ambassador Gold is the author of “The Fight for Jerusalem; Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City” (Regnery, 2007) which was just published in the US.

He is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1997-1999.