Mistrust Thrives at the Mideast Table

The background of recent Mideast peace talks in Washington, D.C. is notably long and complicated, but few could trace it to its modern day political origins. You could credit President Carter with taking the first step in formal peace talks with the Camp David Accords in 1978 but this agreement came after decades of tension and warfare and we’ve all seen how well it worked. To find the true origin of the 20th century conflict as we know it, one must look deeper into the aftermath of the First World War. As the Ottoman Empire, based in modern Turkey, crumbled after their ill-fated alliance with Germany, the great Western powers carved up this last vestige of the classic empires of old. Both France and Great Britain hoped to gain large portions of the newly available countries rich in history, and a newly desirable product: oil.
Representatives of both nations met behind closed doors to develop an agreement that divided the Middle East into “spheres of influence.” French representative François Georges-Picot and Sir Mark Sykes of Great Britain signed the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 essentially ending all hopes of Arab sovereignty that had been dangled in front of many local fighters in exchange for their aid in WWI. (You may remember the agreement if you paid close attention at the end of the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia). This ‘gave’ Syria and parts of Turkey to the French, and Jordan and Iraq to the British while allowing Allied control of today’s Israel. This set up the later creation of the nation of Israel in 1948, but also significantly marked the lack of concern for Arab interests by Western powers.
The hard fact is that Arab nations and peoples do not trust the West, yet we continue to hold the exclusive reigns of any peace effort bandwagon. We should certainly not give up what we believe to be the noble cause because it is difficult, but America needs to look beyond the typical methods and make an effort to bring new negotiators to the table. The unanswerable problem remains that the nation of Israel was established by mandate of the West thus usurping local Palestinian control. Consequently, Israel can never break free of this ‘buddy’ status with the West. They are hated by many pro-Palestinian groups simply for existing, and regardless of your opinion on this issue, this prejudice makes the peace efforts truly a process that America is hardly helping by continuously reminding everyone of the privileged relationship of Israel. I have no good solution here but merely an observation. If you have 4 children and chose a favorite one publically, you would hardly be the person to sit down and discuss fair justice when they all got in a fight. Palestinians believe that the Americans will always side with Israel and that they are merely being pandered to. They need to believe that their presence and opinions are valued and that we are not merely listening just to say we let them talk.