Ticking towards disaster: How the west ignored warnings of an impending Middle East crisis

First published August 1997: For months now, Benjamin Netanyahu and his bickering cabinet have been discussing a reinvasion of Palestinian-held territory

The former Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (AFP via Getty Images)

The “peace process” is long dead. A war is not far away. Almost anyone in the Middle East will tell you this. Almost no one in the United States or Europe believes it. They talk – as the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, did on Friday – of a “low point” in the peace process, as if the whole flawed Oslo agreement were not already buried. All the evidence that a bloody explosion is imminent in the Middle East, of which last week’s slaughter in Jerusalem was merely one more sign, is wilfully ignored.

For months now, Benjamin Netanyahu and his bickering cabinet have been discussing a reinvasion of Palestinian-held territory. In June, Uzi Arad, Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser, was telling the leaders of the powerful American-Israeli lobby group AIPAC that they should do everything possible to resist congressional calls for a cut in US financial assistance to Israel, because Israel was likely to take “decisive and fateful decisions” that would place Israel in a delicate security situation”. No explanation was given as to what these “fateful” decisions would be, nor why they would place Israel in so “delicate” a state of security. This extraordinary statement was ignored by the press – except by the Israeli newspaper Maariv.