Back in November I wrote about diplomatic negotiating, including a passage on the Middle East:

In the Middle East there is an existential negotiation going on over the very existence of Israel.

Either Israel exists, or it doesn’t. The Iranians under current management are contriving to give the impression that Israel should not and will not exist, hoping to weaken Israeli morale. Plus they are hinting at the possibility that Israel will take Supreme Pain, a nuclear attack, if it does not submit to Islamic terms.

Israel after the Holocaust knows all about extreme pain, and is ready to hit back. So this negotiation is an ultimate existential test of bluff and nerve – how far can Iran and its followers go in stepping up the military and psychological pressure on Israel before Israel retaliates and is denounced as the aggressor and/or provokes a wider deadly ‘final solution’ showdown? Which side is willing to inflict – and to take – the greater pain?

In this case the Palestinians alas are collateral damage…

And on that negotiation goes.

This time round the Israeli leadership – maybe with some quiet support from different Arab opponents of Hamas – looks to have concluded that the time has come to take out a lot of Hamas people and installations, regardless of the international hullaballoo.

Here is what is said to be imagery of Hamas forces loading Grad rockets on to a truck, then abruptly disappearing: 

 

Calls for a ‘truce’ between Israel and Hamas tend to miss the rather trivial point, namely that Hamas seems to want to use any such lull in the fighting to build up its weapons supplies to inflict even more damage on Israel next time round. Not much for Israel in letting that happen?

While this zero-sum negotiation proceeds as between Israel/US and Hamas/Iran, others too are negotiating:

… two lines were being taken on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, with Arab states divided between those supporting the Hamas line of armed resistance and not recognising Israel, and those that preferred non-confrontational options.

"More now than ever, they are divided along regional lines of competition of interests in which states are using the Palestinian paper to tug between one another and gain that regional influence.

And Iran is negotiating with the West:

"Fascinating though your European attempts to kill off the Jews no doubt were back sixty years ago, why did you dump the Jewish problem in the Middle East? There aren’t many Jews in Israel anyway – take them back to Europe and we can solve this thing quite easily. A Final Solution if you like – but this time a sensible, peaceful one."

There are those in Europe who tend to agree with at least part of this broad line of thought.

Russia meanwhile is negotiating with the United States, using its erstwhile influence in the region to achive nothing much, other than lingering on as a supposedly Big Power by giving unobtrusive fine-tuned comfort to anti-Western elements.

The EU is negotiating with itself, baffled by its inability to turn the fact that it pours so much money into the Palestinian problem into real leverage.

I tend not to write much about this part of the world. I am no expert, plus the issues are so intractable.

But one thing is clear.

When the Cold War ended, the West ought to have given urgent strategic thought to the Middle East.

We had pushed successfully for change in the Comunist world, then offered a helping hand to democratic Russia and all the former Communist countries.

We should have built on this success and aimed at a new strategic partnership to reverse the moral and physical decline of authoritarian Arab regimes in North Africa and further East, themselves legacy issues from WW2 and then the Cold War.

Instead the opportunity was lost.

Western effort became bogged down to a startling degree in micro-managing the Yugoslavia drama. As the world economy boomed after the Cold War ended, oil money poured into militant Islamist hands.

And so nearly twenty years later we now have all the different ghastly Middle East Negotiations in all shapes and sizes dragging on, but at a notably higher level of cynical risk and deadly earnest.

Of all the players now negotiating in and around this problem, how many of them in fact do not want it ended for fear of losing ‘influence’?