China, which has reconciled Saudi Arabia and Iran, has started to work with Saudi Arabia to mediate Middle East peace on the Palestinian issue. In Palestine, as usual, Hamas and Israeli forces in Gaza are shelling each other, and the Israelis are assaulting Muslims who have come to pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (the top is Muslim holy ground and the side cliff is Jewish holy ground). In response to these developments, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang called the foreign ministers of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) on 17 April to calm the situation and suggested that they should reconcile because China would mediate.
In a telephone conversation between Qin Gang and Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, Qin Gang called for restraint and proposed dialogue, to which Cohen retorted that China’s reconciliation with Saudi Arabia and Iran had made Iran more magnanimous and hastened its nuclear programme (although in truth Iran is not developing nuclear weapons). Qin Gang then held a press conference in which he expressed China’s desire to play a constructive role in building Middle East peace. Middle East peace has been stalled since 2014.
It calls on both sides to exercise restraint, calm the situation and resume dialogue, and expresses a desire to play a constructive role in Middle East peace… This is what the US has been doing for 30 years, ever since the Oslo Accords. But Middle East peace has not progressed at all. It’s not going to change even if China says so now. It is natural that many people think so. However, US politics has been controlled by Israelis who do not want to advance Middle East peace. Even when the presidential administration and others want to promote peace, they are blocked from all sides of US politics. US peace efforts in the Middle East have been ‘only pretend’. The US-Israel has kept the Middle East away from peace by antagonising Iran and pitting Saudi Arabia against Iran.
China, by contrast, has a proven track record in the recent reconciliation arbitration between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Until now, the hegemonic US had only forced the Saudis, who wanted to reconcile, to be hostile towards Iran. However, when China interceded, the issue was resolved at once. Saudi Arabia and Iran subsequently held a foreign ministerial meeting in Beijing and became closer and closer. The Iranian President visited Saudi Arabia and talks are underway for the Saudi King to visit Iran. The war in Yemen, which was a proxy war between the two countries, is also being reconciled through prisoner exchanges.
China’s Middle East peace initiative is linked to the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran, mediated by China, is not just a story of reconciliation between the two countries, but a move towards Saudi Arabia and Iran getting along and, with the cooperation and backing of China and Russia, rebuilding peace and stability throughout the Middle East, which the US has so far destroyed. Resolving the problems in Palestine and Syria is also part of this. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has supported pro-US (puppet) forces and Iran has supported anti-US forces, maintaining the confrontation structure instilled by the US, Britain and Israel. When Saudi Arabia and Iran reconcile, they will reconcile with each other and stabilise the Middle East.
In Palestine, Hamas (Islamist) in Gaza has been supported by Iran and the Palestinian Authority (formerly socialist Fatah) in the West Bank by Saudi Arabia. The conflict between the two sides was fixed in 2006 when the US forced Palestine to hold elections when the anti-US Hamas was predicted to win, and Fatah’s autonomous government, which did not recognise the election results, sat in the West Bank, deliberately creating a state of division in which only Gaza belonged to Hamas.
This time, at about the same time as China announced that it would cooperate in Middle East peace, representatives of Hamas and the autonomous government (Fatah) were invited to meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In the past, under US hegemony, the Saudis and others had tried to reconcile the two sides, but without success. This time, under China’s influence, it looks as if reconciliation is likely to progress. It is not that China is good at this, but that the US has been obstructing it in a covert way. If the Palestinian side breaks the division and re-unites, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran as a whole can pressurise Israel to resume peace quickly.
In promoting peace in the Middle East, resolving internal Palestinian divisions is the rather easy part. The difficult part is getting Israel to concede and make peace. The Israeli political forces that control the planning of US Middle East strategy are “forces that want to crush Israel while pretending to be pro-Israel”. They are a settler group in Israel and have obstructed the progress of Middle East peace by establishing more and more illegal settlements in the West Bank, the site of the planned Palestinian state in the two-state peace initiative. The settlers have formed a Likud majority and have taken hold of Israeli politics and government, and continue to expand settlements.
Israel is invincible as long as the US, controlled by Israel, holds hegemony over the Middle East. However, this state of affairs will soon end with the loss of US hegemony. Israel will lose its only absolute backing. It will have to make concessions by joining the Middle East peace process, but the settlers who control US-Israel refuse to make concessions. Last year, a coalition of anti-Likud forces came to power, but ultimately failed to do anything. Likud’s Netanyahu, who returned to the prime minister’s office at the end of last year’s elections, may be better able to make peace by pulling the plug on the settlers and cheating them.
A way of transferring the same area of alternative land (mainly desert) to the Palestinian state, while leaving most of the settlements (other than the land occupying the Palestinian side of the transportation corridor) on the Israeli side, might win the approval of the majority of the settlers in the Likud. A Palestinian state would have to have Jerusalem as its capital, but this would not be the Old City of Jerusalem, which is also important to Jews, but the edge of the current Jerusalem city area (such as Abu Dis).
These are also ‘fake peace plans’ proposed by former US President Trump (originally proposed by the Israeli Olmert government). It’s a joke, but it’s the only feasible two-state peace plan. Since the US (fraudulently) failed to elect Trump, and the current Biden administration is unwilling to make peace in the Middle East, the US has no one to promote the Olmert-Trump proposal now (at least until the year after next). The US cannot do it, but China might be able to. Saudi Crown Prince MbS, who is in power in Saudi Arabia after turning from the US side to the Chinese side, was invited by Trump in 2017 to promote the Olmert-Trump proposal and to reconcile with Israel through its implementation.
It seems that there were significant forces in the Saudi monarchy at the time that insisted that it had to be a more proper two-state solution, not a half-baked plan, and the Middle East peace process was derailed by Trump’s inability to be re-elected. But the only feasible Middle East peace is the Olmert plan. It is possible for China, not Trump, to work with MbS to promote a two-state Middle East peace based on the Olmert plan. Now it will be up to Israel to overcome domestic (settler) opposition and make peace.
▼ Syria will be solved first.
In the Middle East, the Syrian problem is now likely to be resolved before the Palestinian problem. Saudi Arabia, which has been hostile to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a US puppet, has stopped being hostile and is now talking about inviting Assad to rejoin the Arab League summit in May. The war in Syria was a proxy war in which the US took the liberty of viewing Assad’s Syria as an enemy and tried to topple the Assad regime by force by supporting weapons to al-Qaida ISIS, which the US intelligence community had nurtured and the Saudis had supported with money.
In the US, the intelligence community acted on its own and turned Syria into a war. President Obama at the time did not want the war to become a quagmire, but the label “Assad is nefarious” was fixed and he could not control the US intelligence community and military-industrial complex. Obama instead asked Russia to help Assad’s Syrian government forces by composing a Russian air force to help Assad win, with Russia using its air force and Iran using its ground forces.
Some 200 US troops are still stationed in Syria. Once the move by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to make peace with the Assad regime is complete, the Arabs, Iran and Russia will jointly ask the US to withdraw its troops from Syria. At the same time as Syria, a similar withdrawal request would be made for the 2,000 or so US troops stationed in Iraq. The US military presence in the Middle East will be significantly reduced. One of the reasons why US troops have been stationed in Syria and Iraq is because Israel, which controlled US politics, wanted them there. Both Syria and Iraq had small numbers of US troops stationed there, which was significant because of the political symbolism of US control of the Middle East. When they were withdrawn, the feeling that US hegemony in the Middle East was over was strengthened.
▼ France’s ‘fallout from hegemony’.
The United States (US and Britain) is not the only country with Middle East hegemony on the US side; France, which has played the role of Britain’s rival since the 19th century, also has some kind of Middle East hegemony. France wants to maintain its hegemony in the Middle East after the withdrawal of the US. That is why Macron went to Beijing and asked China (China and Russia), which has a new hegemony in the Middle East, to cooperate with him and in return recognise France’s previous hegemony in the Middle East.
The meeting between the Saudi-Iranian foreign ministers in Beijing coincided with French President Macron’s visit to China, which also included the first meeting between French and Iranian foreign ministers in Beijing in many years. France is asking China to let it lead the framework of the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA), which the US has abandoned. Macron will also want to work with China on Palestinian Middle East peace in order to score diplomatic points.
In contrast to France, the UK has not come out in the field of hegemonic management much recently. The UK has maintained its hegemony by masterminding the US after the war. Recently, the UK has been forced into a heart-to-heart with the US as the US has been self-destructively abandoning its hegemony. The UK’s own measures against China and Russia, such as AUKUS and TPP membership, have been attempted, but China hates the UK even more than the US, and the UK is in severe decline.