Hey Barack, Joe, Tony, BBC! Want Middle East peace? Just. Stay. Home.

Stephanie Gutmann
Telegraph.co.uk
19 March '10

Are you sick of seeing reports of clashes between rock-throwing Palestinians and tear gas canister tossing-IDF soldiers in Jerusalem and the West Bank plastered across the front page of your newspaper? What about the monotonous daily headlines detailing talks that are on (Oh rapture!) or postponed (All is lost!) between this Palestinian leader of the day and that flavour-of-the month Israeli poobah?

Are you wondering what relevance this has to your life?

I hope you are wondering, because the cause of peace in the area would be helped a lot if you ignored these articles. It would be particularly helpful if busybody leaders — the Barack Obamas, Joe Bidens, Javier Solanas, and Tony Blairs — of the world did the same. And the most helpful thing of all would be if the platoons and brigades of news media camped out in Jerusalem went back to London and Amsterdam and Mexico City and Beijing and New York.

Because, no, don’t believe the hype. Israel/Palestine is not a regional conflict that has huge relevance for the fate of the planet — any more than border disputes over Kashmir or Tibet or Hong Kong. Iranian nuclearisation actually does have relevance for the planet – but people who believe, as a British columnist recently put it, that “a peace deal in the territories would remove a significant casus belli for Tehran” are bonkers.

No, all those restive Sunnis, Shias and Persians are not sitting around chewing their nails over the terms of a “final status agreement” between Israelis and Palestinians. People who have bought into the linkage concept (as Middle East writers abbreviate it) are allowing themselves to become stenographers for regional dictators who use the plight of the Palestinians to deflect blame from sins against their own populations.

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