24th November
Bethlehem.
It seems I chose well. As some of you know, when planning to come to the Middle East I had considered going back to Beirut.
Who would have thought, at least until the moment that Rafik Hariri was killed in a massive car bomb on the streets of Beirut’s Central District in February 2005, that less than three years later I would be able to say that from the West Bank, Lebanon is now a place too dangerous for comfort.
Until that fateful assassination, Lebanon was a country that inspired optimism for those interested in the future of the Middle East. It had been brought to its knees during the civil war of 1975-1990, much as Baghdad now has been, and it had got back on its feet to become one of the playgrounds of the Middle East. Its French colonial streets seemed to chime perfectly with its Western, Europe-bound outlook.
However, Lebanon now seems to be looking back rather than forward. The bad old days may be just around the corner, and it is within the context of a much less stable Middle East that it is sliding into a new period of conflict. Will the Middle East be able to resist collapsing completely if it experiences disorder of this level all the way from the Mediterranean to the Gulf? Will Israel be able to stay out of it? How will the Palestinians react?
There are many questions, and many more unknowns. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, the only known known is that things are looking bad, and against this backdrop the Annapolis summit appears a joke. Unfortunately, it’s one that I think could end up being not all that funny.
