SCRANTON, Pennsylvania — Many Americans might wonder when decades of unrest in the Middle East will end, but a former U.S. special envoy to the region believes developing lasting peace there will likely take many more decades.
In an interview Tuesday before his public lecture at Elm Park United Methodist Church, George J. Mitchell, also a former U.S. senator from Maine, said plenty of reasons exist to think Israel and the Palestinians will never reach a peace agreement, including decades of previous failure by 12 U.S. presidents, 20 secretaries of state and many others.
“On the other hand, I think there is a reasonable prospect for success based largely upon my belief that it is so much in the interest of both societies to reach an agreement,” Mitchell, 82, said while seated in the lobby of the Radisson at Lackawanna Station Hotel.
He credited President George W. Bush with saying that during a 2009 visit to Israel.
Mitchell spoke hours after new confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers appeared to escalate.
Many factors complicate the prospects of peace, including the mistrust between Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and internal divided views within each society about the other.
Netanyahu’s wavering about whether Palestinians should have their own country has led Abbas to doubt his rival’s sincerity about allowing a new state, Mitchell said. Meanwhile, Netanyahu doubts Abbas has the political will and power to negotiate peace with the terrorist group Hamas lurking and rejecting Israel’s right to exist, he said.
“Very few politicians will take huge political risks to enter into a process that they believe from the outset cannot succeed,” Mitchell said.
Further complicating tensions is the rise of “a new order” within “the Muslim world (that) is going through a very difficult period,” he said.
That was an allusion to the demise in the last 15 years of dictators such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and their replacement by far less stable governments or terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida or the Islamic State. It was also an allusion to ongoing strife in Syria.
“Constant upheaval,” he said.
With Muslims expected to grow from a fifth of the world’s population today to more than a third in 2060, the “huge numbers of unemployed men with no prospects” in the Arab world will serve as fertile ground for recruiting by groups such as the Islamic State, he said.
“And the only answer in the long term has to be responsible, inclusive governments in that region,” Mitchell said.
That means governments that treat minority ethnic groups or minority parties with respect instead of shutting them out to avenge past mistreatment, he said.
“Perhaps the greatest challenge in any democracy is one we encounter daily in this, one of the most mature and successful democracies in all of history, is to reconcile the tension between majority rule … and the rights of minorities and those who don’t win elections,” he said. “We still struggle with that here.”
Large parts of the Arab world have no tradition of democracy that respects the rights of minority groups, Mitchell said.
“The notion of inclusive government is simply foreign to them,” he said. “The reality is none of them are going to succeed until they learn to have inclusive governments in which power can be shared between all segments of society.”
In the meantime, the United States must do its best “to help and support and encourage those who share our values, those who will agree to reasonable, responsible governance and recognize and respect the rights of minorities.”
“But that’s not easy to accomplish,” he said. “It took 50 years in France after the revolution; it took over 100 years in Britain. You can’t be impatient that the Arabs can’t do it overnight.”
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