I no longer wonder. We have an example in our own time. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been persisting, off and on, for sixty years; some say more. How many of us were alive when it began?

Yet, just about any thinking person would agree that the solution is obvious, and has been for the last 20 years there should be an independent state of Palestine comprising the territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The borders should be more or less the line of control prior to 1967. The Israeli annexation of Jerusalem may be impossible to resolve in the foreseeable future, but like the "Taiwan is part of China" issue, it can be put on the backburner for a very long time, if there's a will.

Now, there's the rub. As everyone knows, the problem has long been a lack of will. And this month, the conflict has spiralled out of control again. After the militant wing of Hamas seized an Israeli soldier near Gaza, Israel launched raids into the strip. Within days, Hezbollah (sometimes spelt Hizbollah) carried out its own raid from southern Lebanon into northern Israel, seizing 2 Israeli soldiers. Promptly, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert authorised ferocious attacks on various, clearly pre-planned, targets in Lebanon. It's been two weeks now, with no let-up in sight.

In this essay, I shall discuss two aspects that have been brought to the fore by this flare-up in fighting the question of irregular militias and that of statesmanship.

A type of conflict that is very difficult to contain is that waged by an irregular militia. The individual combatants seldom even wear a uniform, making it difficult to tell which person is a fighter and which is a civilian. Nor, generally, do they hold territory in any formal way, so it's hard to plot where exactly the battle lines are.

The militia may not see itself bound by the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war, and so there is the heightened risk of captive soldiers being tortured or killed, rather than treated humanely. This heightened risk in turn tends to argue for a robust response.

Things get even messier when the militia operates not within your own country (when it's really a civil war, e.g. Sri Lanka or Ivory Coast) but out of territory that nominally belongs to another country, yet is attacking you. This kind of situation tends to arise either because the host country is tacitly supporting the militia in order to wage low-grade war against you, or the host country isn't effectively in control of its territory and the militia is operating in that vacuum.

In the former case, when it is obvious that the militia is operating with the connivance of the host government, deterrence may be possible by threatening all-out war if the militia isn't reined in. This is roughly the situation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

But in the latter case, deterrence itself is hard because the host country is just unable to control its territory however much you demand that it does so. During the last decade, the ebb and flow of irregular armies between Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo was one such chaotic situation.

That being the case, it was outside the control of the Beirut government to determine whether or not its territory could be used to launch attacks on Israel. Yet when Hezbollah decided to launch the attacks, it was the Lebanese and Lebanon's infrastructure that suffered.

To compound matters, an irregular militia has less of a responsibility to the host country and its civilian population, than that country's formal military forces. Jan Egeland, the UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, yesterday criticised Hezbollah scathingly for embedding its fighters among civilians. "Hezbollah, stop this cowardly blending in among women and children," he said in Cyprus.

More specifically, other reports said Hezbollah liked to park their truck-mounted rocket-launchers in inhabited areas – next to schools and hospitals, for example – before firing off missiles. Not surprisingly, Israeli counter attacks often land in the same inhabited areas.

So, it's really bad news if a militia starts operating in any country's territory. However much one may disagree with the policies of a government, unless it is as bad as Kim Jong-il's, it is better to have the government in effective control than not.

This is where I come to the question of statesmanship. If it is better to have a government in control than none at all, has it been wise for the Israelis to have invested so much in stymieing the development of an effective Palestinian Authority? Has it been so helpful to Israel that there isn't a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side which can deliver on its promises?

Even if the other is an enemy, you may have to treat him with a modicum of respect because the alternative is chaos from competing private militias.

Yet as we can all see, Israel has done almost everything possible over the last 20 years to prevent the Palestinians from taking control of their own fates. Not surprisingly, it breeds a despair that is fuel and fodder for the most extreme outfits.

Contrary to popular belief, peace is never ideal. Nor is it a product of idealism. It is the product of pragmatic considerations, arrived at between pragmatic men (and women). It's only when people put aside some of their ideals that negotiations can commence.

Through the 1970s, Zionists, with the support of the Likud government in Jerusalem, established many settlements in the occupied West Bank. They did this with the aim of making the entire country from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River irrevocably Jewish. It was a purist objective that took no account of the millions of other inhabitants already in the area. Some of these settlements now stand in the way of a total Israeli evacuation of the West Bank as a price for peace.

For even longer, on the Arab side, the idealism of pushing the Jews back into the sea and erasing the State of Israel reigned supreme, often with the blessing of Arab governments. This non-negotiable position has so infected Palestinian resistance movements -- and others such as the Hezbollah -- that it has made it almost impossible for Arab leaders to negotiate seriously with Israel.

The exception was when the governments of Jordan and Egypt made peace with Israel in the late 1970s. You have to credit President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein II of Jordan for being smart enough to extricate their countries from perpetual war with Israel, but the majority of their own people didn't see it that way. The two leaders were seen as wimps, betraying the Great Arab Struggle. For their trouble, Sadat was assassinated and Hussein faced numerous attempts on his life.

In the current conflict, most Arab governments are conspicuous by their relative silence over Israel's bombardment of Lebanon. The reason for this, analysts pointed out, is their suspicion (or maybe knowledge) that Hezbollah is acting as a proxy for Iran, whose game plan is to seize the anti-Israel initiative for Iitself and the Shi'a Muslims, and thereby undermine the credibility of most Arab governments.

The Israeli question is only a means to an end in Iran's overall equation. Iran's objective is really hegemony over the Middle Eastern countries. Its gunsights are not so much trained on Jerusalem, but on Riyadh, Baghdad, Doha, Kuwait and maybe even Cairo.

But now that the Arab governments begin to see the mortal danger to their own longevity, they find themselves with very few options. On the one hand, it suits them to have Israel destroy Iran's proxy, the Hezbollah. On the other hand, by failing to come to the defence of Hezbollah and the Lebanese, their own people, brought up on a rhetoric of everlasting war against the Jews, ratchets up their contempt for their own governments, playing right into Iran's hands.

The failure in Arab statesmanship, over a generation, has had 2 facets. The first was to permit a militant, idealist, almost mythical, Arab ideology to sink such deep roots in their societies that today pragmatic alternatives have become incredibly difficult to sell.

Yet, how could they have countered that ideology when their own people had little respect for their governments? What could they have said that the people would have believed? And that's the second failure: perhaps it could only have been countered if these Arab kings and presidents had allowed, for the last few decades, a more open political debate in their own countries. But alas, they have consistently found liberal voices and non-orthodox ideas too threatening to their own incumbency.

That democratic deficit today makes it so much harder for Arab leaders to lead. As the people rise up in fury over Israel and throw support to Hezbollah, pragmatism, which is the only route to peace, is not seen as noble but defeatist. In that sense, it is not a lot different from Lebanon. There the Siniora government was not in control of its territory and hence, Lebanon's destiny. Elsewhere, other Arab capitals may not have much sway over their own people's emotions. The result is similar: no one can deliver in negotiations.

© Yawning Bread