Buy Peace

Tony Blair is a man on a mission. Last June, he assumed a new position as Middle East Peace Envoy of the Quartet (or the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia), and he now needs to start finding solutions to finally put an end to this interminable state of turmoil.

I think he has a plan. If not, why on earth would he have forgone a comfortable retirement to the after-dinner circuit with his good friend Bill Clinton by assuming a mandate that has been sinking Western leaders for over half a century. Yes, Tony Blair has a plan; and if his plan is the one I have in mind, and the one that experts have had in mind quite for quite some time, well who knows, it may just work.

Imagine being a young Palestinian Muslim man living in small village near Ariel Sharon’s concrete wall. A few years back, a battalion of Israeli tanks stormed into your village and took the soul of one of your friends who had come to protest against the destruction of a Mosque in Jerusalem by Israeli Armed Forces. Then, just last year, a bomb, no doubt Israeli, landed near your village’s granary and destroyed many months worth of food, forcing the whole community to ration itself nearly to death until the next harvest.

As could be expected, you hate Israelis, so one day, when a group of fighters from a Radical Muslim group come to your village with food and water to preach the destruction of Israel, you decide to take up arms and join them in their holy struggle against the Western Invaders.

The next week, you and your new comrades spot a lone patrol of Israeli soldiers standing guard near the wall. You shoot, and you hear a long, tearing scream as one of them falls to the ground. You feel guilty about having spilt blood, but you remind yourself that these white armed men are nothing more than cold-blooded invaders who killed a friend of yours a few years back. So you stay the course. But while you are away fighting against foreign invaders, your family is still at home in your little village and suffering terribly from a drought. At the same time, you hear that a group of western doctors and diplomats from a “peace agency” recently arrived in your village and are offered to grant all the inhabitants a constant supply of water and grains if you and the other young fighters of the village return home.

At the same time, the leader of your guerrilla group receives a notice from that same Western “peace agency” that he is being offered a credit flow of thirty thousand US dollars a month in exchange for the dismantling of his group. The flow will remain open for as long as he stays out of terrorist-related activities, and can be used partly to fund the construction of a new Mosque in East-Jerusalem.

Then, also at the same time, the ten most influential mullahs of the area also receive a note from this “peace agency”, this one asking them to accept an invitation to Jerusalem to participate in the new rounds of negotiations for the creation of a Palestinian state. All their costs would of course be covered, and each would be granted a beautiful new mansion and a seat in the Palestinian Upper Chamber as a token of Western appreciation of their relentless work to bring peace.

I’m not an economist, nor a political scientist, so I probably haven’t quite figured out how much needs to be paid to the various actors to provide strong incentives, but I do know this: Blair needs to buy the ceasefire, buy an agreement to hold democratic elections, buy out the local chieftains, and satisfy the religious leaders. And if he can convince his friends in Brussels and Washington to grant him the cash, there’s a good change he’ll get peace… and maybe also the Nobel.