IN explaining the Middle East conundrum Edward Saeed and Noam Chomsky have been lucid. John Pilger and Robert Fisk with their relentless exposés of all-round western perfidy have been unbeatable.

To me personally though a Pathan cabbie I met in Dubai in 1980 remains a profound influence in understanding the skein of tangled exigencies that govern Arab politics.

Thousands of Pathans from Pakistan drive taxis in the Gulf states. They are mostly scrupulously honest and hardworking individuals. Unlike other expatriates from Asian countries who submit tamely to the occasional road rage of a brash petrodollar rich Arab youth, the hardy Pathans would offer stiff resistance. For this they were sent home occasionally only to return with a new passport and a new resolve to continue their trudge in inhospitable lands.

“Ye khaana kharaab maasoom hai,” the cabbie muttered with understated rage as an Arab youth tried to overtake him from the wrong lane. “Allah Ta’ala isko upar se Quran diya, ye nahi samjhi. Allah isko neeche se tel diya, ye nahi samjhi.” (This pitiful fellow is not to blame. God gave him Quran from above, he couldn’t understand it. God gave him oil from below, he couldn’t understand it.)

The Pathan spoke from hindsight. The bitter experience of the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars bothered him. The failed attempt by Arab states to get even with the West with the help of their fabled oil weapon informed his anger. An internecine war between Iran and Iraq, both of whom he believed capable of deploying their enormous oil resources to tame Israel, formed the foreground to the cabbie’s sullen worldview.

It was not difficult to verify the basis for the succinct critique. Only last week I placed the early maximalist position of the Palestinian struggle — to create a Palestinian state on the rubble of Israel, nothing less — against the recent Arab clamour to secure with some difficulty common municipal rights for the inhabitants of Gaza and West Bank. The comparison was hurtful.

What permeated through a collective humiliation was a history of mock bravado and studied deception.

The cabbie’s words were still fresh in my thoughts when I got a ringside view of the 12th Arab summit in Fez in November 1981. Leaders of Iraq, Libya, Syria and (yes) Kuwait boycotted the gathering, which met to consider an eight-point Fahd Plan to broker peace in the Middle East. The plan contained a clause that for the first time required Arab governments to accept the state of Israel as a legitimate partner in peace.

As was his wont, Saddam Hussein absented himself and sent his deputy Tariq Aziz. Hafez Assad dispatched the diminutive vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam while Muammar Qadhafi chose Abdessalem Jalloud to go to Fez. (I hear Jalloud has now defected to the anti-Qadhafi rebels.) King Hassan the host in Morocco was livid. “You are too junior to make war or peace,” he told Khaddam when the Syrian tried to raise a point of order. The summit collapsed but reassembled within a year to endorse the Saudi plan.

The plan had Washington’s support and seemed to have Israel’s tacit approval. Ironically, the eight points rejected by the hard-liners 30 odd years ago seem extremely revolutionary by today’s desperate standards when even the award of municipal rights to the Palestinians is predicated on Israel’s grudging approval.

The plan as submitted to the UN General Assembly required at the outset that Israel should withdraw from all Arab territory occupied in 1967, including Arab Jerusalem. It then decreed that Israeli settlements built on Arab land after 1967 were to be dismantled, including those in Arab Jerusalem. A guarantee was offered and sought freedom of worship for all religions in the holy places.

An affirmation was needed of the right of the Palestinian Arab people to return to their homes and compensation offered for those who did not wish to return. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were to have a transitional period under the auspices of the United Nations for a period not exceeding a few months. “An independent Palestinian state should be set up with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Most importantly from Israel’s view was the deal-clincher that more or less everyone present was agreed on. It was the seventh clause — “All states in the region should be able to live in peace in the region”. And finally, the United Nations “or member states of the United Nations” were required to guarantee the carrying out of the provisions.

What happened between then and 1993, when the Madrid conference successfully established a municipality where statehood was being sought were events that endorsed the reservations my cabbie friend had about Arabs, more specifically about Gulf Arabs.

Egypt’s membership of the Arab League had been suspended after it broke ranks to sign a peace treaty with Israel. There were still four of the so-called ‘frontline’ or ‘steadfast’ Arab states left to take on Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. Jordan caved in soon. Iraq was nudged into a haemorrhagic war with Iran before it was seized and occupied by Israel’s allies. Kuwait too was taught a lesson and this is not as well known a fact.

Margaret Thatcher forced the Kuwaiti government to sell back 26 per cent of the stakes it had picked up in British Petroleum.

The racially contrived regurgitation of BP shares was embarrassing for Kuwait to say the least. The American ‘green light’ to Saddam Hussain to seize Kuwait came later.

Of the two so-called steadfast states that remained, Libya has collapsed in a heap before a Nato-led ‘rebellion’. Many known heads of Qadhafi’s torture chambers are leading the great upheaval and we can only surmise the outcome.

The Syrians have been sufficiently emasculated. Their ability to help Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza has been considerably impaired.

Israel is sitting comfortably on Syrian Golan Heights. As it presses the grapes it seized on the Golan Heights into globally celebrated varieties of wine, the embattled Syrian president is kept busy with the daily routine of ushering democracy as prescribed by Washington.

Remember that my cabbie friend spoke to me when his people had only just become budding friends with the Americans, including the Haqqanis. How time flies.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com