The BBC reporter was aggressive. How could Qatar possibly play host to representatives of Hamas during the present Israel/Gaza conflict? The Qatari official patiently explained that his country had long acted as an intermediary. It organised prisoner swaps, humanitarian aid and peace initiatives. It negotiated the recent Israeli and US hostage returns. It had mediated conflicts in Afghanistan, Chad, Libya and Sudan. The BBC’s challenge might have been, why were these mediations often unsuccessful? But no: the implication was that they were improper.
If there is now to be a way out of the Israel/Gaza conflict, it will need intermediaries, as these wars almost always do. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Paris accords that ended the Vietnam war. It is the 30th of the Oslo accords that achieved peace, for a while, between Israel and Palestine through Norwegian auspices.
Sooner or later someone has to chart a route out of hell, when fighting on the ground has reached a stalemate and when the internal politics of the contending parties renders bilateral talks unthinkable. There are rumours that this moment may be approaching in Ukraine, where hope now reportedly lies with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and, more cryptically, China.
A hurdle often lies with powerful allies, happy to give their favoured side support against a shared foe. These proxy wars, by the US in Ukraine and Russia in Syria, become more intractable when those allies have nothing but money to lose in fighting on, and status to lose in backing off. The much-vaunted post-imperial role of the west as a global policeman has all but collapsed in successive failed interventions.
A tragedy of postwar diplomacy has been the demise of the United Nations as a peacemaker. Its UNHCR and other agencies have worked bravely and relentlessly in a humanitarian role. But the raw banging together of heads requires a peculiar combination of detachment and determination. Though traditionally the role of countries such as Switzerland with no dog in the fight, it can also fall to a well-led major power. The US brought Israel and Egypt a period of peace at Camp David in 1978 and it negotiated the end of the Bosnian war at Dayton in 1995. Neither proved lasting, but that was not the fault of the peacemakers.
The role of mediation is to render a ceasefire plausible and the resumption of war obscene. It is to suspend the necessity of fighting while war’s objectives are supposedly being sought around the negotiating table. That table has to be acceptable to both sides. The host must be impartial in pushing the most difficult task of mediation, making the pain of compromise preferable to that of war.
What is appalling today as throughout history is that such compromise only seems acceptable when fuelled by exhaustion brought on by killing and destruction. Qatar’s moment has surely come.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
