Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that if the Organisaton of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) takes no decisions leading to a resolution of the Palestinian problem it might act on its own. The OIC has had to move from taking a position on the Israeli police raid on Masjid Al-Aqsa to dealing with the increasing violence of the Israeli attack on Gaza, which it has bombed repeatedly in response to Palestine firing off rockets into Israel. While the rockets have killed no one, the Israeli bombings have killed 139 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while 13 have been killed in the occupied West Bank. Now there are signs that Israel is preparing to launch a ground assault. This is dangerous, for all the regional players are part of some alliance system or the other, and there is the danger of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict developing into a more general, even global, conflict.
Though the OIC resolution, passed by the Permanent Representatives meeting, calls for a meeting of the OIC Foreign Ministers, more crucial will be the meeting of the UN Security Council. The OIC came into being because of the reaction by all Muslim states to an act of arson on Al-Aqsa Mosque by an Australian, while the UN Security Council was not only seized of the creation of Israel when it came into existence in 1948, but when it occupied West Jerusalem after the 1967 Six-Day War.
It does not seem that the Muslim world will do now what it has been unable to do for the last half a century, nor that the UN will suddenly wake up and enforce their resolutions. However, will they go forward and allow the world to slip into the conflict that looms? The only way of resolving this issue will be to end the conflict that is poisoning the entire region. The USA, and those of its European allies, who have defended the Israeli airstrikes as self-defence against the rockets, should realise that the entire world is threatened by the encouragement the are giving Israel.
