Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000, Pages 17-18

Affairs of State

Putting Humpty Together Again

By Eugene Bird

The Israeli election scheduled for early February will be a gut-wrenching event for the Middle East and for newly sworn-in U.S. President George W. Bush. Indeed, the vote for Israeli prime minister may well define American policy choices for the next few years, as the Palestinians’ al-Aqsa intifada remains at a boil and the Israeli right wing tries to rocket back to power after only 18 months of Gen. Ehud Barak’s peace coalition government.

Regardless of who wins the Israeli vote, it is the degree of American involvement in the election which may determine the future course of the peace process. Congress and the new U.S. administration alike would welcome Barak’s re-election in the hope that, if given a second mandate for peace, he would move further in that direction.

Barak now, however, carries a lot of baggage that even a dedicated and objective American peace team—should one ever appear on the scene—would find it difficult to carry down the road toward a real Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. He has failed to implement even the simplest steps toward such a détente, falling back on the excuse that he was elected in an attempt to keep the right-wing at bay. And on the ground, as they say, he has killed 300 Palestinian civilians.

Even the Americans were unable to stomach Barak and his generals’ overreaction to the new intifada. The Israeli prime minister, moreover, bears much of the blame for triggering the violence through his tacit support of Ariel Sharon and the Likud leader’s unnecessary and highly provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif.

The scramble in the Clinton administration to repair the Oslo process and somehow stop further escalation of the war raging in Palestine is at the same time commendable and somewhat ridiculous—for there is no one left to make the decisions that might magically end 100 years of war over a Jewish homeland. The American peace team is about as inactive as it can be and remain a key component of this administration. No trips to the area, no interviews with the press—but, of course, they undoubtedly have been facing the urgent task of updating their resumes and biographies.

True, President Bill Clinton still has his reknowned powers of persuasion, and former Sen. George Mitchell and his “international” team of monitors may produce a suitably balanced report on the need for protecting the Palestinian people. With Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s Dec. 8 resignation annnouncement, however, the best that can be hoped for is a temporary cease-fire. Certainly there will be no discussion of, or solution to, the remaining issues of Jerusalem, borders, and the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

The fact is that no leader—whether Israeli, Palestinian or American—is in a position to do what is necessary: to break with the past and create a new and more trusting negotiating atmosphere. The brief December visit to Washington of Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Farouk Kaddumi included no significant stops at the White House or the Department of State. In a speech at the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, Kaddumi joined those who say the Oslo process is dead. Moreover, the disappearance from the Israeli scene of all but a few peaceniks, and the widening gap between Israelis and Palestinians in all walks of life, do not bode well for a quick ending of the al-Aqsa intifada.

After opposing a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an international observer force to monitor Israel’s use of excessive force, the State Department was forced to acknowledge—in a very low-level way, of course—that it was concerned about the issue. But the department turned aside all questions about possible violations of the Munitions Control Act by Israel’s use of U.S. weaponry, including Apache helicopters, rockets and bombs, against civilians. A legal research team had determined that there were no violations.

While top U.N. leaders, including former Irish President and now High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, confirmed that excessive force was being used, and British and French officials toured the area to try and dampen down the violence, there was no such U.S. investigation. Dennis Ross and his team have remained strangely invisible: they have not even visited the region since Gen. Ariel Sharon’s notorious Sept. 28 visit to the Haram al-Sharif.

The American response was to assist in putting together a team headed by former Sen. George Mitchell, with members including a European Commission Middle East envoy, a Norwegian, Turkish President Bulent Ecevit, and another former U.S. senator, Warren Rudman. The department kept its distance from the commission’s work, however, refusing to say if it had a staff, or what its parameters were, repeating only that the ad hoc committee would be in the area in mid-December.

President Clinton and his team at the National Security Council continue to repeat that there must be an end to the violence and further negotiations. There is no other alternative, they insist.

In fact, however, there are alternatives—both to the continuation of the violence and to resumption of the discredited Oslo process.

The Palestinian Authority’s first priority is internationalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the Americans have failed to act as an impartial mediator, the argument goes, the only way to reach a lasting agreement is to establish something like a fairness commission to include the U.N. and the Europeans. Of course, the U.S. would not be excluded.

Curiously, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Saudis would—despite the fact that Riyadh, with its oil reserves, is in a good position to remind the new U.S. administration that, if Americans want a better price at the pump, Washington had better be seen as being honest and fair about implementing Resolutions 242 and 338.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright never misses an opportunity to cite 242. Occasionally she even will refer to the whole of the Palestinian people, including the refugees. She has been unable or unwilling, however, to do anything about ending the creeping annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Nor has she made any coherent comment on the issue of the Holy Places.

Time for a Change

With recent and imminent elections in the U.S. and Israel, respectively, it is time to consider future American policy toward Israel and the Palestinian people.

Try as it may to avoid it, Washington ultimately will have no alternative but to use the bully pulpit to insist that Israel confront reality. Israel must be convinced that its self-interest lies in finding security through peace, not aggression.

The current Israeli policy of smash ’em and crush ’em, for example, has given a high profile to three Christian communities in and around the Jerusalem area. Beit Jala, Bethlehem and Ramallah all have suffered heavily under the Israeli occupation. Indeed, the use of tanks and U.S. Apache helicopters against what must include Palestinian-American homes is reminiscent of World War II attacks on civilian targets. Why does Israel do this?

The only answer came from an Israeli general in charge of the forces that have been pouring into the West Bank. When asked why Israel did not just withdraw its heavy equipment, since the Palestinians had said that this would end the confrontations, his reply was, “There is not room.”

Indeed, one of the problems of sharing Palestine always has been Israel’s strategy of holding all the rich ground along the coast. as well as the high ground to the east between the Jordan River and the sea.

Thus the first problem that needed to be addressed as long ago as the 1991Madrid conference was the competing long-term strategic interests of Palestinian and Jewish nationalism. The goal of political separation and economic cooperation leading to integration of the two economies, however, can only succeed if it is based on a full understanding that religious nationalism will not prevail and cause another century of crisis in the Middle East.

For its part, has the U.S. learned that it cannot use its superpower status to condone—or, at best, ignore—the very real problem of illegal Jewish settlements? Does Washington grasp the need for truly sharing Jerusalem without violating the long-held sovereignty the three religious communities have over their respective Holy Places? Will the U.S. dither away another decade, and perhaps another $80 billion, supporting half-measured solutions with no chance of success?

Escalating Distrust and Anger

Reconstituting the old or devising a new peace process will be a quickly declared goal for the new team at State. One can expect lots of special missions, some of them under the aegis of the U.S. government, others only faintly acknowledged as private endeavors inspired by American politicians and diplomats—and thus easily disavowed if necessary.

Congress will remain a distant cousin of the Knesset, and will realize only too late, if at all, that it has pushed forward the Israeli case so strongly that the Jewish nationalists there feel no need to remove the settlements or share sovereignty over East Jerusalem’s Holy Places.

A successful new peace initiative, however, would not resemble the Oslo process, nor that of Madrid, nor even that of the Camp David peace of 22 years ago. It should instead be called, and should in fact be, a Peace of the Realists.

Eugene Bird is president of the Council for the National Interest and diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Report.