Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2002, page 18

Affairs of State

 

Tamping Down a Civil War Sideshow and This Needs a New Title

By Eugene Bird

It may not seem like it, but the Palestinian war of Liberation, as it should be called, is only a sideshow—albeit an important one—to the war on terrorism. On departing Washington in early December, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made clear his view: The U.S. war on terrorism is the same as the war Israel is fighting against Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Well, not exactly. While America is trying to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, Israel is clearly trying to remain permanently entrenched on the West Bank and Gaza.

 

Powell’s Speech a Seminal Event

In an eagerly awaited speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell on Nov. 19 announced Washington’s new Mideast policy. It was meant to placate both parties, move on to a cease-fire and implement the Mitchell plan on the way back to a peace process.

What is new about U.S. policy is so subtle many could miss it entirely: Powell is being authorized to talk about a Palestinian state and about ending the Israeli occupation.

What is not new is that Washington continues to monopolize the effort to reach an agreement on sharing the land of Palestine—which automatically means that Israel can continue to do pretty much whatever it chooses.

So far, there have been no leaks of the first draft of Powell’s speech by which to gauge the battle over wording that took place between the White House and the State Department—with the Department of Defense undoubtedly as chief kibitzer.

According to Ned Walker, head of the Middle East Institute and former ambassador to both Israel and Egypt, the speech was not cleared for delivery until hours before the Louisville event.

Like his predecessors, Powell refused to interpret or spell out the precise meaning of U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338—while citing them as the basis for U.S. policy, as presidents and secretaries of state have for the past 30 years. “The lack of an end-game in the Powell speech is disappointing,” said Walker, adding that Powell’s proposal was indicative of a “short-term approach.”

Knowledgeable Europeans, and some Israelis, are saying that the border between the two peoples should be the 1949 Armistice line. For some two decades, that line was fairly quiet and Israel had the greatest security it ever enjoyed. Tel Aviv refuses even to discuss this line as a final border, however, and Washington appears to acquiesce in this.

During Sharon’s December visit, when the suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa caused Congress to rally ’round the Israeli flag, Powell was asked on “Larry King Weekend” if the United States was pro-Israel. America’s secretary of state replied that he was pro-Israel, but added that he also was “pro-humankind, and I’m also pro-Palestinian to the extent that they are human beings, to the extent that they have a desire to see their children grow up in peace.”

In his meeting with George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell only hours after one of the worst Jerusalem mall bombings, Sharon apparently was not told to restrain his reaction one bit. Leading State Department correspondent Barry Schweid tried hard to get a White House spokesperson to indicate off the record whether they had urged such restraint. Schweid is usually considered a great friend of Israel, but this time he doggedly asked a series of questions suggesting that the Israelis were carrying out actions and provoking Palestinians. Even off the record, however, the spokesperson could not give him an answer.

Yet Secretary Powell is one of the administration’s best bureaucratic infighters and he may be working toward a stealth peace—i.e., one that would have General Zinni gnawing away at the many-faceted problem until he and Powell (and President Bush) are ready to go public with a new kind of Camp David. If the will exists, there is some reason to think that we should not underestimate our ability to find a way to peace in the Middle East.

 

Palestinians and Israelis Respond

Palestinians reacted to Powell’s speech with cautious optimism. President Arafat promised General Anthony C. Zinni, the secretary’s special and personal representative, “100 percent to make these efforts succeed, in order to get a comprehensive and lasting peace,” and requested that Zinni draw up “a mechanism and timeline” to implement the Tenet and Mitchell plans.

Grateful for many of the points made, Palestinians nevertheless were critical on two key issues: Powell’s failure to call for ending the siege of Palestinian cities and villages, and continued U.S. refusal to support an international observer force without the consent of both parties. Powell laid down no new ground for negotiations on Jerusalem or borders and left it up to the parties to reach an agreement on all the issues.

Hanan Ashrawi’s Jerusalem-based organization MIFTAH welcomed the new initiative calling for an end to the occupation and the Bush administration’s willingness to re-engage. But in its paper on Powell’s speech, Ashrawi criticized as unbalanced the harsh accusations against Palestinians compared to the much softer criticisms of Israel.

Much of the Israeli Left was disappointed that Powell did not use the opportunity to reject Sharon’s demand for seven days of quiet before negotiating a cease-fire. In general, however, they breathed a sigh of relief at the new Bush-Powell initiative. Main-line Israeli commentators saw opportunities only if Arafat stopped the violence.

Sharon’s message and reaction to the Powell speech is best reflected by his immediate declarations and his choice of fellow hawk and former Mossad chief Gen. Meir Dagan, rather than Shimon Peres, to head eventual negotiations.

Just hours before departing on his official visit to America on Nov. 29, Sharon declared that his demand for seven days of calm before Israel would agree to any truce was “nonnegotiable” and would “not change.” Prior to the arrival of General Zinni and the American team the Israeli prime minister reiterated his intention to continue his policy of assassinating Palestinians and declared again that Jerusalem is the “undivided eternal capital of Israel.”

The choice of Dagan to head any future negotiations disappointed both the Palestinians and many on the Israeli Left. “On the day you agreed to Dagan’s appointment,” Haim Ramon complained to Foreign Minister Peres, “the slightest chance of a cease-fire was buried.”

Eugene Bird, a retired foreign service officer, is president of the Council for the National Interest and diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

SIDEBAR

 

A Letter to the Secretary of State

To Secretary of State Colin Powell, Nov. 19, 2001.

I am writing to thank you for and to comment on your speech in Louisville today about the situation in Palestine, including the statement that:

“Israel must be willing to end its occupation, consistent with the principles embodied in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and accept a viable Palestinian state in which Palestinians can determine their own future on their own land and live in dignity and security.”

Your recognition that “Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been the defining reality of Palestinians’ lives there for over three decades, longer than most of the Palestinians living there have been alive,” makes plain the continued causes of this conflict.

Your use of the term “occupation” is a return to a correct description of the situation, one which recent U.S. administrations had abandoned in favor of nonsensical euphemisms designed to please Israel and bamboozle the rest of the world into thinking that if you don’t mention occupation it somehow ceases to exist.

Your demand that Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territories “must stop” was a welcome reaffirmation of U.S. opposition to this activity which, in addition to being a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, is designed and calculated to prevent an end to the occupation, and therefore to prevent peace.

These statements, coupled with recent declarations both by you and President Bush about the establishment of the state of “Palestine” mark a clear change in the tone of U.S. policy that those who wish for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot but welcome.

Less encouraging, however, was your statement that the United States is unwilling to do more than “push and prod” the process along and that “at the end of the day it is the people in the region taking the risks and making the hard choices who must find the way ahead.” Of course the people in the region must want peace and work for it, but unfortunately when we are dealing with military aggression and intransigent occupation, such admirable hopes are insufficient. There was no indication that you plan to do anything other than what the United States has been doing thus far without success.

Mr. Secretary, the United States is not a mere bystander in a conflict between two recalcitrant parties with equal control over the situation. Rather, it is a participant in the conflict on the side of Israel, providing the enormous military and economic aid without which Israel could sustain neither the occupation you identified as the source of so much suffering and anger, nor the settlements that are designed to make the occupation an irreversible fact. The United States alone among members of the United Nations continues to block all efforts to gain international protection for the Palestinians and to ensure that the Fourth Genevan Convention is applied to them as the Security Council has repeatedly demanded.

According to Gideon Levy, a commentator in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the Palestinians in the occupied territories today “are in the worst situation they have been in since the Israeli occupation befell them. Their lack of freedom has reached a level they have never known before.” Why has Israel been allowed to behave this way for 34 years Mr. Secretary?

The excuse has always been the claim that Israel is surrounded by states that want to destroy it. Yet for more than twenty years Israel has had a peace treaty with Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, and since 1994 with Jordan, the country with the longest shared border. Syria has declared repeatedly its intentions to make peace once its occupied territory has been returned, and Lebanon has said it will follow suit. The PLO explicitly recognized the right of Israel to exist within secure boundaries in 1993, a decision ratified at the behest of the United States and in the presence of President Clinton in Gaza in 1999. From Morocco to Qatar, other Arab states took great political risks to establish trade and diplomatic relations with Israel opening up the region to Israelis as never before.

In short, Israel is entirely surrounded by states that have recognized it, made peace with it, or declared more than reasonable terms for doing so, and yet Israel has still not recognized that the Palestinians have national rights or indeed any rights at all and still continues its policy of expanding on and colonizing occupied Arab land while refusing to negotiate.

(I am sorry that you did not highlight these facts in your speech but instead preferred to focus on Israeli-inspired charges that across the Middle East “incitement” drives people’s views of the conflict rather than these views being the natural reaction to Israel’s brutal and relentless repression of the Palestinian people and the world’s apparent acceptance of it.)

What kind of “pushing” and “prodding,” Mr. Secretary, do you think will succeed where every other kind of diplomatic initiative and inducement has failed?

Today. Mr. Powell, you attached your name to a set of noble ideas and goals for a peace that will give hope and life to Israelis and Palestinians, and this has perhaps breathed a little life into the battered integrity of the United States. But unless you and the United States are prepared to take responsibility for U.S. support for Israel’s occupation, and to put real pressure on Israel and make it accountable for its policies, I am afraid your name will simply join a too long list of others attached to failed initiatives and false starts in the Middle East punctuated by ever worse outbreaks of violence and war.

—Ali Abunimah, Chicago, IL

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