Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2002, pages 16-17

Affairs of State

 

Is George W. Bush More Relevant Than Yasser Arafat?

 

By Eugene Bird

For months now, the Sharon government and its right-wing ministers have been putting about that Yasser Arafat no longer is relevant. Indeed, the Israelis now are openly saying that, after surviving more than 38 years as head of the umbrella Palestinian nationalist organization, Arafat should depart the scene.

After witnessing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President George W. Bush’s press conference, however—held Feb. 7, a week before Valentine’s Day—in which they fielded questions about Arafat, one might instead ask how relevant America is. After all, if Washington continues talking only to one party and maintaining a hands-off policy on the basic issues, the not unpredictable result—demonstrated daily, and with increasing ferocity—is that Israel never will have to compromise.

At the Oval Office press conference, President Bush said that Arafat not only was responsible for the continued violence, but that he could do a lot more to stop it. For his part, Sharon emphasized the Palestinian Authority’s evil terrorism. This, of course, makes it impossible for Arafat to be a partner in any future negotiations. Indeed, not only has the American president refused to meet, or even shake hands with, Arafat, but Sharon, who has met with Bush four times, also has not met with his Palestinian counterpart since he became prime minister.

When asked about the question of relevance following a week of increasing violence, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher replied that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s numerous telephone calls were proof of American engagement. In one weekend, he said, Powell telephoned Sharon, Arafat, Jordan’s King Abdullah, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and EU Ambassador Javier Solana, who still visits Arafat in his encircled Ramallah compound. Besides, Boucher added, the fact was that the parties want America to be involved. All questions about Arafat’s ability to do anything while effectively imprisoned were turned aside. One hundred percent effort was all that was needed, the mantra went.

Although the American president had emphasized how important it was for Arafat to end the violence, the Israeli prime minister gave Arafat no reason to do so, except that at the end of negotiations there might be a Palestinian state—which Sharon all but said would not be headed by Arafat. If anything, Israel is moving the goalposts. After weeks of Israeli demands that Arafat arrest the three men wanted for the killing of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi the Palestine Authority complied. Its reward? Arafat now is permitted to have other visitors and move about Ramallah to a slightly greater extent.

Each time Washington has pressured Arafat to make the fabled 100 percent effort, he has moved to do so by arresting a few more men wanted by Israel. It took a horrendous first week of March, during which more than 80 Palestinians and Israelis were killed, for Colin Powell to issue his first stern warning to Sharon that there could be no military solution for either side. In terms of the U.S. population, that week’s death toll was the equivalent of more than 2,500 Americans.

The Department had said on occasion that there should be security for the Palestinians and that Israel should provide safe and secure passage at checkpoints.

Yet the only result of American policy has been an increase in violence. On that score alone, the Department’s yearlong effort to gain traction by implementing first, the Tenet security cooperation proposals and, secondly, the Mitchell Report can only be described as no longer relevant.

 

$10 a Month to Keep Palestinians at Bay

The president made one other promise at his press conference with Prime Minister Sharon: that those Palestinian people who were suffering and who were not terrorists would receive $300 million in relief through various American non-governmental organizations. That works out to about $10 per month per Palestinian—a magnificent sum in some parts of the world, perhaps, but not in the West Bank or Gaza, where prices have skyrocketed as daily supplies have been cut off by Israel. And certainly not when compared to the approximately $60 monthlyper Israeli represented by Washington’s annual offering.

 

The Riyadh Initiative

State Department spokespersons gave an almost audible sigh of relief after New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s interview with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who suggested that other Arab nations would recognize Israel if it would retreat to the Green Line of 1949-67.

Israeli President Moshe Katsov’s response a few days later, inviting Prince Abdullah to come to Jerusalem to “explain his plan,” demonstrated that the Israelis are willing to discuss Jerusalem and the West Bank with anyone except the Palestinian leadership. An unnamed official in Prime Minister Sharon’s office welcomed the initiative but, pointing out that Abdullah had called for full withdrawal, asked, “Would this be in stages?”

Israel’s Left and peace parties responded almost joyously to the Saudi—not the American—peace initiatives. Indeed, the Riyadh Initiative, as unexpected as it was, also highlighted the lack of relevance of U.S. policy toward the conflict.

In the opinion of one still-serving foreign service officer, America indeed was very relevant to the problem, but only to the degree that Washington refused to get involved, except to fund and aid one side—a sort of negative relevancy. Another argued that George W. Bush has no plan and no policy toward the Israel-Palestine dispute, hoping only that the problem will be containable until the fall elections.

 

Kill Ratio Drops Dramatically

When George W. Bush assumed office in January of last year, Ariel Sharon was only days away from winning the massive mandate from Israeli voters that allowed him to reject further negotiations with Arafat and the Palestine Authority and to deal with the intifada purely as a military problem. Sharon had once been reported to say, “I know how to make the Palestinians react, and then we have our chance.”

Whether or not he actually said it, most believe Sharon has worked on that assumption since taking office.

The actual number of Palestinians killed and wounded in the five months between the outbreak of the current intifada and Sharon’s taking office was about five Palestinians to every Israeli, with about 20 Palestinians wounded badly enough to go to the hospital, compared to one Israeli.

A year later, with the escalation of the intifada, the gap has been closing. In the first 60 days of 2002, about five Palestinians were killed to every three Israelis. In one week in February, the ratio dropped to two Palestinians to every Israeli killed. The ratio of the number of wounded has changed very little, with Palestinian civilians hit much harder with non-fatal wounds.

Nearly 40 years ago an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) colonel said that Israel needed to have a 10-to-1 advantage in the number killed to call any battle or war a victory. Since 1948 the ratio has been about five to one, with 19,000 Israeli dead—perhaps 90 percent in uniform—and over 100,000 Arabs killed on Israel’s five surrounding fronts. A majority of the Arab victims were civilians, with the largest number being from Egypt, then Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. It is difficult to assign a figure to the wounded on either side.

The longer Israel’s greatest benefactor allows it to remain in the occupied territories as a colonial power, instead of as a neighbor, the worse the grisly kill ratio will be.

Washington continues to demonstrate its reluctance to give Arafat the smallest fig leaf of hope which might open the door for a nonviolent intifada to end the occupation. As the U.S. sits by, however, the idea is actively being worked on by many West Bankers, including Sari Nusseibeh, whose efforts are supported by the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Service, among other Israeli and European organizations.

Of course, America is very relevant to whoever rules Israel, and the Bush administration has gone further than any previous U.S. administration in hewing to the line laid down by Israel’s current prime minister—so much so that it is difficult for Washington to make any abrupt changes in the direction of real peace negotiations. U.S. policy is frozen on the necessity of supporting Sharon right up to the moment when he might cause an impact on American relations with the other Arab states. It may be too late, however. Already the lack of U.S. involvement in curbing Sharon and his military solution to the intifada has had deep and permanent repercussions on the all-important U.S.-Saudi strategic cooperation.

 

Irrelevant Policy Leading to Transfer?

While the United States still may be important—even relevant—to returning to a quiet time on the land west of the Jordan River once known as Palestine, the policy of simply repeating over and over to Arafat, “cease the violence” has not been at all successful, and is no longer relevant.

The great debate among retired State Department Middle East specialists is whether or not Washington would react if the Sharon government began the actual transfer of Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt. Some long-serving officers attending an informal late February luncheon at DACOR House, the club for retired officers located one block from the White House, predicted there would be no effective American response—nor one from Europe or the international community, including the United Nations. Sharon and his generals, the diplomats said, simply would ignore the world’s protests.

One indication that Israel is, indeed, prepared if necessary to deport 2.5 million people comes from claims by two Israeli-American peace activists who regularly take part in demonstrations on the West Bank. Charles Lechner of Solidarity International Group and Joshua Reubner of Jews for Peace in Palestine-Israel said recently in Washington that the Israeli army and security forces already had a contingency plan to bus and truck out the entire population.

This is reminiscent of what happened in 1948-49. In November of 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion put a secret vote to his cabinet on busing and trucking out the 200,000 Palestinians remaining under Israel’s control in Nazareth and the Galilee. Ben-Gurion lost the vote in his own cabinet, 7-5.

Were it ever to put such a transfer of Palestinians to a vote, the Sharon government probably would end up losing its majority in the Knesset, breaking up the coalition government.

It seems likely that such plans do exist, waiting only for orders from the prime minister and his government. Although Sharon’s government likely would break apart over the issue, a successor government might not—especially if it were to be headed by Bibi Netanyahu, who is favored to win any such post-Sharon regime election.

Does President Bush realize what fires he may have lit by allowing this country to become irrelevant in the current war process being played out in the Holy Land? Some of the foreign service officers at the DACOR luncheon believed he probably did not, and that there were no ranking advisers in the National Security Council to fill the vacancy created by Bruce Reidl’s departure at the end of last year.

Certainly Secretary of State Powell’s voice and influence have become more muted as the partisans of war in the Pentagon and Justice Department have become more influential. At least in public, the secretary appears to be on a very short leash. In his recent appearances before Congress, Powell simply repeated the now tired mantra, “President Arafat must take all measures to end the violence.”

In the end game for Sharon and the Palestinians, the Bush White House either will play a significant role or wash its hands of the entire difficult problem of sharing the Holy Land with two states side by side. As far as the European Community and some of America’s old friends in the Middle East are concerned, however, America is being seen as less and less relevant.

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

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