Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2002, pages 10-11, 16

Special Report

 

The Bush Administration Dawdles and Debates While Sharon Re-occupies Palestine

 

By Rachelle Marshall

“You’ve got to be kidding. What pressure?”—High-level Israeli diplomat’s response when asked if his government would bow to pressure from Washington and agree to enter peace talks.

Like the protagonist at the end of a Greek tragedy, exactly 35 years after Israel triumphantly seized the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, the Israelis found themselves paying a price for that victory. An army that defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan in six days and is able to deploy Vulcan anti-aircraft guns and TOW anti-tank missiles against a people who possess neither aircraft nor tanks proved unable to protect Israelis from young Palestinians armed with homemade bombs. Israel’s devastating assaults on West Bank cities that began last March destroyed Palestinian civil institutions and killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians but provoked a series of suicide bombings that have made Israelis afraid to ride a bus or go to a café.

It was no coincidence that one of the deadliest of these attacks was a car bombing that took place on June 5, the anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian group Islamic Jihad said it had organized the attack that killed 17 Israelis in order to send a message to the Israeli people that they would never enjoy security as long as they occupied Palestinian land. When Palestinian President Yasser Arafat condemned the bombing, Islamic Jihad’s leader, Ramadan Shallah, replied, “To those who tell us to stop the martyrdom operations we say: give us an alternative.”

One need not condone suicidal violence to say that Shallah’s logic is inescapable. With every day that passes the Palestinians see less hope of a future. The wanton destructiveness of Israeli army tactics (“What was once unthinkable is now banal,” said one European diplomat), and the suicide bombings they provoke, underscore the futility of Bush’s demand that Arafat stop the violence while Israel inflicts more and more misery on the Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer acknowledged as much when he said, “The closures create hatred and frustration that may mean the birth of another 5 to 10 suicide bombers.” Ben-Eliezer, a known hawk, admitted that the only solution was peace.

Ever since George Bush took office there has been a vacuum where a constructive Middle East policy should be. After several months Bush finally turned his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the urging of European and Arab leaders, only to focus exclusively on protecting Israel’s security. When it came to peacemaking the administration dithered and delayed. “We are sorting out for ourselves what would be appropriate for us to say about the endgame,” an official said on May 25, “and the best time to say something about it.”

That time kept being put off, even as the crisis in the occupied territories worsened. Just before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak arrived at Camp David on June 8 to stress the urgency of creating a timetable for Palestinian statehood, former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross commented that administration officials “still have not made a basic decision on what they’re going to do or even what the objective is.” One reason for the paralysis was the evident split within the administration between Secretary of State Colin Powell, who favored an immediate conference to discuss a peace settlement, and backers of Sharon who insisted on delay.

Bush himself sent out mixed messages depending on the person he was talking to. When Mubarak pointed out at their meeting that the Palestinians must see hope of progress before they can be asked to stop the violence, and asked Bush to arrange a a peace conference this summer, Bush responded positively. “We’ve got to get started quickly, soon, so we can seize the moment,” he said.

Two days later, however, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon generated a different message. At a cordial meeting with the Israeli leader Bush accepted Sharon’s view that a peace conference would be premature and agreed that “no one has confidence” in Arafat’s government. Two weeks earlier, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns during a visit to Jerusalem defended Arafat as the only Palestinian who could count on wide grassroots support, only to have Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer immediately contradict him. “In the president’s eyes,” Fleischer said, “Yasser Arafat has never played a role of someone who could be trusted...”

Israelis accuse Arafat of saying one thing to the Arab world and another to the West, but the same could be said of the Bush administration. When Powell told a reporter for the Arab newspaper Al Hayat shortly after Sharon’s visit that Bush was about to reveal his plan for “a provisional Palestinian state,” Fleischer shot down the statement as another rumor. “Welcome to the Mideast,” he told American reporters. “This is a situation where people get a variety of information, a variety of advice. If the president has anything further to indicate he will.”

The next day, however, Powell appeared to have won at least a small victory when Bush met with Prince Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia and announced he would soon outline a plan for Palestinian statehood and the start of peace talks. As the days went by while Bush presumably worked out details, White House officials explained that what he had in mind was an “interim” state, with future borders and other issues to be negotiated. The first priorities would be the reform of Palestinian institutions and the protection of Israel’s security. Brokering a full-fledged peace plan was out of the question, according to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. We’re not going back down that road,” she told a reporter for the San Jose Mercury on June 14.

When Bush finally did announce his plan it turned out, not surprisingly, to be an endorsement of Sharon’s policies. In his speech of June 24 Bush held out a promise of a vaguely defined Palestinian state, but said negotiations could not even begin until the Palestinians stopped all violence and carried out “externally supervised” efforts to reform their courts, their security system, and their economy. In what amounted to a non sequitur he said they must hold free and democratic elections but be sure to elect “new leaders, not compromised by terrorism”—in other words, none of their present leaders. Bush did urge Israel to stop settlement building and lift the roadblocks, but he set no time tables and made no mention of an international peace conference. Bush’s much-heralded “vision” in effect left the Israelis free to occupy the entire West Bank and keep its popualtion under total lockdown until the Palestinians manage to hold free elections and reform themselves into a democracy.

As Israel effectively paralyzed life in the West Bank and Gaza with closures and repeated raids, the White House remained largely silent. Sharon received a warm welcome in Washington just one day after Israeli forces invaded Ramallah for the second time in a week, and placed its 200,000 residents under a round-the-clock curfew. Four days earlier Israeli forces had bombarded Arafat’s compound for six hours, killing six people, flattening several buildings, including those of the security services, and even blowing a hole in Arafat’s personal bathroom. In the second invasion Israeli tanks again battered Arafat’s compound while troops conducted house-to-house searches throughout the city and Apache helicopters sprayed the streets with machine gun fire. Eleven Palestinians were killed during the three-day siege, including an 8-year-old boy who was struck by machine gun fire inside his home. Scores of men and boys were arrested. And again the Israelis violated international law by refusing to let ambulances respond. Yet when reporters asked Bush if the operation harmed the peace process, he answered only, “Israel has a right to defend herself.”

Through it all, Arafat managed to survive as leader and even make a few reforms. He consolidated his security agencies, signed the Basic Law providing for an independent judiciary, and promised to hold elections when the closures were lifted and travel became possible. Arafat’s most significant reform was to invite into his cabinet the Palestinian People’s party, which will be represented by Ghassan Khatib, a respected publisher and ardent proponent of democracy. Several prominent Palestinian dissidents who find these changes inadequate have formed a movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, which aims at forcing Arafat to move much faster toward grassroots democracy.

But the Palestinian president himself is in jeopardy. Israel’s repeated attacks on his compound were clearly intended to demonstrate Arafat’s powerlessness and keep him sidelined until he can be ousted altogether. Many Israelis predict Sharon will use the next major Palestinian attack to expel Arafat from the occupied territories. Sharon is said to believe that if the Palestinian Authority is replaced by extremists, so much the better, since Israel would be under less pressure to negotiate.

Sharon also can be fairly confident that if Arafat is forced out the Bush administration would not strongly object. Bush was reportedly noncommittal when Sharon hinted at the possibility during his latest visit to Washington, and Rice, in her interview with the San Jose Mercury, said that no Palestinian state could emerge under the present leadership. “ Frankly, Arafat is corrupt,” she said, “and cavorts with terror.”

In any case, Israel’s April invasion of the West Bank continued for a month after Bush asked Sharon to stop it, yet U.S. support for Israel never wavered. Despite Bush’s talk about a provisional Palestinian state, the Israelis have every reason to assume they still have a free hand in the occupied territories.

Consequently Sharon is doing everything possible to make the closures permanent and a future Palestinian state impossible. In recent months the military has seized more than 30 square miles of Palestinian land for a 225-mile-long fence intended to close off the West Bank from Israel. Although right-wing Israelis oppose the wall as a de facto division of “Greater Israel,” construction of the first 75-mile stretch began on June 16. In the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jebel Mukaber, the Israelis are constructing a huge hotel and cable-car complex on Palestinian-owned land that will provide an additional barrier between the West Bank and Israel. The cities of Qalqilya and Bethlehem are now surrounded by an 18-foot-high cement wall.

As Washington debated whether to propose a “provisional Palestinian state,” the Israelis were carving the West Bank into eight cantons and Gaza into three, each one cut off from the others by Israeli settlements and a combination of ditches, walls, and barbed wire. Palestinians need passes to go from one town to another, and even with a pass the 10-mile trip between Ramallah and Jerusalem requires three taxis and takes more than two hours. To get from one part of Gaza to another can now take an entire day or longer, so that residents can’t get to their jobs and sick people are dying at checkpoints.

Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi called it a plan “to transform the West Bank into a mass prison…a euphemism for Israel’s unilateral solution to the conflict.” With the closures and other restrictions made permanent the effect can only be total destitution and dependency for a population whose economy is already in ruins. Israel’s April offensive alone caused physical damage estimated at $361 million, according to the World Bank. In this context, the Bush administration’s admonitions to Arafat about “reform” and “security cooperation” with Israel seem a cruel joke.

Washington’s reluctance to restrain Sharon could have even more tragic consequences, according to some analysts. Sharon is the only Middle East leader who favors a U.S. invasion of Iraq and he is eager to provide logistical support for such an operation. In an article published on April 28 in the British newspaper the Telegraph, Israeli historian Martin van Creveld predicted that Sharon is likely to use a U.S. war with Iraq as a pretext for the expulsion of 2 million Palestinians into Jordan, justifying it as a defensive measure. At least three parties in the present Israeli government are openly calling for what they call “transfer.” Van Creveld believes the army would use artillery bombardments to drive people from their homes, creating vastly more damage than they did in Jenin this spring. He doubts that America would take any action if Israel did the job quickly and the flow of oil was not disrupted.

Like the war of 1967, which was over in six days, such a scenario if it came to pass might produce the illusion of victory for Israel but have disastrous consequences far into the future. Even the fact that it is a strong possibility means there is greater need than ever for a constructive U.S. Middle East policy. The Bush administration’s open-ended “war on terrorism,” which has so far involved threatening Iraq and jailing Muslim immigrants (and Americans) without trial, may be politically expedient but does not add up to a foreign policy. Nor is it a substitute for an informed diplomacy that deals with the causes of conflicts and tries to find solutions.

The central issue in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the Israeli occupation, and ending it is the only solution. The peace plan offered last March by Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, based on U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and approved by all the Arab states, would end the occupation and assure lasting security for both Israelis and Palestinians. It offers a way to at last bring peace to the Middle East—but only if Bush has the will to impose it on Israel before the ongoing tragedy in the occupied territories becomes irreversible.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

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