July/August 1990, Page 69, 70

American Educational Trust

Publishers' Page

What's Next in the Middle East?

"I have decided to suspend the dialogue between the United States and the PLO. . . At any time that the PLO is prepared to take the necessary steps, we are prepared to promptly resume the dialogue." President George Bush, June 20, 1990.

This issue of the Washington Report contains a number of carefully reasoned, but contrasting, opinions concerning the sudden ascension of radicals over moderates on both sides of the Middle East confrontation lines. In this space we'll speak for ourselves.

For Arabs, one of the last straws was the May 26 U.S. veto of a Security Council resolution calling for the introduction of U.N. observers into Israeli-occupied territories. For George Bush and James Baker, the last straw was not so much the May 30 attempt by splinter group leader Mohammad Abul Abbas to land 12 armed Palestinians on the Israeli coast, but the refusal of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat over the subsequent three weeks to "denounce" the attack and "discipline" Abul Abbas.

All this backsliding apparently left little time for anyone to react to the categorical rejection by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Baker's bottom line conditions for U.S. support of Israeli-Palestinian talks in Cairo, and of Bush's request in a long personal letter to Shamir that the new Israeli government move peace up from the very bottom of its agenda.

A Setback for Peacemakers

It's a clear setback for the peacemakers, if not for peace itself. The "peace process" already had been halted by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's formation of a new Israeli government whose only priority is putting Soviet Jews, religious Jews, and anyone who defines himself as a Jew into heavily subsidized housing in the occupied territories. It's a frenzied attempt to stall politically while "creating facts" on the ground to preclude the land-for-peace deal to which the U.S. has paid lip service for the past 23 years.

It's a triumph for the war makers. With moderate Arab rulers, Yasser Arafat, and whatever is left of the Israeli peace movement sullenly licking their wounds, war could break out tomorrow. If an Iraqi radar operator concludes that fighter planes taking off from an Israeli military airfield may be planning a "pre-emptive strike" on his country, Saddam Hussein will probably press the button that sends Iraqi rockets on their way to Israel. Who wouldn't?

If an Israeli spy, electronic eavesdropper, or satellite photo interpreter concludes the Iraqi strongman is about to push the button, Israel may draw on its nuclear or chemical arsenal to strike first, as it did in 1967 despite evidence that the Arabs had no intention of striking first themselves.

Both Iraq and Israel have what are euphemistically called "weapons of mass destruction" and the capability to deliver them. Would they be crazy enough to use them? There are parties on both sides of the lines spoiling to do just that.

In Israel, the right-wing extremists within the Likud party, led by Ariel Sharon, seek another war to do what "Sharon's War" in Lebanon failed to accomplish in 1982. Their scenario is to create such a major disturbance in the Middle East that, in the chaos, they can bring down King Hussein's regime in Amman and put the Palestinians from the occupied territories and Israel into Jordan.

Their slogan is "Palestine exists, but in Jordan." They need a war to make it come true. With characteristic contempt for their Arab opponents, they don't think the price in Israeli blood would be too high.

From Iraq, Saddam Hussein has warned that the price of an Israeli attack will be the incineration of half of Israel. Anyone who doesn't believe him need only recall how he brought Iran, with three times Iraq's population, to its knees in 1988.

Iraq demonstrated it had rockets capable of hitting Tehran. It demonstrated it had chemical weapons. Its ruler convinced the Iranians, as he apparently has not yet convinced some Israelis, that he was ruthless enough to mount chemical warheads on delivery systems capable of hitting Tehran.

Stopping the Rush to War

If, at this point, Saddam Hussein or any other Arab ruler unleashes "weapons of mass destruction" on Israel, and gets Amman, Baghdad or Damascus nuked in return, how will he be regarded in the Arab world? Given the current mood of total Arab anger and frustration with Israel and its American mentors, an attack against either would change his image overnight to that of a new Saladin, nemesis of the crusaders, or Gamal Abdel Nasser, nemesis of western imperialism. It's a role Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi or Hafez Al-Assad would kill for. Now's their chance.

So who can stop the rush to war? Not President Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan of Morocco or President Ben Ali of Tunisia. It was they and other "moderates," working closely with the United States, who convinced Yasser Arafat to jump through three American hoops by publicly affirming his readiness to accept land for peace in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, recognizing Israel's right to exist, and "renouncing" terrorism.

When the U.S. suggested to Shamir that perhaps it was time to think about meeting Arafat half way, however, Shamir refused to consider making any concessions, or even to meet.

Raising the Hoops for Arafat

So what did the U.S. government do? It raised the aid for Shamir, and raised the hoops for Arafat. Now he must "denounce" and "discipline" Abul Abbas, his rival based in Baghdad and funded by Libya, over whom Arafat admits he has no control, for a raid whose objective remains undetermined and in which no one was killed but some of the raiders.

Meanwhile, an Israeli court has sentenced Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a leader of Israel's militant religious "settlers," to five months imprisonment, which he is not serving for "health reasons," for a shooting spree in which he randomly fired his automatic weapon into shops in Hebron until one Palestinian shoe merchant lay dead, and another lay gravely wounded.

No Israeli government official has been instructed by the United States to denounce Levinger, or the viciously racist and discriminatory Israeli legal system which grants the full protection of Israeli citizenship to every Jewish resident of the occupied territories, and no protections at all to Christian or Muslim residents of the same places.

Levinger's Gush Emunim followers, after parading him in triumph through Palestinian towns put under Israeli military curfew for the occasion, are planning a fund-raising tour in the United States.

No members of Congress are circulating letters calling upon the administration to deny them visas, as did so many senators when Arafat, after jumping through the hoops, wished to come to New York to address the U.N. Security Council.

Can the Europeans make the U.S. abandon its blatant double standard of coddling Israelis, no matter how radical, and chastising Palestinians, no matter how moderate?

Leaders of the NATO countries, even Margaret Thatcher, are appalled to see the U.S. put on hold what, for a time, seemed to be the first serious U.S. Middle East peace initiative since Jimmy Carter was president. Japan gave up on the U.S. in the Middle East long ago. The Soviet Union, in a state of near economic and political collapse, feels it is being held hostage by Israel's lobby in Washington. If it stops the flow of Soviet Jews to Israel pending a pledge that Israel will stop settling Jews in the occupied territories, the U.S. will not make the trade concessions a beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev feels he needs for credibility at home.

For all of them, the U.S. truly has become what was once called a "pitiful helpless giant." Its Middle East policy is hostage to an election campaign financing system that keeps the most venal, and vulnerable to the Israel lobby, candidates in Congress. It is hostage to a persistent media bias that owes much of its stance to advertising pressures. And, as so many times in the past, it seems to have fallen victim to an attack of election year presidential pusillanimity.

The initiative could be salvaged. President Bush might suggest that, since he was suspended the dialogue with the PLO until it meets his conditions about booting Abul Abbas off its Executive Committee, he is suspending aid to Israel until it meets his conditions about stopping subsidies to Jewish settlements in the Arab West Bank.

If the Bush administration does this, Yasser Arafat might recover his voice. Israeli voters might recover their senses. Americans concerned for Middle East peace might recover their faith in the administration.

In the Reagan era, the U.S. had a president who, for whatever reason, refused to understand the causes of Middle Eastern instability, or the fact that he could end it.

George Bush and James Baker are fully aware that there will never be Middle east peace until they begin to put strings on aid to Israel. Until May, with cooperation from such courageous congressional leaders as Senator Robert Dole (R-KS), they seemed to be moving, timidly, in that direction.

If they stop, where does the Middle East go from here? Almost certainly to war.

Good News About the Bad News

The message about U.S.-Middle East relations is bad, but there's good news about the messenger. The scales were lifted from the eyes of some U.S. journalists as early as 1982, when so many went to Lebanon to cover the Israeli invasion, and saw the slaughter of innocents that followed. Unfortunately, even though they approached Middle East events with some understanding, they seemed unsure of what to do with their new insights.

Now they aren't. One of the most revealing outbursts occurred on NBC's televised "McLaughlin Group" over the weekend of June 16-17. It came at the end of a remarkably frank discussion, for the second weekend in a row, of the new harder-line cabinet assembled by Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's abominable no man. Host John McLaughlin asked each panelist whether the new Israeli government's refusal to discuss either the substance or modalities of peace might not induce Congress to act on Senator Robert Dole's suggestion to "shave" aid to Israel by a few percentage points this year.

"Are you kidding?" snapped Newsweek's Eleanor Clift. "Congress is an Israeli-occupied territory."

Several years ago the editor of this magazine spotted on a grafitti-covered wall in downtown Washington, DC the spray-painted slogan, "CONGRESS IS AN ISRAELI-OCCUPIED TERRITORY." He had it printed as a bumper sticker available at no charge to anyone who purchased books from the AET Book Club. We've mailed out a few thousand since then, and dozens of visitors to the office have helped themselves as they departed. The editor, in applying a five-year field test, has had two torn off his back bumper, and once had someone block his car in a parking lot and refuse to move. Another time, as a car overhauled him on a busy but narrow city street, the grinning driver took both hands off the wheel to give him two comradely "V" signs, Richard Nixon or Yasser Arafat style, and nearly collided with an oncoming car.

Now the slogan which evolved from graffiti in a run-down section of Washington, DC into a bumper sticker catalyst for angry and joyful human interaction has blossomed into the mainstream media. Trickle down economics doesn't always work. We think trickle up public opinion generally does. Over a 5- or 10-year period, many far-out statements gradually evolve into conventional wisdom.

For the past two years we've listened to outgoing presidents of the Middle East Studies Association make statements on the necessity of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and the impossibility of reaching it without PLO participation. Their statements were greeted with polite applause and a ho hum. When we wrote these same things in the strongest terms six years ago, however, the Washington Report was branded, "pro-Arab," "controversial," "far-out," and off the wall.

The moral to all this is that those who subscribe to the Washington Report are initiated early into the next decade's "conventional wisdom" on the Middle East. If, however, they affix our stickers to their bumpers, they may find themselves in peril in parking lots and on the open road.

Be an AET Point of Enlightenment

Midway into 1990, Washington Report paid circulation continues to increase at a 25 percent annual rate. Book sales, for reasons we don't fully understand, are up 30 percent from a year earlier. Both, we think, reflect increased American interest in and realism about the Middle East, and intense interest in solving the Palestinian-Israeli problem. Increasingly, Americans realize the blood of Palestinian children is on our hands so long as we give unconditional military and economic aid to Israel's brutal and racist army of occupation.

There are ways our readers can help channel that interest and concern, and help us to keep expanding at the present rate. If you haven't yet joined our AET points of enlightenment program for this year, please do so now. It's our single best means of increasing paid circulation. Send us $60 and 12 names and addresses of "opinion molders," meaning clergy, educators, media, and elected or appointed officials. We'll provide them a subscription and, after 12 months, ask them to renew it themselves.

If they don't we'll inform you and you can decide whether you want to renew for them, give subscriptions to others, or sit the next year out. A surprisingly high percentage of the recipients are grateful to the donor for showing them the light, and eager to renew on their own.

The same rules apply to donations of our newest book, Stealth PACs: How Israel's American Lobby Seeks to Control U.S. Middle East Policy. If you don't have one yet, you can buy one copy for $7.95, plus $2 for postage, or two for $9.95, plus $2.50 for postage. If you want to donate copies, send us the names and addresses and $5 per name, which covers postage. As with subscriptions, recipients must be "opinion molders." We also have a special matching grant that enables us to send the book to radio, print or television journalists at only $2.50 per copy.

Make a Difference-This Month

Contact your representatives in Congress to ask that they co-sponsor or support resolutions calling upon the Israeli government to reopen the West Bank and Gaza universities that have been closed for more than two years. House Resolution 315, called the "Nielson" Resolution, as of June 29 had 35 Democratic and 15 Republican co-sponsors.

You should ask your representative to support it if it is offered as a floor amendment to the foreign aid bill (H.R. 4610).

Although Senate follow-up will largely depend upon House action, you can also ask your senators to support Senate Resolution 288, submitted by Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) for herself, Sen. John Chafee (R-RI), Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Sen. Robert Dole (R-KS).

If you do so, you can help make a difference this month.