Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 7, 118-119

Special Report

U.S. Apathy Over Israel's Obstruction of the Peace Process Ignites Hostility, Frays U.S. Alliances

By Rachelle Marshall

In February 1994, after an Israeli settler gunned down 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, seven members of the Israeli cabinet urged Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to oust the few hundred armed Jewish militants who were illegally occupying buildings in the center of the town and who had been the source of continuing tensions. Instead, Rabin punished the Palestinians.

Claiming it was protecting the settlers from possible reprisal, the Israeli government imposed a tight curfew on the Arab population of Hebron and other West Bank cities, and closed the borders with Israel. In the week that followed the carnage at the mosque, Israeli soldiers killed at least 10 more Palestinians. Finally, as Jewish settlers freely roamed the streets of Hebron brandishing guns, and Rabbi Yaacov Perrin was declaring publicly that "a million Arabs are not worth a single Jewish fingernail," Israel closed off the city's main thoroughfare, Shuhada Street, forcing scores of Palestinian businesses to shut down.

In October 1997, three and a half years after closing it, Israel officially reopened Shuhada Street. But instead of being a cause for celebration, the occasion illustrated the sham Israel has made of the peace process and the shallowness of American commitment to that process.

According to the U.S.-brokered Hebron protocol, signed in January 1997, Shuhada Street was to be reopened the following April, spruced up by the U.S. at a cost of $2.5 million. Now the street has been repaved and lined with flower beds and street lamps. But the only Palestinian vehicles allowed to use it are fire engines and ambulances.

Palestinian pedestrians and civilian cars still are forced to take a roundabout route to the central marketplace while settlers and their cars are waved through the checkpoint. Hebron Mayor Mustapha Natsheh called the reopening "nothing but a publicity stunt," and protested that "It is most unreasonable to prevent the 200,000 people of Hebron from using the street in order to please 300 settlers."

An equally illustrative incident took place in Bethlehem in mid-November when Israel reopened Rachel's Tomb, a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews. It was built by the Ottoman Turks as a shrine to Rachel "the exile," and renovated by the Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore in the 19th century.

Just after Israeli troops withdrew from Bethlehem in accordance with the Oslo agreements, the Labor government began surrounding the tomb with a high concrete wall topped by guard towers, blocking access by Muslims. Palestinian Minister of Religious Affairs Hassan Tahboub pointed out that the wall violates the Oslo provisions on Palestinian self-rule as well as freedom of worship and the protection of holy places.

On Nov. 10, as hundreds of Orthodox Jews gathered in Bethlehem for the reopening of Rachel's Tomb, with loudspeakers blaring and hawkers selling Jewish religious objects, boys inside a nearby refugee camp began throwing stones at soldiers guarding the celebrants. Although the soldiers stood at a safe distance and the stones fell short, they suddenly began shooting at the stone throwers, most of whom were under 11.

According to New York Times reporter Joel Greenberg, as the boys were running away, 8-year-old Ali Jawarish happened on the scene on his way to a shop. A soldier took deliberate aim and at close range shot him in the head with a rubber-coated bullet. Ali died four days later. Just after his funeral, soldiers again broke up a stone-throwing protest with rubber bullets, this time wounding six people. Ali's parents donated his organs to two Israeli hospitals.

The Israeli soldiers' use of bullets to put down Palestinian protests, and the killing of a child, however unintended, were emblematic of the current state of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Athough the Palestinians called off the intifada when Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles in 1993, the Netanyahu government is still combatting it. Protests that involve stone throwing are now largely spontaneous and usually involve only young boys, yet the Israeli army continues to confront them with overwhelming force, including the use of lethal bullets.

Deaths and Demolitions

In the first six months of this year 38 Palestinians died at the hands of Israelis, according to the Jerusalem Times of Aug. 29. In the same period, Israel demolished at least 120 Palestinian homes and imposed 73 border closings. Professor Fouad Moughrabi of the University of Tennessee, who recently returned from the West Bank, told an audience at Stanford University that the border closings have resulted in a loss to Palestinians of some $1.3 million a day in family income. For the first time in memory, Moughrabi said, many Palestinians are literally starving.

Meanwhile Israel is relentlessly seizing more Palestinian land to make way for settlers, and refuses to withdraw from additional West Bank territory despite urging from the Clinton administration. In further defiance of past agreements, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and 22 other Knesset members recently voted to reoccupy the four-fifths of Hebron that had been evacuated last spring.

While Secretary of State Madeleine Albright urges "both sides to live up to agreements," Arabs and Europeans blame Israel alone for stalling the peace process and fault the U.S. for not putting more pressure on Netanyahu to honor his obligations. Albright's effort in early November to get the two sides closer together failed when negotiations in Washington produced no results.

Netanyahu flatly refused to call a "time out" on settlement building as the U.S. had requested, or schedule further troop withdrawals—the two most important issues to the Palestinians. Right-wing religious parties have threatened to leave the governing coalition if the prime minister agrees to either demand, and other members of the Knesset have said they would refuse to support him in crucial budget votes later this year if he did.

Netanyahu risks little by being obstructionist. His policies are fully supported by a U.S. Congress that suspended aid to the Palestinian Authority this year and blocked a State Department contribution of $10 million to a water project in Gaza, but endorsed without hesitation Israel's annual grant of $3.1 billion, nearly a fourth of the entire foreign aid budget. Clinton is unwilling to risk an attack by pro-lsrael members of Congress and the Jewish community by openly criticizing Netanyahu. Nevertheless, he has reason to be irritated, since Israel's intransigence is seriously undermining U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.

Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, including barring them from Jerusalem's holy places, has aroused increasing anger in the Arab world and recently led Arab leaders to withhold cooperation on two issues that Clinton and Albright regarded as vital: the economic conference held in Doha, Qatar, Nov. 16-18, and a united stand against Saddam Hussain for expelling American weapons inspectors from Iraq.

Despite intensive cajoling by Albright, nearly every Arab state, including such U.S. allies as Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, boycotted the meeting in Qatar, which was intended to promote closer economic ties between Israelis and Arabs. Only Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Tunisia, and Yemen sent delegations. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak explained Egypt's absence by saying, "The Israeli government never carries out its promises."

After causing the collapse of U.S. hopes, Israel inflicted the final humiliation: at the last minute the government did not send Foreign Minister David Levy to Doha but only Industry Minister Natan Sharansky. And so, according to The New York Times, Albright's own appearance at the conference was "brief and embarrassing."

Far more important to Washington than the Doha conference was reviving the coalition against Iraq in the Gulf war. But in this effort, too, the U.S. was hamstrung by Israel's behavior and the popular outrage it arouses among Arabs.

As U.S. warships and bombers massed in the Gulf region and Defense Secretary William Cohen was holding up vials of simulated anthrax to show how Saddam Hussain could wipe out the population of Washington, DC, the Arab states made clear their opposition to a military strike against Iraq. Even Kuwait, which has reason to fear Iraq but has a strong anti-Israel movement, declared its opposition to military action.

In the midst of the crisis the Saudi government issued an unusually blunt statement that acknowledged the danger of Iraq's production of destructive weapons but stressed that Middle East peace took first priority. Obstruction of the peace was "exclusively attributable to the intransigent position of the Israeli government," the Saudis said, "and its failure to abide by the contractual obligations as articulated in the Oslo agreements."

A U.S. official based in the Gulf summarized Arab opinion by saying, "There is a lot of talk about American 'double standards' on the Arab street—that the Americans are happy to starve Iraqis and punish Saddam Hussain but do nothing to make Israel live up to its commitments to the Palestinians." Other reports stressed the widespread outrage at the suffering inflicted on the Iraqis by the U.S. The semi-official Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram charged that "The aim is to continue starving and besieging the Iraqi people...without the slightest regard for their human rights."

"We are a sovereign nation."

Opposition of our Arab and European allies to an attack on Iraq prompted Clinton to suggest that if Saddam Hussain backed down Iraq would be allowed to sell more oil to finance the purchase of food and medicine. The Iraqis angrily refused. "We are not a refugee camp," Foreign Minister Mohammed Said al-Sahaf said. "We are a sovereign nation." Sahaf pointed out that U.S.-led policy had imposed seven years of crippling sanctions with no sign of a respite and that his government was acting on the view that "There is no hope."

In defying the U.S., Saddam knew he had little to lose. Ever since the end of the Gulf war Washington officials have stated unequivocally that sanctions would last until the Iraqi ruler was replaced. Last March Albright announced that the U.S. would not be willing to lift sanctions even if Hussain complied with U.N. resolutions. On Nov. 14 Clinton asserted that "the sanctions will remain until the end of time or as long as he lasts."

What the Iraqis clearly wanted most was some assurance that they could achieve an end to the sanctions and that new conditions would not be endlessly imposed. The Russians ended the impasse on Nov. 19 by promising to work to lift the sanctions if Iraq allowed the U.S. weapons inspectors to return, and Iraq agreed.

The peaceful outcome allowed Saddam the satisfaction of having drawn worldwide attention to the suffering the sanctions had caused to the Iraqi people and Clinton was able to avoid a show of force that would have dismayed and angered U.S. allies. Nevertheless the U.S. kept tensions high by sending more military forces to the Gulf while U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson announced, "There is no chance the sanctions will be lifted."

Hopes that Oslo would end Israel's long isolation from its Arab neighbors collapsed with the election of Netanyahu, who has not only made Israel a pariah nation in the Middle East but is managing to drag the U.S. along with it. According to Fred Lawson, professor of Middle East history at Mills College, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are concerned about continuing U.S. sanctions against Iran as well as Iraq. Along with the French and other Europeans who see the possibility of profitable investment in Iran, the Arabs find no advantage in isolating a powerful neighbor.

Lawson believes the Saudis regard Iran as a major player in the Gulf area and, rather than risk hostilities with the Iranians, favor a regional organization that includes them. It is noteworthy that top Arab officials who had declined to go to Doha as the U.S. had urged, instead accepted invitations to the December meeting of the Islamic Conference Organization in Tehran.

The prospect for renewed Arab ties with Iran depends on whether the Gulf states are willing to risk their economic and military partnership with the U.S. by violating Washington's "dual containment" policy—a policy rooted as much in the need to appease Israel as in a desire to maintain a U.S. military presence in the Gulf. The New York Times has extensively reported on Iranian President Mohammed Khatami's efforts to liberalize the country and his successful initiatives to improve Iran's relations with nations in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf as well as in Europe.

Iran's Foreign Ministry recently condemned as contrary to Islam "the sinister phenomenon of terrorism and the killing of innocent people." Yet during the crisis over Iraq's expulsion of the weapons inspectors in November Netanyahu said repeatedly that the greatest danger to the world came from Iran.

In the U.S., the pro-lsrael lobby and its allies in Congress are helping him sound the alarm. Representatives Sam Gejdenson and Benjamin Gilman have circulated a letter in Congress that calls on Clinton to invoke existing sanctions against any company in the world that does business with Iran.

Because of objections from Europe to applying U.S. law to foreign companies, Clinton has until now refrained from punishing firms based abroad. A new bill before Congress, the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act of 1997, would do away with presidential discretion and automatically impose sanctions on any company selling goods or technology that could aid in Iran's missile buildup. Loosely interpreted, the bill could apply to almost any equipment sold to Iran.

Last October the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) stepped up the campaign to demonize Iran with a full-page "educational" ad in Jewish newspapers that warned, "Iran Could Hold Much of the World's Oil Supply Hostage if We Don't Act Now." The ad urged readers to tell their representatives to sign the Gejdenson-Gilman letter in order to prevent foreign investment from going to "the world's leading terrorist state." An editorial in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin backed up the plea, saying "This is a fight between greed and security."

The editor obviously meant Israel's security, a word the Israeli government has used for 50 years to justify crimes ranging from assassination to invasion. For too many of those years U.S. Middle East policy has been shaped by the demands of Israel and its supporters, demands made in the name of security but in fact designed to maintain Israel's hold over captured territory.

Blind support for Israel has cost the U.S. heavily in the Arab world and sullied America's image as a champion of democracy and human rights. Since the end of the Cold War Arabs and Europeans have shown an increasing tendency to ignore Washington's wishes, as is evidenced by recent U.N. Security Council votes and the attendance at the summit meeting in Tehran. If the U.S. should try to thwart these efforts while refusing to punish Israel for its defiance of international law, we could eventually find ourselves a pariah nation along with the Israel. In that case, our own vital interests might be at stake.