Once Again a President in Trouble Heads for the Middle East As Chances Fade for Arab-Israeli Peace

By Richard H. Curtiss

When President Bill Clinton arrived Dec. 12 for a three-day visit to Israel and Palestine, he had two immediate goals: To save his presidency and save the Middle East peace process. Most Washington pundits thought he would be successful with his presidency but, consumed with the shadow cast over it by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, hadn’t really assessed his chances for establishing Middle East peace.

His reception during his fourth visit to Israel from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, preoccupied with his own political survival, was distant, if not actually grudging, but was generally warm from the Israeli people, who have long regarded Clinton as a friend.

By contrast, his reception on his first visit to Palestine by both President Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian people, even those who have little faith that the Israelis have any real interest in land-for-peace, was warm and enthusiastic. American flags, which might have been burned a few days earlier, waved side by side with Palestinian flags all over Gaza, with one U.S. flag so large it seemed to completely cover the control tower at Gaza International Airport. The Gaza audience warmly received Clinton’s moving speech after the Palestinian National Council, once again, and convincingly, renounced clauses in the Palestine National Charter calling for the abolition of the State of Israel. Afterward, even Netanyahu pronounced himself “satisfied,” although only hours later he also announced that, nevertheless, Israeli forces would not carry out their promised Dec. 18 withdrawal.

The few Americans who interrupted their morning schedules to watch the moving scenes live on television from Gaza also could not fail to note that as soon as the cameras shifted back to Washington, the talk solely concerned Clinton’s seeming 50-50 chance of surviving an impeachment vote later in the week in the House of Representatives.

Clinton’s eloquence aside, and whatever his chances of still being in office by the scheduled end of his second term two years hence, there is virtually no chance of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute being settled by then. The situation is grimly reminiscent of a time a generation ago when what had seemed an unparalleled opportunity to end the same problem on exactly the same land-for-peace terms was perceptibly slipping away.

In June of 1974 when President Richard Nixon went to the Middle East, I fervently hoped he would beat the odds and turn back the impeachment shadow then darkening his presidency. I was convinced that, after arming Israel to the teeth in his first term after his 1968 election victory and, literally, saving Israel from a battlefield defeat in the October 1973 war, Nixon was determined to make Israel withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza in his second term.

So were most Middle Eastern leaders. When Nixon arrived in Alexandria, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat turned out millions of Egyptians to cheer the train in which both leaders rode to Cairo. Both hoped that the sight of an American president being cheered in the streets of Arab capitals which had broken relations with the U.S. during the 1967 war would kindle some enthusiasm among Americans for what otherwise seemed a doomed presidency.

In Damascus, where I was handling press relations for the Nixon visit, I was struck by the contrast between a frequently distracted Nixon, limping with his phlebitis and gray with fatigue, and the Syrians who were visibly enthusiastic over the return of Americans to their country after a total absence of more than six years. His people’s animation infected normally somber President Hafez Al-Assad, who seemed almost giddy as he offered a toast at the state banquet to the future of U.S.-Syrian relations.

“Do you think what Americans are seeing on television from the Middle East will save the Nixon presidency at home?” I asked then-Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler as we shared a limousine racing from one Damascus event to the next.

“That’s what we hope,” he answered guardedly. But I could see in his eyes that it was a slim hope. Two months later President Nixon resigned to forestall almost certain impeachment by a Democratic-controlled Congress. And though his successor, President Gerald Ford, tried to keep the pressure on the Israelis, he was undercut at every turn by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had an agenda of his own; by Israel’s powerful friends in the U.S. Senate; and by protracted chaos within Israel that eventually resulted in the resignations of Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, leaving no one in the Israeli government with whom an American president could negotiate successfully.

There are haunting similarities in the situation today. The Israeli government, once again, is in chaos. Whatever Clinton does will have less influence on a beleaguered Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu than the defections of his coalition partners, most of whom are dead set against carrying out even the limited territorial withdrawals solemnly promised by Netanyahu at the Wye Plantation in October.

The second such withdrawal was scheduled for Dec. 18, but Netanyahu postponed it to try to hold his coalition together. Extreme hard-liner Benny Elon of the Moledet Party, which openly calls for “transfer” (expulsion) of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories alike, has demanded as the price for his support that Netanyahu say publicly to his countrymen, “I was misguided and misled by Clinton and by Arafat when they took me to Wye and promised things, and I’m sorry that I went to the conference.”

Netanyahu can’t do that without losing the support of both the U.S. and all Israeli voters who want peace. But his supporters are cautioning President Clinton not to pressure Israel’s Likud prime minister at such a delicate moment.

Netanyahu himself seems to be joining his political allies in confronting Clinton in various ways and trying very publicly to further humiliate and infuriate Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in hopes of provoking the Palestinians into doing something that will give Israel an excuse to halt the peace process once and for all and put the blame on the Palestinians.

This has been Netanyahu’s strategy all along, but Clinton’s arrival while Netanyahu was trying to bring new hard-liners into his faltering government moved commentator Sima Kadmon to write in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, “Netanyahu discovered that one can’t stand in the air and on the ground at the same time. His tricks are seen for what they are one time too many.”

Meanwhile Yossi Sarid, leader of the dovish Meretz faction in the Knesset, raged at Netanyahu on Dec. 7, “Scoundrel, there is not a man in this house you have not led astray.”

Under the circumstances, perhaps the best either Clinton or Arafat can hope for is the fall of the Netanyahu cabinet, followed by a 60-day total hiatus while Israel elects a new government. However, whether the next Israeli government is formed by the Labor Party and Israeli left-wingers or another right-wing coalition, its first act will be to ask Yasser Arafat to extend the deadline for completion of final status talks.

If Arafat does, more settlements will be built in the interim, making a land-for-peace agreement increasingly difficult, if it isn’t already impossible. If Arafat doesn’t agree to an extension, and goes ahead with his unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, the Israelis will try to blame Arafat’s action for the failure of the peace process.

A May 4 unilateral declaration of statehood, however, is one of only two arrows left in Yasser Arafat’s quiver. The other, of course, is the possibility that Clinton, whom Israelis have been hailing as the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, will suddenly become even-handed and say what by now most Americans finally have come to understand: that the Palestinians have the right to a state of their own, without further delay.

Hillary Clinton has already said this, although whether her remark last May was planned or a spontaneous accident still is not clear. In a sense, the president’s arrival by helicopter at Gaza International Airport signals his recognition of this fact as well.

However, as with most Clinton foreign policy initiatives, even the Gaza visit was not the result of lengthy planning. It came about as a direct result of one of the deal-breaking requirements that Netanyahu put upon his acceptance of the Wye agreement. Arafat, he said, must convene the Palestinian Legislative National Council to revoke all of the passages in the Palestine National Covenant calling for the destruction of Israel.

Arafat and subsequently the PNC already had declared all such passages null and void, and both the U.S. and Israel’s previous Labor government had announced themselves satisfied. But, as part of his effort to break the Oslo accords and blame the Palestinians, Netanyahu raised the issue again at Wye, insisting the Palestinian leader convene the PNC to rewrite the covenant.

Knowing this would be difficult for Arafat to do, Clinton offered to come to Gaza and talk to Palestinian legislators if it would help. Arafat seized upon the offer, and suddenly Netanyahu was faced with virtual U.S. recognition of the Palestinian state, something far more alarming to his supporters than his feigned unhappiness over the Palestinian Covenant.

So Arafat found himself about to host for the first time in Gaza a sitting U.S. president, but one who could be impeached within days of that event. If the U.S. House of Representatives votes impeachment, the Senate will decide early next year whether or not to remove President Clinton from office after the equivalent of a protracted trial under the auspices of the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The House needs only a simple majority vote for impeachment, but the Senate would require a two-thirds majority to remove the president. At present, even in the unlikely event that all Republican senators vote for Clinton’s removal, it would seem there are not sufficient votes to do this. But that could change as the senators consider the seriousness of the charges. Similar conduct by anyone in the U.S. civil or military service would be grounds for dismissal or demotion, and court action if perjury were involved.

As the American public increasingly becomes aware that in private life an educator or the CEO of a major business would face similar penalties, it may become difficult for senators from Clinton’s Democratic Party to support lower standards for a U.S. president than those enforced almost anywhere else in the U.S. Under such perilous circumstances, President Clinton may not feel inclined to take politically risky actions in the Middle East, even if he wants to.

So, once again, a land-for-peace settlement of the single problem that has given birth to five Arab-Israeli wars, and contributed to all of the wars and upheavals throughout the Middle East since 1948, has become hostage to domestic American politics. And, as with Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush before him, Bill Clinton, who deferred a serious effort to pressure Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories until his second term when it seemed politically safe to do so, almost certainly is discovering now that although he finally has the will to make peace in the Middle East, he no longer has the domestic political strength to do so.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.