Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2000, Pages 6-10, 63

Three Views

Will “the Syrian Track” Result in an Israeli Peace Treaty in 2000?

Can Israelis Be Persuaded to Take a Chance on Peace With Syria?

By Rachelle Marshall

By any objective measure, an equitable and just peace settlement between Israel and Syria would benefit Israel as much or more than Syria. If Prime Minister Ehud Barak agrees to the full return of the Golan Heights to Syria, restoration of Syria’s border on the Sea of Galilee, and the sharing of water from the Jordan River, he will have taken a major step toward achieving Israel’s lasting security. If he refuses, Israel will have lost what may be its last opportunity to gain acceptance by its neighbors and end the long state of hostility that has poisoned the region.

Unlike the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in which Israel has the power to determine the outcome, the talks between Syria and Israel that began in West Virginia on Jan. 3 have every chance of succeeding. Both Barak and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad would profit politically from an agreement. If Assad wants to make certain his son Bashar will succeed him he must regain the territory that Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and begin revitalizing Syria’s economy. Barak foresees peace with Syria as leading to Israel’s “unprecedented economic growth” from increased trade with Arab nations and a “sky high” image for the country. He is also anxious to end the war in Lebanon that has taken the lives of hundreds of Israeli soldiers since 1982 along with thousands of Lebanese civilians.

Both leaders are under heavy pressure from President Bill Clinton, who is eager to leave the White House with peace between Israel and Syria as one of his accomplishments. For this reason both countries can expect substantial financial rewards from the United States in return for reaching an agreement. Syria would receive at least some economic and technical aid, if Congress agrees, and Israel could reap a bonanza. Israel’s finance minister, Avraham Shochat, has put the cost of relocating the settlers and withdrawing troops from the Golan at between $15 and $20 billion, and Barak is reportedly asking for an additional $17 billion worth of military hardware, including AWAC planes and Tomahawk missiles, to replace Israel’s defense installations on the Golan.

As usual, Israeli leaders claim the money is needed to strengthen Israel’s security, an argument that works equally well during both peace and war. But according to a recent report by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Israel has never been stronger. The balance of power in the Middle East is now so overwhelmingly in Israel’s favor, the report found, that its military could overcome any combination of opposing Arab forces. Syria’s military is “fundamentally weak,” with “unusable submarines” and an aging air force. Because of unstable oil prices no Arab country can afford to compete in an arms race. Only Egypt has modernized its army since 1980, and Egypt has been at peace with Israel for 20 years.

Although the Jaffee Center’s report does not say so, a peace agreement between Israel and Syria would undoubtedly call for an end to Syria’s strategic partnership with Iran, leaving Israel in an even more dominant position in that part of the world.

Despite the advantages to Israel of peace with Syria, opposition by the Israeli right will be a formidable obstacle to an agreement. The Knesset gave only lukewarm support to the opening of talks with Syria, and recent polls say the popular referendum that must approve an agreement could go either way. The problem lies in the contradictions that lie at the heart of the Jewish state. Israel purports to be a secular democracy but a disproportionate amount of power is held by minority religious parties, whose members believe the territories under Israel’s control were given to Jews by God and therefore may not be negotiated away.

Barak invited the largest of the religious parties, Shas, to join his coalition last June, on the understanding that the party would support his peace efforts. But in mid-December Shas threatened to pull its 17 members out of the coalition unless the government provided it with $36 million to bail out its debt-ridden school system. The Shas religious schools provide day care and hot meals for the children of parents who are often too poor to pay tuition, and so serve as recruitment centers for new generations of Orthodox Jews and as a source of new Shas voters. Because Barak desperately needs the party’s support for a peace agreement with Syria, the attempt at blackmail worked. Even so, because of pressure from its rabbi advisers, the “council of sages,” Shas may decide to oppose such an agreement. Chief sage Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has not yet ruled on the future of the Golan but is known to harbor resentment against Barak for denying Shas crucial cabinet appointments.

The prime minister could muster a majority in the Knesset without Shas by including the votes of the 10 Arab members, but again the contradictions within Israeli society pose a difficulty. Israelis claim that Zionism is not racist and that all Israelis have equal rights, but officials admit that no prime minister can afford to count Arab votes when it comes to deciding important government policy. Several Knesset members are even demanding that Israeli Arabs be barred from taking part in the referendum.

Two smaller parties in Barak’s coalition, the National Religious Party and the party of Russian immigrants led by Natan Sharansky, are threatening to resign if Israel agrees to withdraw from any part of the Golan. The Golan Residents’ Committee, which represents the 17,000 Golan settlers, has also vowed to fight such a move, and in mid-December staged a rally outside the Knesset chanting, “We are not moving from the Golan.” (In sympathy, a caravan of American Orthodox Jews demonstrated outside the hotel in Shepherdstown where peace talks were being held and chanted the same slogan—even though they live in Brooklyn.)

The most powerful opponent of Israel’s accommodation with Syria is the Likud party, headed by former Gen. Ariel Sharon. Likud is seeking support for its position from Americans as well as Israelis. In an op-ed article that appeared in The New York Times on Dec. 28 Sharon portrayed Israel as the repeated victim of Syrian aggression and warned that Israel could not defend itself without the Golan Heights. Because Barak is almost certain to insist that U.S. peacekeeping forces be stationed on the Golan before he agrees to withdrawing Israeli troops, Likud is lobbying its Republican allies in Congress to reject such a move and thereby scuttle hopes of an agreement.

Notably absent from the Times’s opinion pages have been any reminders that it was Israel’s persistent efforts to introduce its farmers into the demilitarized zones below the Golan Heights that provoked clashes between the two sides, and that in 1967 it was Israel that invaded Syria. When Syria’s foreign minister, Farouk al-Charaa, speaking at the White House on Dec. 15, quoted the late General Moshe Dayan to that effect, the Times called the statement “inflammatory.” Charaa also pointed out that efforts to arouse sympathy for the few thousand settlers on the Golan ignored the more than half-million Syrians whom Israel’s invading forces had uprooted from land their forefathers had inhabited for thousands of years.

Charaa’s words cannot be ignored if there is to be peace between Israel and Syria. Americans and Israelis may swallow the myth that Syria used the Golan Heights to launch unprovoked attacks on Israel, but the Syrian people are fully aware of the facts Charaa cited, and are unlikely to accept anything less than the return of all the land they regard as unjustly stolen from them by Israel.

Another issue negotiators can’t afford to ignore is the fate of the more than 200,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, where they are denied citizenship and the right to hold any but the most menial jobs. As a consequence of their persistent deprivation the refugee camps are breeding grounds for social unrest and violence. The Lebanese government insists that any peace agreement provide for their resettlement elsewhere, and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat is belatedly demanding that Israel allow them to return to their homes or be granted compensation. Barak is reluctant to take up the issue and, like every Israeli prime minister before him, he has vowed that under no circumstances would the refugees be allowed to return to Israel.

In the end, the biggest obstacle to an agreement may be Barak’s own unwillingness to accept peace terms that would satisfy the Syrians. Syria’s first priority is to get back all of the Golan Heights, with security arrangements and water rights to be discussed next. But even before the negotiations began, Barak’s Foreign Minister David Levy declared, “I reiterate the government’s position that there is no return to the line of Galilee or to June 1967.” On Dec. 24 Barak approved construction of 70 more housing units on the Golan, a move that raised doubts as to whether Israel seriously intended to withdraw from the territory.

The Israelis must dispel these doubts if the negotiations are to succeed. Only the return of all of the Golan Heights will induce Syria to agree to the security arrangements and normalized relations that Israel demands. Assad cannot accept less and expect his son to succeed him. A peace agreement that satisfies Syria is also the best guarantee of Israel’s security, since no future Syrian leader is likely to trade a peaceful and profitable relationship with Israel for a suicidal war.

There is reason to hope that the ongoing negotiations between Israel and Syria will eventually be successful, but an end to hostilities between the two countries would eliminate only one source of tension in the Middle East. A comprehensive peace that encompasses the Palestinians’ right to equality and independence on their own land is still the only kind of peace the Arab world will accept and that is certain to endure.

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.

When Israel Declined to Confirm Its Promised Withdrawl, Syria Talks Halted

By Richard H. Curtiss

As Syrian, Israeli and American negotiators ended their first seemingly successful round of meetings at Shepherdstown, West Virginia in early January, this writer was asked for comments and predictions on radio and television shows. My answers depended upon the questions, of course, but I predicted that the Syrian-Israeli talks had, at best, a 50 percent chance of success because the Israelis seemed unwilling to acknowledge the basis upon which the talks had been reconvened, an Israeli commitment to withdraw to the June 4, 1967 borders. As for negotiations on “the Palestinian track,” I said that the chances of reaching a final solution in time to be part of a “Clinton legacy” just before the 2000 elections were zero, no matter how richly the U.S. president is prepared to reward Israel for its withdrawal from Palestinian territory.

Interviewers, who had been predicting a possible Syrian-Israeli agreement within weeks, professed shock. But for me vindication came within days when the Syrians declined to return. As for the second even gloomier prediction, even though U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian talks are proceding as these words are being written, chances remain nil.

Let’s review the reasons it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going to happen in the talks, as I wrote in the previous issue (p. 6), buttressed now by some evidence that wasn’t available a month ago. According to an editorial in Israel’s mass-circulation Yediot Ahronot on Jan. 19, the “Syrian track” was activated after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told President Bill Clinton that Israel was prepared to negotiate a withdrawal from the Golan Heights to the Israeli-Syrian border of June 4, 1967.

This was a very significant concession. While Israeli Likud governments and some Labor Party politicians have refused to discuss a Golan withdrawal at all, serious Israeli Labor Party negotiators in the past have given the strong impression they would talk only about withdrawal to the Palestinian-Syrian international border of 1923, negotiated between the British and French after World War I, which barred Syria from access to the Sea of Galilee and from tributaries to rivers essential to all of the players in the area, Jordan, Israel and Palestine.

Although the differences between the two borders total only 7 to 11 square miles, these are crucial areas. The 1967 borders would require Israel and its neighbors to reach water-sharing agreements. If Israel withdrew only to the 1923 line, there would be far less that it would have to negotiate.

The Israeli concession was, therefore, a significant breakthough, and Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad was quick to accept. It meant that he could leave a legacy of his own-that when he was still in office Syria recovered every inch of land it had lost in 1967 when he was one of the country’s top military leaders.

Upon his arrival at the White House to open the first round of talks, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Charaa insisted on noting publicly in the presence of President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak that the talks were resuming where they had left off before the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whom the Syrians have long insisted had offered a complete withdrawal. Charaa also reminded the world that the fiction that Syrian gunners on the Golan Heights had mean-spiritedly shelled Israeli farmers below was just that, fiction, and that former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had confirmed that at least 80 percent of the armed clashes between 1948 and 1967 had been set off by deliberate Israeli attempts to occupy demilitarized areas (the lands between the 1923 and 1967 borders).

The substance of Charaa’s brief remarks was not carried at all by the U.S. media. You had to be there or be watching on television to realize that what he was saying was that he had come to the U.S. not to negotiate the extent or the timing of the withdrawal, but only the details of water-sharing and military security arrangements that would accompany the already-agreed full withdrawal.

But that was not the way the Israelis played it from day one at Shepherdstown. They wanted to activate committees to discuss water and demilitarization. But they did not want to activate committees to set a date for and to carry out the withdrawal, nor did they want to make public the line to which they had agreed to withdraw. Thus the dueling leaks, first in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Hayat, and then in Ha’aretz of Tel Aviv, and the refusal of the Syrians to return to the United States for a second round of negotiations.

So what on earth did Ehud Barak have in mind when, to get the talks going, he conceded privately to the U.S that he was willing to meet Syrian withdrawal terms, but then wouldn’t do so directly to the Syrians themselves? The Golan withdrawal may have been a ploy to scare the Palestinians into making more concessions on their track—but one that Barak had no intention of following up. More likely, however, he had reached a conscious decision to make a real peace with Syria to take pressure off himself for necessary concessions to the Palestinians.

However, knowing that the full withdrawal will be a very hard sell to the Israeli public, he has decided to extract the maximum possible financial gains from the U.S. before the Israelis vote on the treaty he signs. Thus the fantastic notion that the U.S. should pay somewhere between $18 billion and $65 billion to Israel for giving back land it seized from its neighbor in return for an iron-clad, internationally guaranteed treaty of peace—which surely Israel shouldn’t have to be paid to make at all. So even as the first round drew to a close at Shepherdstown, the Israelis began putting out the slogan that the most expensive investment in peace is cheaper than the least expensive war.

The premature revelation that the withdrawal would be to the 1967 line now has put Barak off his pace. Syria’s government newspaper, Al Thawra, has said Israel should promise in writing to withdraw to that line, obviously as the price of resuming the talks. In response, Barak has promised his cabinet he will not make any written promises to withdraw from the entire Golan to get peace negotations going again. But, clearly, he will have to, particularly as current Israeli-Palestinian talks to set “a framework for a final agreement” miss their Feb. 13 deadline.

The Israelis would like to keep the two tracks separate, with the implication that once Israel has a treaty with one party, Israel can wait for the other to meet its terms. The trouble is that Israel has no intention of offering the Palestinians terms close to anything any Palestinian leader can accept. The Israelis believe they can somehow bamboozle an aging Yasser Arafat, or an even weaker successor, into accepting whatever they offer, without the slightest understanding that a land-for-peace agreement means genuine withdrawal from West Bank and Gaza land, not just talk of withdrawals. A one-minute analysis of the withdrawals to date—as they are, not as the Israeli government, slavishly followed by the U.S. media, presents them—shows how unbridgeable is the present gap.

The original U.N. partition of Palestine in November 1947 was a breathtaking example of legalized theft.

It gave the Arab two-thirds of the Palestinian population 47 percent of the land. The Jewish one-third of the population, who owned only 7 percent of the land, received 53 percent of the entire mandate of Palestine. So that’s what the Palestinians are legally entitled to. Now look at what they’re getting.

When the fighting ended in 1949, the Israelis occupied all but 22 percent of the former Mandate of Palestine. Then in 1967 the Israelis seized the rest of it. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 of November, 1967 proposed as a final solution to the dispute that Israel withdraw from lands it seized in 1967 in exchange for Arab recognition of the right of Israel to exist within secure and recognized boundaries.

At one time Israel, under Prime Minister Golda Meir, seemed to have agreed to the deal. But by now, with virtually every country in the world, including the League of Arab States, agreed to UNSC 242, the Israelis no longer are willing to settle for the 78 percent of Palestine it awards them. Thus the “peace process,” whose purpose, from the Israeli point of view, is to procure huge amounts of U.S. aid for incremental Israeli withdrawals, while buying time to build Israeli settlements and Jews-only roads over as much of the West Bank and Gaza as possible.

Remember that “final status” negotiations were to begin when Israel had withdrawn from 40 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. That sounds like a respectable amount of territory until you realize that we’re talking not about 40 percent of Palestine, but 40 percent of the 22 percent of Palestine which is all that the Palestinians are claiming. Forty percent of 22 percent is only 8.8 percent of Palestine, but 33 years after UNSC 242 and 9 years after the beginning of the “peace process” the Israelis have not completed their withdrawal from even that. And now Barak, through his every word and action, is making clear that he has no intention of withdrawing from any more than that.

No Palestinian leader can accept less than the 22 percent assigned to his people under UNSC 242. If there is bargaining to be done, it should be over the difference between the 47 percent originally assigned them by the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947 and the 22 percent to which their claim has been reduced by UNSC 242 of 1967.

That is why the chances of an agreement “on the Palestinian track” are zero and remain so under present circumstances. Yasser Arafat, who at this point exists on the sufference of the Israelis because they believe they can make him sign off on the ridiculous and unworkable agreement they have in mind, could at least insert some reality into the process by making a stand similar to that of Syria.

Just as the Syrians have said they will be ready to discuss the modalities after the Israelis agree to give them all of their land back, Arafat apparently will have to do the same thing.

And he will need the Israeli commitment to withdraw from all of the West Bank and Gaza in writing because, unfortunately, while Syria’s record of compliance with every detail of every agreement it has entered into with Israel over the years is 100 percent, Israel’s record of complia0nce with the agreements it has signed is shameful.

Every year the Israelis delay in reaching an agreement with the Palestinians, Israel’s long-term chances of survival as a Jewish state in the Middle East diminish. Israel claimed a mid-1999 population of 6.1 million. Of those, more than a million are Arabs, and of the five million remaining Jews more than half a million for certain, and more likely three-quarters of a million, in fact no longer live in Israel. They may have been New York taxi drivers, Toronto restaurateurs or Silicon Valley software engineers for the past 25 years, but Israel counts them present so long as they return for a visit once every four years.

So whether Israel is a country of four million or five million Jews or something in between this year, it now is alone in the Middle East with 276 million Arabs, the mid-1999 population of the 21 Arab states according to the Population Reference Bureau. In 2010 there will be 352.4 million Arabs, and in 2025 there will be 456.9 million Arabs, again according to the Population Reference Bureau. And by that time Jews will even be a minority in the Jewish state.

So why are the Israelis unwilling to seize the peace they could have by giving the Syrians back the Golan, the Lebanese back southern Lebanon, and the Palestinians—who before long will be a majority within former Palestine—the 22 percent of Palestine for which they would settle? We’re all familiar with the irrational reasons of the religious settlers and the Jewish nationalists.

But even among the “secular elites” who again are in control of Israel, at least temporarily, the war with the Arabs has become a way of life. It also provides the underpinning for Israel’s only serious export industy. Using its political clout in the United States, Israel extracts not only immense quanities of economic aid, it also receives vast quantities of military hardware and military technology.

In turn it has based a formidible armaments industry of its own on this technology, producing military hardware for export and, with equal facility, transferring military technology to China and Third World countries with which the U.S. declines to do business for political reasons.

Soon after Israel receives American high-tech weaponry, Israeli technicians are helping countries around the world produce knockoffs, sometimes with an Israeli innovation or two that makes the results as formidable as anything in the U.S. arsenal. Not only does this produce high-tech jobs for Israelis, it produces Israeli billionaires.

In short, the internal concerns that keep Israel from making peace with Syria and the Palestinians may already outweigh the obvious concern that Israel cannot survive much longer without it. Therefore it will require an outside force, the United States, to halt Israel’s breakneck descent to national suicide.

Barak badly wants those billions he can collect from the U.S. for a withdrawal from the Golan. And he knows his chances of such a coup are far better in a U.S. election year than a year later. This year a Mideast peace agreement would help Al Gore’s presidential campaign, help Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign, and provide a “Clinton legacy.” And, this year only, individual Republican members of Congress are likely to go along, just because it’s an election year and their support of aid for Israel will be noted by the Israel lobby.

But there isn’t going to be a serious Middle East agreement between now and November. At best the White House can produce another empty White House photo opportunity like the meaningless Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995, and the Wye River agreement of 1998. And once again the U.S. will pay, and pay and pay.

Therefore a realistic approach is for the outgoing Clinton administration to make very clear that there will be no serious financial outlays until the Israeli withdrawal from all of the Golan is accompanied by Israeli withdrawals from all of Lebanon and all of the West Bank and Gaza. Such a stand won’t produce another phoney handshake on Clinton’s watch. But it will eventually produce a real peace that would be cheap at any price. That would be a real Clinton legacy and, realistically, it is the only possibility that remains.

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

It’s Still Possible for American Muslims to Democratize the Peace Process

By M.A. Muqtedar Khan

The “Syrian track” of the Middle East peace process is now well on its way. Both Americans and Israelis are keen to complete this element of the “comprehensive peace project” before Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad dies. It is amusing to see how eager these two countries are to make peace with a “rogue.”

Clearly the U.S. and Israel, who must have a lot of intelligence on Syria, do not have great hopes from a post-Assad Syria. Most experts on the region fear decreased stability and increased uncertainty with regard to Syrian domestic and foreign politics after Assad.

Israel at the moment is enjoying an unprecedented military and economic advantage in the region. It is the only nuclear power and, with state-of-the-art defense technology, both imported from the U.S. and indigenous, it is easily the most powerful player in the region.

With a per capita income of over $16,000, as compared to Saudi Arabia’s $9,500, Israel is the richest as well as the most developed country in the region. Given its close ties with the world’s only superpower, the picture of a secure and well-positioned power is complete.

Also given the protection it enjoys from the U.S. in the Security Council, and from the media in the public opinion court, Israel can actually afford to abuse its advantage. Remember Qana, for example. Then why the need for peace?

Israel realizes that until its existence is fully accepted in the region, threats to its future will remain. It fears the spread of nuclear technology, which would shift the balance of power away from it. But most importantly, with no one to balance Israel regionally, and balance the U.S. globally, Israel can now make peace on its own terms. It hopes to have much legal documentation and to line up global regimes to defend the peace it wishes to make with unrepresentative governments and hopes to compel future generations in the Muslim world to abide by these treaties.

There are essentially four issues that drive the geopolitics of the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli conflict and the peace process. The struggle for regional domination and leadership between Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and, until recently, Iraq. And the struggle between secular nationalist and religious movements for reshaping the identity, state and civil society in the region.

Of all the states, only Saudi Arabia is relatively stable with a more or less homogenous population and very little political discontent. However, what is outstanding about the region’s political economy is the absence of genuine democracy and economic interdependence, the two pillars of secular means of establishing stability and peace.

The missing elements of economic interdependence and political accountability do not raise the hope that the contested nature of the region will settle down in the immediate future. This also suggests that peace made in Washington may not materialize in any substantive manner in the region itself. It may only alter the nature of instability and discontentment in the region.

From Washington, the prospects for peace do look better. The disappearance of the Soviet Union, the source of Arab military supplies, and the growing frustration of continuous conflict with Israel is pushing the regional players to formally make peace.

Jordan joined Egypt in 1993 as the second Arab country to have a formal peace treaty with Israel. Formal talks between Syria and Israel appear to hold some promise.

The new Iranian president, Muhammad Khatami, has openly called for a dialogue with the West and Saudi Arabia. Israel is actively considering a withdrawal from Lebanon and all in all things seem to be improving.

However, there is one catch in the whole peace process. While the democratic needs of Israel are entertained in the conditions of peace, meaning that the concerns of all parties within Israel are considered, the same essential political freedom is not extended to the Arabs.

Islamic movements, perhaps the only spontaneous and democratic expression of political desires in the region, in Palestine, in Egypt, in Syria, in Jordan, in Lebanon are not only excluded but repressed militarily. The peace, if ever it is achieved, will be between a democratic Israel and the authoritarian, often illegitimate, regimes in the Arab world. It will not be peace between peoples.

If the Islamists come to power, then all bets will be off. Not only were they excluded from these so-called peace negotiations and treaties, but their aspirations were actually repressed militarily.

Undoing Washington-dictated political treaties may well become the first, and even legitimizing, activity of Islamic regimes. I am sure that all the parties, the U.S., Israel and the unrepresentative leaders in power, from Mubarak to Assad, already realize that. If they didn’t, now they do.

That means that the first goal after the signing of the comprehensive peace treaties would be for the U.S., Israel and the Arab puppets to start a pre-emptive war against the present/future threats to that peace. They will probably have these strategic goals: 1) eradicate Islamism by hook or by crook, and 2) delay democracy indefinitely. Given the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the peace process, democracy, like Islam, would be an enemy of this peace.

Can American Muslims play any significant role in this peace process? So far, unlike their American Jewish cousins, they have remained marginal to the issue. Not a single American Muslim is playing a formal or an informal role in the process.

American Muslims must realize that this thing will go through with or without their involvement. Therefore, they must stop hedging on the issue and come out and support the idea of a peace process in principle. A major resolution at ISNA’s annual convention, a large advertisement in The Washington Post or a well-advertised press conference on Capitol Hill with prominent Muslim leaders present may help.

Once that has been accomplished, they can then actively lobby and even challenge the legitimacy of the American role, which is so completely led by friends of Israel and which does not include any American Muslims at all. The U.S. Muslims can also label the whole process as undemocratic. This criticism will now carry a greater weight. The same denunciations prior to any open declaration of support for the peace process will carry less weight.

The timing is also good. Given the proximity of presidential elections no one will dare to anger any potential voting bloc.

For the first time this will give American Muslims a limited entree into the affair. And it is here that American Muslims can make their most significant contribution.

They can be the voice that will bring the legitimate and deeply felt concerns of the entire Muslim population of the Arab world, who are being kept so definitively out of the peace process, to the negotiating table.

American Muslims may, in a limited way, be able actually to democratize this authoritarian project. This is something which all sober elements in the U.S., including the American Jewish community, will appreciate.

It is still not too late. Dr. Seyyed Saeed, Dr. Maher Hathout, Dr. Ali Ramadan Abuzakouk, Dr. Agha Saeed, Mr. Nihad Awad, Mr. Faheem Abdul-Hadi, I hope you and your colleagues in the American Muslim Political Coordination Council are reading this.

M.A. Muqtedar Khan is a member of the faculty of international politics at Washington College, MD, and a doctoral fellow in international relations at Georgetown University. He is locally known as the “Mufti on the Internet” and is a director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

SIDEBAR

Although a majority of Israelis are against a Golan withdrawal now, when they begin to translate the huge financial benefits being demanded by their government in exchange for the Golan, amounting to somewhere between $4,000 and $16,000 for every man, woman and child not just in Golan, but in all of Israel, it may not look like such a bad deal.

And what makes Israelis think the U.S. would pay such sums? Here are some figures compiled by the B’nai B’rith Messenger, in California, and passed to us by Dr. Edward W. Miller, who writes a column for California newspapers.

Of the Jewish settlers displaced by the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, each of the 51 families in the Moshav Ogadan received $435,000. Each of the 40 families of Moshav Dikla received $558,000, each of the 8 families of Moshav Zahran received $358,000, each of the 19 families in Naot-Sinai received $445,000, and each of the 19 families in Moshav Sadoit received $650,000. Collectively the handful of Sinai settlers received $96,672,000 in U.S. taxpayer funds and became known throughout Israel as the “Yamit millionaires.” A very high percentage took their winnings and emigrated to the U.S. or Canada.

Today, some 17,000 Jewish settlers in the Golan, some of whom already have applied for U.S. immigration visas, are holding their breaths. Watching them eagerly are many of the 170,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

But when the money’s gone, what’s next? Well, it took the Israelis fewer than 24 hours to seize the West Bank and Gaza, and fewer than 48 hours to occupy all of the Golan. Heights. At that pay for those hours, what’s to prevent them from someday doing it all over again?—RHC