Clinton Becomes “The Good Shepherd” of Recalcitrant Israeli and Syrian Flocks at Shepherdstown

By Eugene Bird

Despite the convening of the largest Middle East peace conference since Madrid in 1991, with more than 100 participants including the Americans, the Syrian-Israeli talks at Shepherdstown, West Virginia ended in no agreement even on what to talk about first, Israeli withdrawal or security and normalization of relations. The follow-on conference 10 days later was postponed and the Good Shepherd, lame-duck President Bill Clinton, had to be satisfied with continuing the dialogue not between the parties but between Israel and the U.S. and Syria and the U.S., separately. A good try, but Camp David this was not.

A Good Step Forward…But?

Why can it be called a good step forward when the parties, particularly the Israelis, are saying there was no progress? Behind the headlines, there are several good reasons:

The establishment of four expert committees on borders, water, security arrangements and normalization of peaceful relations, only two of which, security and normalization, really functioned at Shepherdstown.
The agreement by both sides to return within 10 days for a second round.
The $18 billion price tag for military assistance being pushed by Israel even before the conference got underway, with hints that the final package of aid to Israel would approach the astounding level of $65 billion from the U.S. taxpayer. The obvious desire of Israel is for a huge new aid reward for making a peace that should actually save her money and would be close to the final step on the road to having peace with all her neighbors. The dialogue that was held defined the issues starkly without any one of them appearing to be a deal-breaker, despite all the posturing about it by Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy upon his return to Tel Aviv. The fix is in or on its way, and the Israeli voter has only two choices, either to come down from the Golan and receive the equivalent of two-thirds of all the aid to Israel over the past 50 years, which equals at least two-thirds of the annual gross national product of Israel, or continuing war with Syria.
Both parties clearly demonstrated that they want to reach a settlement and both appear to need such a settlement.

Violence Would Stop Progress

The one event that might stop the whole process and reverse it is the real possibility of further violence stemming from the lack of progress toward a real peace and a viable Palestinian statelet. The administration knows very well it cannot ignore the Palestinian track and apparently hoped to convene the second round of talks on Syria the day before Arafat’s arrival would place pressure on him, whether the U.S. negotiators admit it or not.

The carefully orchestrated Shepherdstown conference was supposed to take up where the 1996 negotiations with Syria were broken off by Israel. But it was clear that the Israelis were determined to prevent any substantive discussion about the extent of withdrawal and final borders, and most of the week was spent on “security” for Israel.

The initial Israeli demand for a withdrawal of the Syrian army behind Damascus obviously is not going to happen. Nor will Israel have monitoring stations on the Golan, though there may be a United Nations or even an American “trip-wire” presence there. The word at the end at Shepherdstown was that monitoring would all be done by satellite.

U.S. Seven-Page Memorandum

The U.S. made a final push for peace by introducing to the Syrian and Israeli delegates a seven-page working document to be taken home and studied before they return in nine days to resume negotiating on their differences. The document, or self-serving versions of it, soon appeared first in the Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat, published in London, and then on Jan. 13 in Ha’aretz, a Tel Aviv daily.

The Al-Hayat article appears only to be a statement of the positions of each side, with a little posturing from the Syrians about what the Israelis are really asking for. The Ha’aretz article, however, reads like a legal document. Most notable is the request of Syria to remove the settlers from the Golan when Israel withdraws, which Israel has not agreed to, implying that the Israelis are attempting to persuade the Syrians to agree to the presence of Israeli settlers in Syrian territory.

Both sides seem ready to adopt peaceful relations with each other, and are willing at the signing of a memorandum to establish diplomatic relations, including an exchange of embassies.

Syria and Israel demand access to electronic and space warning systems, and Syria insists that the parties be warned simultaneously, not allowing Israel to have an edge. Aside from the agreements, however, huge differences still exist between the two nations.

According to Ha’aretz, the Syrians are basing negotiations on the June 4, 1967 lines. The Israelis do not appear to be proposing any definite border but instead are “taking into account security and other vital interests of the Parties,” which for Israel would be water. The Israelis are insisting on maintaining their same level of water consumption, while Syria understands the water issue to be “based on relevant international principles and practices.”

Entering into the third round of Israeli–Syrian negotiations, it is clear that the positions listed above are starting positions, only the beginning of a long series of adjustments and trades that will have to be made before any formal treaty can be submitted to the Israeli electorate. There are several “deal breakers” in these positions for each side, and it is now a question only of whether further discussions can reach an acceptable compromise on settlers, borders, and water. Some tiny American towns have been placed on the map of world history because they were chosen to host a major presidential conference. Fulton, Missouri, where British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made his immortal charge that the Soviet Union had dropped an “Iron Curtain” across Europe, became forever identified with the beginning of the Western alliance that won the Cold War.

In recent years Camp David and Wye Plantation have become identified with the Middle East peace process. Now Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a town of 2,000 that hosts an additional 3,500 students at the local four-year college, has been chosen primarily because it was within 75 miles of Washington, DC, so that the president could easily helicopter or, in bad weather, drive if necessary to join in the consultations on ending 50 years of confrontation between Syria and Israel.

And it was important to have only one hotel available, which was just large enough so that both delegations plus their American counterparts could be placed in the same building with each other, but isolated from the media.

To paraphrase Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, good accommodations make for good negotiations. The Clarion Hotel, all four floors of it, was taken over and thoroughly isolated by state troopers. Perhaps the only bad portent was that the hotel is on the edge of the town’s main cemetery. But no one seemed to care about that and no delegates were seen musing over the bleak inscriptions on early 19th century grave markers.

The president cited the proximity of the Antietam battlefield, and its vast cemetery, as a warning to the Middle East. Antietam, just across the Potomac River from Shepherdstown, was the site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, and was visited by several delegates, including Barak.

The citizens of Shepherdstown went all out in greeting the 55 Israeli and 35 Syrian delegates, and unknown legions of Americans. In fact, the American delegates and their support staffs were at least double the total of Middle Eastern delegates.

Controlling the Spin

The arrangements for isolating the press effectively limited them to twice-a-day formal press conferences. Local newspapers had a field day covering the events and speculating on what was really happening behind the closed doors of the Fish and Wildlife Service training academy, where the presidential party began the conference, which then moved to the Clarion Hotel for the rest of the time.

It is always amazing how dependent the two parties in such negotiations are on support by the Americans. They were unable to agree before they came on what was the starting point for resuming talks, canceled by Israel four years ago after two bus bombing attacks in Jerusalem, although neither was attributed to Syrian involvement.

That did not matter to Israel then, so one has to wonder what would happen if another such series of bombings by Palestinian extremists should occur in the spring of 2000. Would Israel again walk away from the Shepherdstown talks? Very likely, giving power to the violent and refusing to pursue a “peace of the brave.”

The talks at Shepherdstown were primarily between experts and generals from both sides and not between dedicated peaceniks as at Oslo. Does this reflect the difference between American and Norwegian approaches to making peace in the Middle East? Decidedly so, for it was not just the Israelis insisting on Syrian commitments to absolute security for the state of Israel, but the Americans themselves who, perhaps realistically, strove to set security of the state of Israel ahead of peace.

“Withdrawal Equals Borders”

The American team tried to include from the beginning some reference to withdrawal from the Golan by changing the terminology to “borders.” Israel agreed to start negotiations in a security committee and in a normalization of peaceful relations committee, but refused to begin talking about borders and water.

Instead the Israelis agreed to discuss these issues only with the Americans but not directly with the Syrians. That is an Israeli diplomatic technique seen before at Wye River, where it took several days to reach agreement on which horse came before which cart. Obviously Israeli negotiators will continue to use Philadelphia lawyer techniques to gain time and advantage in the Syrian talks: Their mantra of security first will prevent any free-ranging break-throughs in the two all-important areas of setting borders, and sharing water.

Instead, demilitarized zones even beyond the Golan are being sought by Israel with no comparable zones on the Israeli side. The fact that the 1967 war, in which Israel seized the Golan, was begun by Israel, not Syria, is lost to the American press.

Still, the Good Shepherd, as some of the correspondents were calling the president by the end of the first week, was able to use the same tactic used at the Wye River talks between Israelis and Palestinians 15 months ago: listen to both sides, then prepare a paper setting out “areas of agreement and disagreement,” and then work with both delegations on specific small steps that can be agreed upon.

The following negotiations will be difficult but could lead to an early agreement, probably based on the old international border; a complex of demilitarized zones, none of which are likely to be inside Israel; security monitoring by satellite, supplemented by a U.N or U.S./U.N presence on the summit of Mt. Hermon, and some agreed division of water resources.

This will not be the peace of the brave. But, regardless of its complexities, it probably will work if it is equally unsatisfactory to both sides.

Eugene Bird, a retired foreign service officer, is president of the Council for the National Interest and diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Report.

SIDEBAR

The Truth Will Out

Career foreign service officer William Harrup was dismissed from his position as U.S. ambassador to Israel in 1993 after he warned in a speech that Israel could not expect to remain the major recipient of generous U.S. foreign aid indefinitely, and that it should begin converting its semi-socialist economy to a free-market system. The Washington Report reported the reason for Harrup’s dismissal at the time, even though the Department of State refused to confirm that he had been summarily fired by Warren Christopher, the secretary of state during the first Clinton term. Surprisingly Ambassador Harrup, after he returned to Washington, refused to discuss the reasons for his abrupt withdrawal from Israel.

Finally, however, the now-retired diplomat has spoken out. In an interview with Washingtonian magazine published in its January 2000 issue, Harrup explained: “U.S. policy to Israel is always special. No one wants to push Israel hard.”

He went on to describe how Congressman Tom Lantos (D-CA), a Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor and hard-core supporter of Israel, created a firestorm on Capitol Hill against Harrup after the U.S. envoy made his speech, at a time when U.S. aid made up 8 percent of Israel’s budget.

“Even though people [in the U.S.] were working on how to reduce our economic aid to Israel, which is now happening, I had gotten out in front of that move,” Harrup told Washingtonian. “That caused the political leaders here to feel, ‘We’ve had enough of this guy.’ What was most painful was that Secretary of State Warren Christopher, with whom I had worked in the Carter administration, never spoke with me about it. I wouldn’t have expected Clinton to, but Christopher let others handle it.”

Harrup added, “I don’t regret having done it. It was good for Israel and good for us, but people react sensitively back here if anyone in Israel feels the United States is throwing its weight around too much.”

Clinton political appointee Martin Indyk, a former paid Washington lobbyist for Israel who became Harrup’s successor and who now has been appointed for the second time to the post in Tel Aviv, was then one of the people who axed Harrup. Career foreign service officer Sam Lewis, who served an unprecedented 10 years as U.S. ambassador to Israel starting in the 1970s, and who was one of the staunchest U.S. supporters of hard-line Israeli policies, was sent to Israel to inform Harrup he had been fired.

The Harrup incident made clear to independent-minded and objective professional foreign service officers that they had better toe the Lantos-Lewis line and leave Israel alone to decide for itself when it might choose to cut back its U.S. aid intake.—E.B.