"Linkage" Means Winning the Peace

By Richard Curtiss

"At last someone in authority has mentioned that the Palestinian question has something to do with the Persian Gulf war and the permanent crisis in the Middle East ... Since the war broke out, we have kept a submarine silence about its underlying cause, the Arab-Israeli problem."

—Mary McGrory, The Washington Post, Feb. 17, 1991

In launching what became the Gulf war by invading Kuwait, Iraqi President Saddam Hussain broke two Middle Eastern taboos, but almost got away with it. His Arab state attacked another Arab state, but four Arab chiefs of state seemed to support him. His predominantly Muslim state attacked another Muslim state, but some Muslim politicians and demonstrators as far away as Pakistan and Indonesia supported him.

The reason was that he wrapped his cause in the Palestinian flag, and promised Yasser Arafat a march on Jerusalem and perhaps someone else's Gulf oil fields for good measure.

Usurping the Palestinian Cause

By usurping the Palestinian cause, Saddam Hussain captured hearts and minds in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and even the United States. If the US allows him to go down in history as a hero of the still homeless Palestinians, Americans will lose the peace. This means our Arab allies will, eventually, be undermined. Our relations with all of our NATO allies will suffer. And US troops will someday be back in the Middle East, but very likely without either Arab or European allies.

This doesn't have to happen. Starting last Aug. 2, the US did a lot of things right. President George Bush rapidly and effectively came to the aid of an Arab ally, Saudi Arabia. With masterful, and expensive, diplomacy, Secretary of State James Baker turned what was a unilateral US action into a UN collective action in which the world boycotted and embargoed Iraq and, eventually, authorized collective military action to get Iraq out of Kuwait.

Secretary of State Richard Cheney, Chief of Staff Colin Powell, and Desert Storm Commander Norman Schwarzkopf also proved, to Americans and the world, the US was no paper tiger. Now is the moment, therefore, for the US to capitalize on a diplomatic and military victory on the Gulf side of the Arabian peninsula by attending to unfinished diplomatic, military and moral business on the Israeli-Palestinian side.

With leaders on both sides of the quarrel totally dependent upon financial assistance from members of the coalition that just liberated Kuwait, there never will be a better opportunity. Yasser Arafat, after years of desperately playing Arab leaders against each other to keep any of them from wresting control from him of the Palestinian cause, has suffered a double disaster.

A Double Disaster

Politically, he hitched the Palestinian wagon to the most despotic leader to arise in the Arab world in modern times. Anyone who doubts this need only reflect on the pleas by Iraqi prisoners of war that their names not be published because, if they are, "they will kill my family." Can anyone cite another Arab leader whose people fear he will kill their families for their misdeeds?

Even more disastrous for the Palestinians, the government of Saudi Arabia is convinced that Arafat entered into a conspiracy with Saddam Hussain directed at it as well as Kuwait and the other major Arab oil producers. At one stroke, the leader of the PLO has alienated the only reliable sources of funding for all its obligations, from the salaries of its bureaucrats, teachers and doctors to pensions for the widows and children of its martyred soldiers.

That the leader of the Palestinians could choose such a disastrous course can only vindicate observers who believe that Israel, both through its own Mossad and by manipulating Palestinian extremists, has systematically assassinated Palestinian leaders with intelligence and common sense for the 43 years Israel has been in existence.

On the other hand, Israel is scraping the bottom of the barrel for its own leadership. Yitzhak Shamir is a former terrorist personally guilty of every sin of which he accuses the Palestinians. During World War II, the terrorist LEHI (Stern Gang) underground organization Shamir headed fought America's British allies in Palestine at the same time Nazi Germany was fighting them in nearby Greece and North Africa. During that war, Shamir ordered the 0ling of British soldiers for their weapons, as well as the successful assassination of British Governor General Lord Moyne in Egypt in 1944.

After the war, Shamir again personally ordered the successful assassination of UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in 1948. Shamir's terrorists also perpetrated the massacre of more than 200 Palestinian men, women and children at Deir Yassin in April 1948.

Though less media attention has been devoted to it, Israel's prime minister has been almost as successful as Arafat in alienating his country's sole dependable source of financial support, the US government.

Before the Gulf war, the Bush administration had insisted Shamir draw up a plan for peace with the Palestinians, When the US agreed to his plan, however, Shamir refused to implement it.

That's when Secretary of State Baker testily told a pro-Israel congressman that, "when the Israelis are serious about peace, they know what number to call, " then recited the White House telephone number.

The US does owe something to its own people and to all of its allies.

When the US Congress attempted to conceal from American taxpayers $400 million in assistance to Israel for settling Soviet Jews by turning it into an "off-budget" housing "loan guarantee" (which the US taxpayer, inevitably, will have to pay), Shamir ham-handedly drew attention to the action.

The Bush administration conditioned the loan on assurances that the money would not lead to increased Jewish settlement activity in Israeli-occupied territories slated under UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace settlement to be returned to their Palestinian occupants. When Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy gave verbal assurances the conditions would be met, Shamir denounced Levy. Instead, Shamir's finance minister told journalists that as a result of Soviet immigration and the Gulf war, Israel would need $13 billion in addition to the nearly $4 billion in military and economic aid it receives annually.

Next, Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval complained in a Reuter interview about the US conditions attached to the housing loan guarantees: "We sometimes feel we are being given the runaround, although to the best of my understanding Israel has fully complied with the requests that were raised in this connection by the United States government."

Shoval complained further that, "not being part of the coalition ... we have not received one cent of aid in spite of the fact that we have had immense direct military costs ... not to mention even the indirect economic costs such as the loss of tourism ... We demand that these needs and necessities be addressed as swiftly as possible."

Baker summoned Shoval to the State Department for a reprimand. Then White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater on Feb. 16 released a statement "personally approved by Bush" saying the Israeli envoy's comments had been "outrageous and outside the bounds of acceptable behavior by the ambassador of any friendly country."

Shamir, however, seemed to be hard of hearing. Baker had suggested to Shoval that a rapprochement between Israel and Syria might be accomplished by demilitarizing the Golan Heights, seized by Israel in 1967. The US recognizes the area as part of Syria' although Israel claims to have "annexed" it* Shamir, who had just welcomed into his cabinet a member of the extremist Molodet party, which advocates expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli-controlled lands, released a telegram to Jewish settlers assuring them he would not accept demilitarization or any change in the status of the Golan Heights.

Director Yossi Olmert of Israel's Government Press Office elaborated on Shamir's telegram: "What we are saying is that we are not going to pay the political price" after a Gulf settlement, Olmert said.

Two opposition members of the Israeli Knesset released a statement of their own revealing that, instead of complying with the US conditions on housing loan guarantees, Shamir's government plans to increase the Jewish population in the occupied West Bank by 50 percent in three years by building 12,000 new homes in Jewish settlements.

"I've never heard that the assistance of the United States for the absorption of the Soviet immigrants in Israel is conditioned on political steps we will take or not take," Shamir blustered on Jan. 17 to a group of visiting US Jewish leaders who had asked about the Israeli statements. "It was not so in the past and I hope very much that it will not change in the future."

An Endless Debate

American Jews and Arab Americans can debate to the end of time whether Arafat or Shamir has been the most deceitful. No one can argue, however, that the US, which bankrolls Israel, or Saudi Arabia, which bankrolls the PLO, owes anything to either. The US does, however, owe something to its own people and to all of its allies, especially those in the Middle East. It owes them consistency. Armed with 12 UN Security Council resolutions passed between Aug. 2 and Nov. 29, 1990, the US moved decisively against an illegal military occupation of Kuwait. UN Security Council Resolution 242, calling for a land-for-peace settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute, was passed Nov. 22, 1967, and has been endorsed by six consecutive US presidents. But the US not only has failed to pressure Israel, it has provided ever-increasing US aid to Israeli governments that are increasingly intransigent.

A recent Time/CNN poll revealed that the American public no longer supports this irresponsible US approach. Asked if after the Gulf war is over the US should try to pressure Israel to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians, 63 percent of the Americans polled said yes and only 28 percent said no.

If the US was ready to use military force in Kuwait to support the basic premise of international law that bars the acquisition of territory by force, it surely is ready to use economic pressures against Israel in support of the same principle. It will find the whole world ready to join it, so long as the US does not seek to distort the existing Security Council Resolution 242 in favor of Israel. In December, the UN General Assembly voted 144 to 2—the holdouts being Israel and the US—for an international conference to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

It's time, therefore, for the US to stop opposing this call for justice in the Middle East, which is just as important to long-range US interests as are the defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That would be linkage, and that would be good for America.

It would recognize the justice of the Palestinian case, which no longer disputes Israel's right to exist, but asks for itself only the same right to exist. It would take the Palestinian cause away from the Iraqi despot who usurped it. It would entail the US withholding further financial aid from Israel until it is willing to withdraw from the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese land it occupies, in return for acknowledgement by the Arab states of Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized boundaries. It would count upon the United States, and most of the countries that are participating in the UN coalition today, to guarantee the peace.

Linkage of this kind would safeguard politically the victory the US wins militarily. It would show that the "new world order" applies everywhere, and not just where the US says it applies. It would assure George Bush's place in history. More important, it would assure that American troops need never return to the Middle East to make war, but only at the invitation of the people of the area to protect the peace.