Israeli-Palestinian Peace: Everyone Wins or Everyone Loses

By Rachelle Marshall

As the United States and its allies continued their punishing air attack on Iraq throughout January, analysts were busy determining ultimate winners and losers of the Persian Gulf war. Most were uncertain as to what Iraq's eventual defeat would mean for Iran and neighboring Arab regimes, but they had no doubt about how the war would affect Israel and the Palestinians.

Treating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as if it were a zero-sum game, a New York Times editorial of Jan. 21 predicted: "Sure Losers, the Palestinians. " In the San Francisco Chronicle the same day, columnist Edward Epstein announced: "Israel Scores Big." The Times' Anthony Lewis agreed that the Palestinians had lost ground. He warned that Israelis who were once willing to make peace with Palestinians "will have in mind now who cheered when the missiles landed in Tel Aviv." And a Wall Street Journal editorial of Jan. 22 urged the US to exploit its wartime alliance with Arab nations to press those allies to abandon the PLO and "pursue mutual interests" with Israel.

The universally held premise was that the PLO had wholeheartedly supported Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, thereby forfeiting its right to represent the Palestinians in negotiations with Israel. Israel, on the other hand, had behaved with heroic forbearance by absorbing the impact of Iraqi missiles that had killed at least four Israelis and injured more than a hundred, and declining to strike back—at least for the time being.

In return for what a New York Times correspondent called Israel's "sacrifice and restraint, "Washington not only dispatched an aircraft carrier and a supply of Patriot missiles to Israel, but kept Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger in Jerusalem to express the Bush administration's "admiration and affection. " Relations between the two countries had seldom been warmer. (They were so warm, in fact, that on Jan. 22 Israel's finance minister asked for $13 billion in US aid over and above the more than $4 billion Israel is already getting this year, and the Bush administration agreed to at least think about the request.)

The problem with the accepted characterizations of Palestinian and Israeli responses to the Gulf crisis is that they are seriously distorted. There is no doubt that tens of thousands of Palestinians, having been pushed to the wall by Israel and ignored by the US, cheered Saddam Hussain for defying both of these countries and for forcing the Palestinian cause into the world's attention.

Far from supporting the invasion, however, the PLO leaders had from the beginning called for Iraq's withdrawal. In an article published in Israel and Palestine (August-September 1990), the chairman of the Palestine National Council's Political Affairs Committee, Nabil Shaath, quoted from Yasser Arafat's first statement on the crisis: "Our position is to work ... to achieve a peaceful resolution based on international legality and the UN Charter and principles through commitment to negotiations that protect the dignity and rights of all parties. " Shaath stated unequivocally: "The first and foremost of these principles requires the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait." Other Palestinian leaders were equally firm in opposing the invasion, according to Shaath, but wanted UN rather than American forces in the area while negotiations were held with Iraq.

Missing the Mark

Labeling the Palestinians as "losers" because of their alleged support of Iraq also misses the mark. In fact, they had little to lose. At the time of Iraq's invasion last August, the US-prodded "peace process" was at a standstill, and Israel's attempts to crush the intifada had become increasingly brutal.

Two months earlier, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had reneged on his own proposal for elections in the occupied territories by refusing to hold preliminary discussions with Palestinians chosen by Israel, Egypt, and the United States—an arrangement the PLO had obligingly accepted. Secretary of State James Baker reacted to Shamir's intransigence not by threatening to cut US aid but by "disengaging from Middle East diplomacy, " as The New York Times put it. "Call us when you're serious about peace, " Baker told the Israelis, thereby giving them carte blanche to continue the occupation.

Soon afterwards the United States cut its slow-moving dialogue with the PLO, ostensibly as punishment for an aborted guerrilla raid against Israel but undoubtedly in response to heavy pressure from Jewish organizations and members of Congress who feared the talks might lead to serious negotiations. The US underscored its indifference to the Palestinians' plight in early June, when it ignored an appeal by 40 moderate West Bank leaders and vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a UN investigation of Israeli brutality in the occupied territories.

Since then, Israel has taken over more and more Palestinian land in order to house Soviet refugees, and thousands of Palestinians have been fired from their jobs in Israel in order to make room for emigres. Things only got worse for Palestinians in the occupied territories after the outbreak of war on Jan. 16, when 1.7 million Palestinians were confined in their homes by an "indefinite curfew, " initially shutting down the Palestinian economy.

The Palestinians could not lose support they never had.

In fact, the Palestinians could not lose support they never had, and Israel cannot be credited with altruism for refraining from an attack on Iraq. Israel has long considered Iraq to be a threat to its own security and has wanted nothing more than to see Iraqi military power destroyed.

"Israelis want the United States to attack President Hussain, and the sooner the better," Joel Brinkley wrote in The New York Times last Aug. 30. Brinkley indicated the nature of Israeli concerns by reporting military analyst Ze'ev Schiff's speculation that if Israel launched a major attack on Lebanon or attempted to expel a large number of Palestinians, Iraq would be likely to attack. In other words, the presence of a heavily armed Iraq prevented Israel from having a free hand in the region. Given these considerations, Israel would be acting contrary to its own interests if it risked undermining the all-out US effort to destroy Saddam Hussain by intervening in that effort prematurely.

Unfortunately, the current love feast between the United States and Israel, and the unpopularity of the PLO, make US support for a Middle East peace conference seem less likely than ever. Not long after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussain proposed such a conference in order to discuss a range of Middle East issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He hinted (but did not actually make the offer) that he might withdraw from Kuwait if such negotiations were held. President Bush rejected the proposal as an attempt to link Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But, in fact, the Bush administration had never been warm to the international conference idea.

Last December, the United States finally approved a Security Council resolution calling for an international Middle East peace conference, but only after insisting that the resolution be nonbinding and that it include the words "at an appropriate time." Israel has bitterly opposed multilateral peace negotiations ever since the UN first broached the idea in 1973, after the Israeli-Egyptian war, and has insisted on negotiating with Arab governments one by one.

In 1976, the United States and the Soviet Union issued a joint call for a UN-sponsored Middle East conference that would lead to a settlement guaranteeing the security of Israel's borders and the "legitimate rights" of the Palestinian people. The Carter administration dropped the plan, however, after angry protests by the Israeli government and American Jewish organizations. The PLO had welcomed the proposal.

Since then, the United States has repeatedly rejected calls by the European Community and the UN General Assembly for an international peace conference, often voting alone with Israel in the United Nations. In March 1989, The New York Times reported that Baker had promised Israeli leaders he would "shield Israel from the mounting European, Arab and Soviet clamor" for an international peace conference if Shamir came up with a "substantive" autonomy proposal for the West Bank and Gaza. Shamir failed to keep his side of the bargain, but two months later the United States refused even to consider a Soviet proposal that the five permanent members of the Security Council meet to discuss the Middle East.

Postwar Resistance

After the war, if analysts are right, the United States will continue to support Israel in its resistance to international peace talks. According to Leslie Gelb of The New York Times (Jan. 23), the Bush administration's postwar peace plans "will displease kneejerk advocates of an international Mideast conference and give Yasser Arafat a well deserved diplomatic body blow. " Gelb said the plans call for Israel to hold one set of talks with Syria and another with Palestinians in the occupied territories. If so, certain obvious questions arise. Could Syria's President Hafez Al-Assad agree to negotiate for return of the Golan Heights without also demanding Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank? Would Israel accept PLO supporters as negotiating partners? And could Palestinians who dissociate themselves from the PLO claim to represent the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza and agree to a settlement that would be enforceable? The answer to all of these questions is almost certainly no.

Too much is still unknown about the postwar Mideast to make predictions. However, an attempt by Israel to deal separately with Arab states seems unlikely to work. The economic and human costs of the war to the Arab world will make governments in the region less stable than ever, and popular resentment against Israel and the West more intense. Arab leaders who appear too conciliatory to Israel could face trouble at home, especially if they came to any agreement that did not provide for self-determination for the Palestinians.

The one certainty about the Arab-Israeli conflict is that it will not be resolved as long as Israel and the US continue to regard it as a zero-sum game. If Israel is to survive as a state, it cannot indefinitely be surrounded by hostile Arab nations. If Israel is to exist as a healthy, secure democracy it cannot indefinitely continue to oppress a million and a half Palestinians. A-negotiated Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank is still a necessary element of peace in the area. And a comprehensive Middle East peace conference, held under international sponsorship and with the participation of the Palestinians' chosen leaders, remains the most widely accepted means of achieving a mutually satisfactory agreement between Israel and its neighbors. If George Bush is serious about a new world order in which disputes are settled through international cooperation, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which has cried out for a solution for at least 45 years, is the obvious place to start.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. She is a member of New Jewish Agenda and writes frequently on the Middle East.