With Mideast Peace and Clinton Presidency About to Both Go Over a Cliff, Is There a Connection?

By Richard H. Curtiss

"The Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida wrote this week that 'the Jewish clique' had determined to use his encounter with 'a plump, corpulent Jewish girl' to teach Clinton a lesson in 'slavish loyalty,' and that his chosen escape involves 'attacking Iraq under the pretext of "doing away with a dictatorial regime."' This accusation is an extreme, false and obnoxious version of a suspicion widely shared or at least entertained elsewhere, not least in Washington."

—Editor Stephen S. Rosenfeld, Washington Post, Jan. 30, 1998.

Thursday, Jan. 22, was supposed to be the day when Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, in a joint White House press conference with President Bill Clinton, would make a direct appeal to the American people through the U.S. media for intervention to save the Middle East peace process. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's unwillingness to carry out Israeli withdrawal commitments signed by his Labor Party predecessors at the White House in September 1993 and again in September 1995 had been revealed during Netanyahu's White House visit two days earlier. Now it was time for Arafat to announce that he had faith the U.S. would resume its long-suspended role as "honest broker," and for Clinton to indicate that he was prepared to do so.

The problem was that on that day the White House correspondents weren't asking questions about the Middle East. They calculated it was their only chance to confront President Clinton with questions about the newest, and by far the most serious, White House sex scandal, which had first been reported in The Washington Post two days earlier—Netanyahu's second day in Washington.

As a result, it had prevented even those few Americans who follow foreign affairs closely from realizing that the Israeli prime minister's two meetings with Clinton, who offered no lunch or dinner, and his meetings with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whose only function in his honor was a breakfast, had been totally unsatisfactory.

Netanyahu had refused to bring a map outlining even a proposed withdrawal. Nor would Netanyahu agree with U.S. insistence that Israel's long-delayed withdrawal should be in the "double digits." As a result, a full year after the first of three final territorial withdrawals was to have taken place, there still is no firm Israeli withdrawal offer on the table at all.

Clearly only forceful U.S. intervention can possibly bridge the gap between the roughly 2.9 percent of the West bank presently controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and the 92 percent Arafat has insisted the Palestinians must control before they enter into final status talks with Israel. But none of this was discussed at the Arafat-Clinton press conference.

Instead, as Yasser Arafat sat smiling fixedly, media questions focused on allegations against the U.S. president not suitable for daytime television. The media frenzy didn't begin or end with the Arafat visit, but it left three huge questions for Middle East watchers in its wake. Where does the peace process go from here? Where does Bill Clinton's presidency go from here? And is there a Middle East connection to the fact that both seem to be going over a cliff simultaneously?

The Peace Process

In late 1997, Clinton had the leaders of a number of mainstream national Jewish organizations to dinner. The conversation at this White House event was urgent and frequently emotional as the Jewish leaders sought to convince Clinton that unless he used the power of the presidency to crack down on Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister would surely destroy the peace process and squander what may be Israel's last opportunity to integrate peacefully into the Middle East.

Clinton staffers reported that of those present, the politically experienced Clinton was the most skeptical. His questions indicated he was not convinced that those urging him so passionately to stand up to Netanyahu would be there to support him when Netanyahu unleashed his own considerable assets among Likud-supporting members of the U.S. Jewish community and within the so-called U.S. "elite media." In hindsight it is easy to see that Clinton's extreme reluctance to take on Israel might also have stemmed from knowledge of his own personal vulnerabilities—like Monica Lewinsky. Nevertheless, things started stirring in Washington.

In January leaks appeared in the U.S. press that Madeleine Albright had lost confidence in her all-Israelist Middle East peace team and was turning for new ideas to the third-ranking State Department official, Thomas Pickering, a brilliant and highly regarded career officer whose six ambassadorial assignments had included both Jordan and Israel. Back from a brief retirement to serve as State Department under secretary for political affairs, Pickering apparently had ideas to save the peace process. But activist Albright, who was largely responsible for convincing Clinton to intervene in Bosnia in 1995, was having trouble selling them to the cautious president on the eve of the Netanyahu and Arafat visits.

The result was, in the words of one U.S. Jewish weekly newspaper, a Netanyahu visit that was "not as bad as expected" by Netanyahu's U.S. supporters. Then, with the Arafat visit all but buried in the headlines about Clinton's alleged affair since late 1995 with then 21-year-old White House unpaid intern Monica Lewinsky, little of Arafat's visit was reported at all.

Nevertheless, the Palestinian leader had arrived in Washington with a letter formalizing Palestinian recognition of Israel's right to exist and also a list of which of the 33 articles in the 1968 Palestinian National Covenant had been annulled in a vote of the Palestinian National Council in 1996. Albright in turn stated for the first time that the U.S. view is that there is no further question "of substance" concerning the Covenant and that Arafat's letter "addressed the concerns about the ambiguities" in the 1996 vote.

Although details of the U.S.ÆPalestinian talks were not released pending Albright's subsequent separate meetings in the Middle East with both Netanyahu and Arafat, it appeared that the Clinton administration is seeking an Israeli withdrawal from 12 percent of the West Bank (meaning about 3 percent of the original British Mandate of Palestine) and a halt to most construction in Jewish West Bank settlements. There was no announcement or leak about what the U.S. would do in case of Israeli refusal.

Clinton's Future

By the time Arafat left, however, Americans were transfixed by the growing shadow of Monica Lewinsky over the White House. Although public opinion polls didn't show it, talk among the media pundits indicated that no one except Clinton true believers and his paid apologists in Washington believed his explanations in the latest of the personal scandals that have dogged him since before his 1992 election as president.

Assuming, as do most U.S. opinion makers, that he lied about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the fate of his presidency seemingly depends upon technicalities. If it can be proved that he lied under oath, he probably will be advised by Democratic Party elders to resign. If it also can be proved that he or his close friend, Washington attorney Vernon Jordan, urged Ms. Lewinsky or other women to deny affairs that actually took place, Clinton certainly will resign in hopes of avoiding criminal charges of suborning perjury. And if there is at least one Secret Service witness to a sexual tryst between the president and Lewinsky, as the rumor mills have it, that will only hasten the resignation.

Oddly, many members of the president's own Democratic Party are anxious to see a fatally wounded Clinton presidency end as quickly as possible—to minimize long-term damage to the party and give Vice President Al Gore time to establish himself as a competent incumbent before the presidential elections in the year 2000.

Many Republicans, by contrast, would be content to see the scandal play itself out for as long as possible. In fact, they would be pleased to see Clinton finish his term so that Gore would be deprived of an incumbent's advantage in 2000. A destructive battle in the primaries between Gore and other Democratic challengers would greatly improve Republican chances in the November 2000 elections.

When the Clinton term ends depends upon evidence being gathered by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr. But whether it ends within weeks, or drags on for many painful months, as was the case with President Richard Nixon in the Watergate investigations, it seems likely that President Clinton will not finish his second term and that two years from now Vice President Gore will be campaigning in national elections as the presidential incumbent.

Conspiracies and the Middle East Connection

It was Hillary Clinton who first raised the word "conspiracy" in the current case. On Jan. 27 she alleged repeatedly that the Monica Lewinsky charges were the result of a "right-wing conspiracy." However, one could also make the case for a Middle East connection, and some people already are doing so, as noted in The Washington Post quotation at the beginning of this article.

In fact, when Israel's largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, asked Lewinsky's attorney, William Ginsburg, if Lewinsky wanted Clinton to step down as a result of her charges, Ginsburg replied: "On the contrary. We are fans of President Clinton and admire his positions and policies concerning Israel. Clinton is very positive toward Israel and the Jews, and Monica and I are Jews."

According to the Israeli newspaper, Ginsburg elaborated further on his own feelings, saying, "I am torn because I fear for the fate of the presidency in our democracy, and I don't want the president to resign. Who knows who will come after Clinton and how he will deal with Israel?"

But that is not how Netanyahu's supporters feel, especially those who know that Gore will be even easier to manipulate than Clinton.

Irv Rubin, chairman of the militant Jewish Defense League, told the Mobile (AL) Register, "I find it fulfilling that a Jewish woman is going to be the one to bring him [Clinton] down. She is an assimilated Jew, not a religious Jew, but [that] does not matter because she is a Jew and I find that very satisfying."

In the Middle East, people old enough to remember believe there was a direct connection between President Richard Nixon's well-documented plans to get tough with Israel in his second term, and the Watergate investigations, spearheaded by The Washington Post, that led to his resignation. Europeans lean toward the same explanation. But 99 out of 100 Americans, literally, have never heard of it because of the iron wall of U.S. media silence whenever charges arise of Israeli intervention in U.S. affairs.

Similarly, although conspiracy theories with a Middle East connection will be largely absent from U.S. press accounts of the Clinton case, historians may find the similarities to the Nixon case hard to ignore. Unlikely as it seems that 21-year-old Monica Lewinsky set out in late 1995 to entrap Clinton in a case of political blackmail, given her extraordinary sexual history that can't be ruled out categorically. However, it is what happened after rumors of the affair began to surface that provides the most solid grist for the conspiracy mill.

This writer is on record as having said and written early in 1996 that if Clinton won re-election for a second term, he would no longer enjoy the media protection that had served him so well in his first term. My prediction was based on the knowledge that U.S. backers of Israel would see Gore, with his stiff demeanor and lack of the common touch, as a difficult president to elect, but one who could be depended upon to put the whole might of the United States behind whatever policies Israel follows. Gore's past dependence upon the Israel lobby, his choice of Martin Peretz and other fanatic supporters of Israel as mentors, associates and staff advisers, and his performance as a senator and vice president all attested to that.

What could be a surer way of getting this dependable friend of Israel into the presidency than exploiting, or at least fully reporting, Clinton's self-destructive tendencies to bring his own presidential term to a premature end? Although as yet there is no conclusive evidence that this is what is happening, there is circumstantial evidence pointing that way.

It appears that Monica Lewinsky boasted openly that she was having an affair with Clinton. In fact, Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff was said to have been working on the story for several months, based largely on some anonymous telephone calls and on tapes of revealing conversations with Lewinsky first offered him by "literary agent" Lucianne Goldberg. Nor did he seem in any hurry to break his story until the weekend before Netanyahu's and Arafat's scheduled visits to Washington.

Then Isikoff and Newsweek did a remarkable thing. When they had their story ready for publication on Jan. 17, they were persuaded that printing it then would interfere with investigator Starr's attempts to gather recordings that could be used in court. So Newsweek postponed the story for a week.

But three days later, after Starr had his evidence, The Washington Post, which has the same ownership as Newsweek, broke the story on Jan. 20, the second day of Netanyahu's visit. Americans will recall that it also was The Washington Post which single-handedly kept Watergate alive for months until it resulted in the resignation of President Nixon.

So, just as The Washington Post provided whatever evidence was necessary for a special prosecutor to bring down Nixon, the Post-owned Newsweek cooperated again with a special prosecutor investigating Clinton. In both cases, someone wanted to get a U.S. president badly. As before, who that someone was this time will be the subject of intense speculation. But in both cases Israel was protected from a very serious confrontation with a U.S. president.

The result in 1998 is best summarized in the words of British journalist Robert Fisk: "The U.S. president—who never did more than complain privately to Israel about its wish to destroy the Oslo agreement—no longer has the slightest leverage over the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. And a war between Israelis and Palestinians, ever more likely given the threats they are making against each other, will cost many more lives than Mr. Clinton's pin-prick missiles against Iraq."

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

SIDEBAR 1

Under Secretary Thomas R. Pickering

The official to whom Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is said to have turned for ideas to keep the Middle East peace process alive is 66-year-old Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas R. Pickering. During a 37-year foreign service career from 1959 to 1996, which included assignments as U.S. ambassador to Jordan, Nigeria, El Salvador, Israel, India, the Soviet Union and the United Nations, he established a reputation for unmatched brilliance and political savvy. Pickering returned in 1997 from a brief retirement to assume the State Department's third-highest position.

SIDEBAR 2

The Holocaust Museum's Invitation to Yasser Arafat

WITH THE VISIT OF YASSER ARAFAT to Washington all but buried in the headlines about White House intern Monica Lewinsky's alleged affair with President Bill Clinton, the only aspect of Arafat's activities that received widespread attention was the strange tale of his invitation to visit the U.S.-taxpayer-supported Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC

Arafat had been asked by State Department peace team head Dennis Ross and his deputy, Aaron David Miller, both of whom are members of the museum board of directors, to include the visit in his Washington itinerary. Told it was necessary to assure U.S. Jews that he understood their pain over the genocide that took place before and during World War II in Europe while he was a child in Palestine, Arafat agreed.

Then he was informed by the museum's director that he would not be accorded a VIP welcome, but could stand in line like anyone else. (Presumably while pickets spat on him and potential assassins drew a bead.)

Arafat canceled his museum visit, but then a minor storm broke out in Washington. Whose museum is it, anyway? many Americans asked, noting that U.S. taxpayers had contributed to the site and are contributing $31 million per year for its upkeep.

So Arafat was formally reinvited for a tour but "not as a head of state." Desiring not to be drawn into a controversy in Washington, Arafat emerged from his second White House meeting Thursday evening to tell the audience at a Willard Hotel reception in his honor by the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation, a largely Jewish-funded organization, that he "would try to visit the museum" before leaving Washington the next day on Jan. 23. He didn't make it, but said he would try again next time. —RHC