Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1998, Pages 15-16

Special Report

With Oslo Accords in Shambles, a President Who Let It Happen Feels Shackled by Both Old and New Mistakes

By Eugene Bird

Nabil Shaath, the most erudite financial and political mind in the Palestine Authority, with a degree from the Wharton School of Business and Economics, told a delegation on a Middle East pilgrimage last June that "President Bill Clinton has his heart in the right place when it comes to the peace process. But his own troubles personally and with Congress prevent him from acting." It was a prescient view of what happened in January as Clinton was faced with an existential threat to his administration.

As the latest made-for-media sex accusations against him began to unfold in Washington, DC, the imperiled U.S. president met for two long sessions totaling three hours with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, but avoided honoring him with a luncheon or a dinner. Two days later, with the Washington media pack by then in full cry, Clinton met with President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority, his partner in a peace agreement now four and a half years old and rapidly falling apart over Netanyahu's unwillingness to make significant withdrawals on the schedule called for under the Oslo accords. With the U.S. not even able to get the parties to meet together, it was hard to take seriously the administration's claim that the process would restart because, in the words of a State Department spokesman, "it has to."

Correspondents were left almost speechless at the spectacle of the "world's only remaining superpower" hopelessly entangled in a maze of obfuscation from tiny Israel and such blatant prevarications from Netanyahu as his Jan. 21 remark at the National Press Club that, "We have withdrawn from all of Gaza and from 27 percent of the West Bank." Even when there was no alternative to blaming Netanyahu publicly for the breakdown of the process, the president seemed unwilling to move.

Perhaps it was because of his Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky problems, not to mention the fact that Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, a long-time protector of Israel, already was talking about impeachment, and the two congressional Foreign Affairs Committee chairmen, Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Ben Gilman, both Republican Israel-firsters, were maintaining a menacing silence. This moment in diplomatic history boggles the mind.

Nixon and Kissinger Relationship Like Clinton's With Albright?

Not since the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger period has a crippled president fighting a rear-guard action at home had to face such pressures to keep the lid on in the Middle East. Clinton and Madeleine Albright appear to be evolving toward the same kind of personal relationship, according to a speculative article by Martin Sieff, the Israeli-born political writer for the conservative Washington Times.

Albright, according to Sieff's unnamed sources, is unhappy with her own peace team, headed by Dennis Ross, and is falling back on a highly regarded top professional diplomat, Thomas Pickering, for advice on what to do next in the Middle East. (Pickering has been U.S. ambassador to both Jordan and Israel, not to mention the Soviet Union and El Salvador at the height of the civil war there.)

Meanwhile, Albright is said to be having troubles herself with Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore is urging the president to stick with the Israeli government, come what may.

Bibi Befriends Jerry Falwell

A new player in the game of Middle East policymaking is the National Unity Coalition for Israel, consisting primarily of Morton Klein, hard-line right-wing president of the Zionist Organization of America, and religious broadcasters Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and their followers and claiming in full-page ads to speak for "40 million Americans," including messianic Jews, with the message familiar in the pre-peace process days and made famous by Senator Bob Packwood: "Never Give an Inch."

Netanyahu's first stop after arriving in Washington was to attend a Coalition rally of 500 people in the elegant Mayflower Hotel, six blocks from the White House, before he met with the president. There he was honored as "the Ronald Reagan" of Israel.

That, said a disgusted Republican stalwart from Las Vegas, was an insult to the memory of the Gipper. Since Falwell has accused Clinton of being an associate of Arkansas drug dealers and an accessory to murders, Clinton, too, considered the Netanyahu visit with Falwell an insult or, more specifically, a personal threat.

Jewish Democrats Outraged

Some Jewish leaders, self-appointed spokesmen for the more than 80 percent of the Jewish community that has voted for Clinton in the past two presidential elections, were outraged by the Israeli prime minister and went public with the opinion that it was a great mistake for him to use Christian fundamentalists so blatantly in his confrontation with the president of the United States.

That did not seem to make much difference to Bibi Netanyahu. An Israeli Meretz peace party source said that Netanyahu's use of the American religious right would not harm his prospects in Israel. Morton Klein, president of the Likudist Zionist Organization of America, a U.S. tax-exempt group, was a featured speaker at the rally. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which supports any elected government of Israel but is more cautious than Klein in its choice of language, was nowhere to be seen.

Netanyahu clearly has made his bed on the far right in Jewish-American politics. He is at the same time the first skilled practitioner of American sound-bite politics to run Israel, and a devout defender of keeping every inch of land.

Peace Team Mistakes?

Is it Netanyahu's alliance with hard-right Jewish and fundamentalist Christian groups that has paralyzed the decision-making apparatus in the White House? Or was it the mistakes of Dennis Ross's peace team that allowed the crazies in the Israeli political spectrum, with an assist from the Palestinian suicide bombers, to dash any hopes of re-igniting the Oslo peace process?

The U.S. peace process team has been suspect from the first, since it is heavily loaded with individuals whose only competency is in Israeli politics and Zionist goals. They are, presumably, loyal Americans, but they also are dedicated to using American power and influence throughout the world to support the cause of a strong and independent Israel.

The basic mistake was made even before Oslo by this American peace team. They did not then and do not now have any concept of equality between the two principal parties in the peace process, the Palestinians and the Israelis. Security for Israel is paramount in the minds of these U.S. Israelists. Security for the bedeviled Palestinian people is rarely on their agenda.

Nor did they start out with even a rough plan of how the Palestinian people would be granted self-determination in exchange for recognizing Israel. Alone among world powers, the U.S. has not yet publicly recognized the inevitability of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Even a majority of Israelis agree it will happen one day. The U.S. "peace" team, however, has been maintaining a facade of passive detachment as a substitute for energetic and intelligent involvement. Neither Albright nor Clinton seem able to bring themselves to say to an Israeli leader, straight out, "You must end the occupation and that means recognizing a state of Palestine."

Congressional Pressures Intolerable

This Clinton administrative timidity has been augmented by even more destructive, in terms of U.S. strategic interests, pressures from Israeli-co-opted members of Congress. The situation has become ridiculous, with Capitol Hill refusing to honor the existence of the Palestinians while giving Netanyahu full honors even as he spews out his defiance of U.S. policy. When House International Affairs Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) refused a request from the Palestinians to host a meeting with Arafat in late January, he also said that no rooms of the International Relations Committee could be used by other members to meet with the Palestinian leader. He is such a frenzied opponent of the peace process that close observers of Congress are forced to question his psychological state.

Despite Gilman's injunction, another Jewish congressman, Sam Gejdenson (D-CT), set up a meeting anyway, but it was canceled so that Arafat could meet with Gore. Crude, pandering snubs of Arafat were a stock feature of New York City's ethnic politics for decades. Now they have moved into the Congress.

The Holocaust Museum flap in which Arafat was issued an invitation, then had it withdrawn, and then was invited again after the snub had been made public was just a reflection by Netanyahu's fervent American supporters of the brutal and humiliating treatment routinely accorded Palestinians by Israel's Likud government. It partially explains why the president and his peace team tread so cautiously every step of the way and seem to compete with Congress in pledging their devotion to Israel, even when it's wrong.

The Holocaust Museum was constructed on prime public land and funded last year by $31 million in U.S. tax-payer funds. By comparison, the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum, a huge attraction, received only $39 million, and the National Zoo received $8 million.

"Palistans" Halt the Process

How could Ambassador Dennis Ross threaten Arafat, as he did in 1995, with a cut-off in aid if the Palestinians failed to agree to the Israeli-gerrymandered Oslo II maps that are the ridiculous reason for the present impasse? Anyone could see that the Israeli game was leading to a series of impotent and ungovernable "Palistans" on the West Bank, and that the danger of a Likud government returning to power made it likely that Israel would try to prevent the establishment of any contiguous territory for the Palestinians.

Arafat walked out of the negotiations but then was dragged back by Ross, who claimed that Congress would cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if Arafat did not initial the maps. (This is something that Gilman has relentlessly tried to do in any case.) The Israeli negotiators always seemed to be two steps ahead of the Palestinians and three steps ahead of the Americans.

Ethnic Blindness?

The U.S. team seemed then, as now, to believe that the U.S. in the end could argue the case successfully with the Israelis that Israel's long-term interests lay in satisfying the basic requirement of the Palestinians to get the Israeli army and the Israeli system off their backs. In fact, by voting support for Arafat, two and a quarter million Palestinians in effect said, "Yes, we will recognize the state of Israel within certified boundaries providing we can have 22 percent of the original Mandate of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza, as we used to have before 1967, or as close as possible to that ideal." It seemed an incredibly good deal for Israel, but not to the Likud of Yitzhak Shamir, Binyamin Netanyahu and the other proponents of a Greater Israel.

There was, of course, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, that made possible the coming to power of Netanyahu. But even if Rabin had stayed on, the government of Israel would have had to be pushed and pushed hard to give up enough of the West Bank in one contiguous piece to make a Palestinian state possible.

Not a Dream Team

Bill Clinton's original American peace team of Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller in the State Department and Martin Indyk at the White House, all of them Israelists and with no Arabist input at all, was hardly a dream team. It failed to anticipate the need for recognition of the PLO. It failed to require Israel to keep to the hard and fast time schedules laid down in the Oslo accords. The original agreement is only four and a half years old, but it already is at least two years behind schedules that were laboriously negotiated and agreed to as firm at Oslo. That permissiveness on the part of the Ross-Warren Christopher team led directly, after the Rabin assassination, to a stall over Hebron. Then came the bombings, and then came Netanyahu.

Are America and Israel really served best by an all-Jewish American peace team that is virtually without even token Muslim or Christian representation? Many in Washington are openly doubting it and the subject is being debated at press conferences.

Albright apparently had a chance to add a bright Muslim-American to the team, or an Arab American. It was never seriously considered.

Would that have made a difference? It at least might have made the peace team a little more circumspect in rushing to support the Israeli position that Israel and Israel alone could determine the extent of withdrawal, when at least one article of the Oslo II agreement specifically states that such withdrawals to "specified military locations" could be interpreted to mean cantonments, not vast stretches of the West Bank.

What Netanyahu seems to be considering is not a "re-deployment." It is a plain old land grab.

The same article (10-a) in Oslo II also states that such redeployment to specified military locations will be negotiated. Yet the U.S. team rushed to confirm the Israeli view that behind the agreement, in discussions, it was made clear that Israel and only Israel would determine the areas of redeployment. It was, and is, a basic mistake from which an amending series of delays and diversions have sprung.

Two Questions

One gets the sense that everything done by the American team is first vetted with two questions:

1. Will it sell to whatever current Israeli government is in power?
   
   
2. Will it harm the president's (or the vice-president's) domestic politicl ambitions?

The end game that Netanyahu wants to get to as rapidly as possible, with the encouragement of the Americans, is likely to be just as mushy in its definitions. There will be endless arguments or, as President Arafat said before getting on the plane from Cairo in late January, "God knows what new pretext he [Netanyahu] will give the president this time."

Clearly, the Oslo process is suffering the death of a thousand cuts. And America's real long-term interests in the Middle East are suffering even more. So are the interests of the Palestinians and Israelis, gripped in the clutches of an escalating struggle with no turning point in sight. Our hands-off peace team and wounded president are far more than a little responsible for this historic tragedy.