Palestinian-Israeli Dispute: Knowing When It's Over

By Richard H. Curtiss

"One day the peace treaty will be signed. One day Israel and Palestine will live side by side."—Arie Lova Eliav, General Secretary Israeli Labor Party, Jan. 13, 1989

"It is inevitable that peace will prevail and that the two-state solution will be achieved."—PLO Principal Deputy Salah Khalaf Feb. 22, 1989

"Middle East peace is the sleeper of the Bush years."—Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, March 9, 1989

Although football games and presidential elections "aren't over until they're over," the outcomes of wars and other clashes of peoples and ideologies are generally predictable long before the fighting ends.

When Robert E. Lee rejected command of the Union forces and joined his fellow southerners, he was familiar enough with the industrial and agricultural resources of the north and midwest to know that secession was a lost cause, unless a major European power could be persuaded to intervene in an area from which all had long since retreated. There was no such miracle and five years of bloody fighting and the waste of a generation of Americans only demonstrated what rational people understood from the beginning.

For a time after World War II began, the Axis powers won all the battles. By late 1942, however, their military expansion halted on all fronts by countries with vastly superior resources, the Axis powers faced certain defeat. Instead of negotiating, Germany and Japan futilely searched for a "secret weapon" to stave off the inevitable while the world suffered three more of the bloodiest years in human history.

So it was with the American civil rights struggle, which should have ended when the Supreme Court struck down all state and local laws that perpetuated inequality through racial segregation. Instead, while white supremacists dreamed of "massive resistance" to turn back the clock, more northern "freedom riders" and southern blacks died and, ironically, each death added to the national revulsion and increased the consensus for real desegregation.

Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied areas have earned self determination in the same manner as Americans did. Equally important, leaders representing a vast majority of the nearly 5 million Palestinians living both inside and outside the occupied territories have accepted the "two-state" solution.

The failure of America's Vietnam adventure was accelerated by demonstrations of American strength. The fatal shooting of four students by panicky national guardsmen putting down an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University diluted whatever remained of home front support for the war. The bloody, televised repression of the Tet offensive in the streets of Da Nang and Saigon, a victory for American and South Vietnamese military forces, convinced American leaders that problems there had no military solution.

After half a century, the ultimate shape of a Palestinian-Israeli settlement is clear. In 1947, a two-state partition plan was adopted by the UN General Assembly. It was manifestly unfair, awarding 57 percent of Palestine to a Jewish one-third of the population which actually owned only 7 percent of the land. Muslim and Christian Palestinians, comprising two-thirds of the population, received 43 percent of the land. Jerusalem, a city sacred to all three religions, was to be administered as a separate body.

The Israelis accepted partition, but immediately seized as much additional land as they could. The Palestinians, buoyed by false or empty promises from Arab neighbors, accepted nothing and lost everything.

If, for a generation, it was a truly intractable problem, a solution became possible after 1967, when Israel seized the areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem held by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip held by Egypt. The UN Security Council, with strong backing from both the US and USSR, passed resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in 1967 in return for Arab acknowledgement of Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized boundaries.

The rhetoric of Israel's Arab neighbors changed. When they spoke of "occupied Arab lands," they no longer meant all of Palestine. And, for a time, it seemed that Israeli leaders were ready to withdraw. License plates of one color meant the owner lived in pre- 19 67 Israel and carried an Israeli passport. License plates of another color meant the owner lived in the "occupied territories" and carried a passport from Jordan, Egypt, or the UN. The stage was set for a permanent settlement based upon "land for peace."

Obfuscators like to argue about why that settlement didn't take place. What's important now, however, is that after two more sudden, devastating Arab-Israeli wars, the stage is again set for a land-for-peace settlement.

Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied areas have earned self-determination in the same manner as did Americans. Equally important, leaders representing an overwhelming majority of the nearly 5 million Palestinians living both inside and outside the occupied territories have accepted the "two-state" solution. Yasser Arafat has said the "magic words" the US demanded as a condition for dialogue: yes to resolution 242, yes to recognition of Israel's right to exist, no to terrorism.

Israel in the time of Prime Minister Golda Meir also said "yes" to 242. In the time of Yitzhak Shamir, however, it is "no" to land for peace, "no" to negotiations with the PLO, and "no" to a Palestinian state.

So long as he continues to receive vitally needed US economic support for Israel's bankrupt economy, Shamir can continue to win elections and be the only remaining obstacle to Middle East peace. But none of his "no's" enjoy majority support in Israel. In the November elections, better than 54 percent of Israelis voted for parties willing to trade land for peace. Israeli polls during 1988 showed majorities for talking with the PLO.

Public opinion in Israel has undergone additional shocks in 1989. In January, Prime Minister Shamir was stunned at the fury he encountered during a visit to reservists outside the West Bank resistance center of Nablus. "I feel humiliated by my conduct," one paratrooper told him. "These are not the values I grew up on," said another. "it tears us apart and strengthens the Arabs," a third explained. "Only a political solution will save us from this abomination."

Chief of Staff Dan Shomron and Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli Cabinet in January that the most their military measures can do is contain the violence and buy time for a political settlement.

These complaints from the military about means only augment the complaints of politicians about ends. Former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban has been saying publicly that Israel must relinquish the occupied areas and must negotiate with the PLO.

Unofficially this is already taking place. Members of the Israeli Knesset met publicly with PLO officials in Paris in January, with PLO supporters in Jerusalem in February, and again with PLO officials in New York and Washington in March.

Dramatic changes in Israeli thinking are reflected in a March 8 report byTel Aviv University's Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies which states: "No settlement of the conflict is possible without direct negotiations with authoritative representatives of the Palestinians. Under the present and immediately foreseeable circumstances, only the PLO or, at the very least, Palestinians identified with the PLO, meet this criterion."

The Jaffe scholars considered five proposals submitted by the American Jewish sponsoring groups and rejected all of them. Instead, they concluded, in the short run there is no substitute for talking with the PLO, and in the long run, after an adequate and carefully monitored period of transition, there is no substitute for a Palestinian state.

In the US, since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and, now, the Palestinian intifadah, there has been a similar evolution of public opinion. In January, 64 percent of Americans asked told New York TZmes1CBS pollsters they favored US-PLO meetings, while only 23 percent opposed them. Asked if they thought Yasser Arafat and the PLO want peace "enough to make real concessions, " 24 percent said yes and 56 percent said no. Asked the same question about Israeli government willingness to make real concessions for peace, 28 percent said yes and 52 percent said no.

This statistically insignificant difference signals that, despite little help from the mainstream American media and none from their representatives in Congress, the American people have shed the pro-Israel bias that for so many years was depicted as a brake on potential US attempts to pressure Israel into making concessions for peace.

A Washington Post/ABC poll in January recorded the highest negative ratings of Israel in American history. Fifty-six percent of the respondents said Israel was not a reliable ally of the United States. Fifty-two percent said they had an unfavorable impression of Israel. Even more astonishing were the positive ratings. While 44 percent of respondents in the Washington Post/ABC poll said they had a favorable impression of Israel, 45 percent had a similarly favorable impression of the Soviet Union. When America's principal global adversary registers the same public approval rating as the principal recipient of American military and economic aid, it is feasible for Congress, the president, or both to consider putting conditions on US economic aid to Israel and to begin enforcing existing laws that all US military aid be used for defensive purposes, and not to subjugate Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian civilians.

All of the countries of Europe and all of the Arab states with the exception of radical Syria, Libya, and South Yemen back the two-state solution, and the position of the PLO. The Soviet Union also backs a two-state solution with self-determination for the Palestinians and security for the Israelis, and says it is willing to work closely with the United States to achieve it within the framework of the overall cooperation which is so miraculously settling other "intractable" disputes all over the world.

The main struggle, however, is over. There will be peace based upon a two-state solution, whatever Bush and Baker do. It's within their power to bring this about within a year or two if they are bold, or after more years of bloodshed and perhaps another Middle East War if they are not.

Washington Post Senior Editor Jim Hoagland pointed out on March 9: "There is one more reason why the Middle East is turning from having been nothing but a problem for the Reagan administration into a significant opportunity for the Bush administration. Middle East peace is the sleeper of the Bush years."

For whatever reason, however, President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker III have chosen to move slowly. While patiently fending off demands to end the US-PLO dialogue from fast-talking, American-raised, Likud hard-liners like Foreign Minister Moshe Arens and Deputy Foreign Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, Baker seeks to use persuasion rather than pressure to bring Yitzhak Shamir to the peace table.

While prudent in terms of US domestic politics, such a go-slow approach is an extremely risky course internationally. It requires Yasser Arafat to keep his mainstream Palestinian constituency poised expectantly at the peace table while plagued from both left and right by gun- and bomb-toting Syrian, Libyan, and Iranian-funded radicals and religious extremists. And therein lies the potential "secret weapon" that keeps Shamir and his maximalist followers from compromising.

While seeming to have no peace plan at all, Shamir, in fact, is waiting for "something" to happen. Something like the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 that can be blamed on Palestinians. Then, while Americans are traumatized by anger or horror, he hopes to crack down on Palestinians in the occupied territories, perhaps even expelling them en masse into adjacent Arab lands.

As a former terrorist chieftain who ordered the successful assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British governor general in Cairo, in 1943; and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Jerusalem, in 1948, Shamir is not without ideas. As a former Mossad chief of operations who initiated a campaign of letter bombs against German rocket scientists in Egypt in the 1950s, Shamir is not without resources.

While Bush and Baker work perhaps too patiently to bring the Israelis to the table, Arab radicals and Muslim fundamentalists will be working to force Arafat to kick over the table and depart before the Israelis arrive.

At present, he is counting on the Ayatollah Khomeini to launch more than verbal outrages against the West to help retain his own weakening grip in Iran. Khomeini recruits for his terrorist acts both Lebanese Shi'ites and Palestinians living in areas controlled by Syria, Iran's only Arab ally.

Shamir also encourages the Islamic fundamentalists who are disputing PLO leadership of the intifadah, making sure that funds from Iran and Libya reach the Hamaas fundamentalists in Gaza and the West Bank, and arresting and detaining their PLO-aligned rivals.

Shamir may be counting also on more armed strikes at Israel by Syrian directed groups like Ahmed Jebril's PFLP-GC, and by PLO-affiliated Marxist groups like George Habash's PFLP and Nayef Hawatmeh's DFLP, both of which argued at Algiers against the resolutions that made a two-state solution possible, and both of which refuse to follow Yasser Arafat's precedent in suspending armed actions.

While Bush and Baker work perhaps too patiently to bring the Israelis to the table, these Arab radicals and Muslim fundamentalists will be working to force Arafat to kick over the table and depart before the Israelis arrive.

Either way, the settlement will give the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza self-determination and a largely demilitarized state of their own. It will give the Israelis real security through a peace with all of their Arab neighbors, based upon recognized borders and guaranteed by the superpowers. It will provide equal civil and national rights for all of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim residents of Jerusalem under a joint administration.

Eventually, the economic ties linking all residents of Jerusalem will almost certainly be extended, voluntarily, to the inhabitants of the surrounding states of Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Citing such economic ties presently linking Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Yasser Arafat calls it the "Benelux" solution. The rest of the world will just call it peace.

Richard Curtiss, a retired Foreign Service information officer, is the chief editor of the Washington Report