A Palestinian-American Peace Activist

U.S. Toleration of Israeli Insatiability Shut Down the Only Game in Town

By Muhammad Hallaj

The Arab-Israeli peace process is in deep trouble. Israel has outwitted itself again and brought itself and the Middle East to another dead end. Taking advantage of a balance of power skewed in its favor, and of regional and global circumstances which seem to absolve it of the need for restraint, Israel has succumbed to its insatiable appetite for gain and soured an historic opportunity for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors.

It is unfortunate that, because they were unexpected, the small and symbolic achievements of the peace process encouraged such exaggerated expectations that many people failed to notice that the horse was hitched behind the cart. The PLO-Israel Declaration of Principles was not much more than an agreement to seek agreement at a later date, though it was widely advertised as a peace treaty. The Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement was hardly more than a formality, and it did not require the resolution of any of the substantive issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Repeated predictions of impending breakthroughs on the Syrian-Israeli track routinely turned into disappointments. Now the Israelis and Syrians seem no longer to be even on speaking terms. Euphoric visions of peace and prosperity crumble as they collide with hard reality.

Israel's habit of living by the sword is souring its peace with Egypt. Its insistence on the right to maintain a nuclear arsenal while it hypocritically denounces weapons of mass destruction in the region does not reassure the Arabs about its true intentions.

None of this should surprise anyone. Israel derailed the peace process from the very beginning by refusing to acknowledge that it is an occupying power and not a competing claimant to "disputed lands." It negotiates from the arrogant premise that the Arabs are to be dealt with as criminals on parole, and that they have no rights but only claims which Israel may or may not choose to grant, depending on whether or not the Arabs pass its tests of good behavior.

The horse was not hitched behind the cart by accident. The strange and unproductive arrangement is a deliberate Israeli design for the peace process. It requires the Palestinians to cease resistance to Israeli occupation while they continue to suffer under that occupation. It requires Syria to normalize relations fully with Israel even as Israel continues to occupy Syrian soil. It requires all the Arabs to befriend it while they live under the shadow of its nuclear arsenal and need its permission to pray in Jerusalem.

After his electoral defeat in June 1992, Israel's former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir confessed that he did not negotiate with the Arabs in good faith. I was stalling, he said, and was prepared to stall for 10 years while the process of Judaizing "the territories" continued. Yitzhak Rabin's strategy differs in method but not in purpose.

There is hardly a more effective strategy to abort the promise of peace in the region. It explains why the Arab peoples increasingly are wondering not only if the peace process will survive but also if it is worth resuscitating.

The failure of the peace process will be particularly hard on the Palestinians. All the other parties will be affected adversely, though in different ways, by its collapse. They all have sufficient assets, however, to survive as they have done before. But the Palestinians squandered major national asssets by betting on this peace process. They have become so politically fragmented that, for the first time since the PLO came into being 30 years ago, there is no Palestinian majority anymore.

Moreover, by signing the Declaration of Principles with Israel without coordination with the other Arabs, the PLO provided those who wanted it with the pretext to unburden themselves of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinians today are more on their own than at any time before.

The Palestinian leadership needs to undertake an urgent effort at damage control, even as it continues to explore whatever possibilities remain in the talks with Israel. Its first task should be the restoration of a Palestinian consensus, or at least a Palestinian majority. PLO institutions which have been allowed to atrophy since Arafat set up shop in Gaza must be reactivated and revitalized. The leadership should seek renewal of its mandate, either through elections or in the Palestine National Council. Palestinian-Arab relations, particularly with Syria, Jordan and Egypt, should be reassessed and reformulated.

The Palestinian leadership should reach out to the diaspora, its intellectuals, activists, and business people and mend fences with them to restore lost confidence and neglected national resources. Above all else, the Palestinian leadership should make it definitively clear to everyone that it will not precipitate a Palestinian civil war in the occupied territory by resorting to strong-arm tactics in dealing with opponents of the peace process or those who engage in legitimate resistance to a foreign military occupation which has not ended.

Finally, after three and a half years of inconclusive talks with Israel, Palestinian objectives no longer are clear. The leadership should recommit the Palestinian national movement to the proposition that the Palestinian people are willing to negotiate how they are to be freed, but not whether or not they will be freed.

Ironically, the crisis of the peace process may make possible what has not been possible in terms of reorganizing internal and regional Palestinian relations, by removing a principal irritant in those relations. The Arab-Israeli peace process lost its moral power when it degenerated from a process of reconciliation to a scheme of molding the Arab world to fit Israel's priorities. If this deviation is not quickly corrected, the peace process will not only fail but it will deserve to fail. The last thing that the Middle East needs is the legitimization of the grievances and the injustices which embroiled it in decades of conflict.

The U.S. government is not an innocent bystander. The fact is it has taken it upon itself to manage the Arab-Israeli peace process. And because it has gone to great lengths to secure Arab participation in spite of Arab misgivings about the faulty design of the process, the U.S. owes the peoples of the Middle East more than occasional sermons about the virtues of peace.

Israel does not need encouragement of its intransigence. The U.S. has been too tolerant of Israel's dangerous toying with the first real opportunity to resolve the conflict. America has tolerated Israel's obvious covetousness of more Arab land, its dismissal of "non-Jewish" rights in Jerusalem, its provocative settlement activities and closure of the occupied territories, the nuclear threat to its neighbors and its arrogant disregard of its commitments to the Palestinians by obstructing elections, the transfer of authority, and the repatriation of persons displaced by and since the war of 1967.

Guiding the peace process out of the absurd labyrinth into which it has been allowed to wander, however, remains primarily an Arab responsibility, achievable only by a persuasive effort to make Israel understand the great difference between pacifying the Arabs, and making peace with them.

Muhammad Hallaj is director of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine in Washington.