An American Middle East Specialist

End of Peace Process Now May Mean End of Israel Later

By Richard H. Curtiss

"The PLO...has no means to pressure the Israeli government. Only the United States could do that and thus advance the hopes of peace, but the Clinton administration sold American foreign policy in the Middle East to the Israeli lobby—lock, stock and barrel. The United States has no Middle East policy. Israel does, and the United States carries it out. This is a disgrace and will prove a tragedy for Palestinians and Israelis alike."

—Syndicated Columnist Charley Reese,
Orlando Sentinel, March 20, 1995.

Only President Bill Clinton or Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin can save the current Oslo-agreement-based phase of the peace process. Neither will.

Clinton has based his administration's entire Near East and South Asian policy on the dictates of the Israeli government and its principal U.S. lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was the easy way. Leave the driving to them, and accept plaudits for doing so from Israel's amen corner in the American media—a tail that by now wags the "mainstream press" dog.

To signal his capitulation early, Clinton installed former AIPAC officer Martin Indyk, founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a "think tank" spun off by AIPAC, as the principal White House adviser for Near East and South Asian Affairs. In the State Department he retained from the George Bush administration Dennis Ross, a former fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Ross's title in the Bush State Department had been "director of policy planning," which meant he carried out the carefully crafted Middle East policies of Secretary of State James Baker. Those led to the direct talks between Israelis and Arabs that began in Madrid in 1991 and gave birth to the current "peace process."

Under the Clinton administration, Ross's title changed and so did his functions. Instead of being the principal Middle East aide to a hands-on secretary of state, he became the "czar" of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Over and over, as the "peace process" died, Ross has sent Secretary of State Warren Christopher on fool's errands to Jerusalem and Damascus, which Christopher visited for the 11th time in two years in March. Whatever the intent, however, Christopher's latest trip could not conceal the fact that Israel's Rabin had changed course, and was using the fear of terrorism as an excuse to stop taking steps to halt the settlements and turn the Israeli-occupied West Bank over to the Palestinians and the Golan Heights back to Syria.

Clinton's Middle East policy is one that will not be undone except on a signal from Rabin. It's a signal that will not come because, whatever his original motive in signing on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993 the Declaration of Principles negotiated in Oslo, Rabin now has no intention of conceding the three minimal demands of the Palestinians: real self-rule either in the form of a sovereign state or in confederation with Jordan, a shared Jerusalem, and Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, which together constitute only 22 percent of Palestine.

It may be that Rabin calculated from the beginning that he did not have the political strength to make any of these concessions to the Palestinians or to withdraw Israeli forces from Golan. If so, from the time it took power in June 1992, the Labor government's entire "peace process" performance was a sham designed only to keep American aid flowing. In fact Rabin's goal may have been the same "Greater Israel" embraced by his Likud party rivals, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. In that case Rabin used the "peace process" to buy time to complete the "annexation" of East Jerusalem and Golan and the "creeping annexation" of the West Bank through the building of settlements. Or it may be that Rabin really did, for a time, fall under the spell of his long-time rival within the Labor Party, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who envisioned a real peace with Israel's Arab neighbors and Israeli integration as a major economic player into the booming petroleum-driven economy of the Middle East.

If Rabin ever envisioned genuine peace with the Arabs, however, the time to begin implementing it would have been immediately after the February 1994 massacre by Dr. Baruch Goldstein of 29 Palestinian men and boys at prayer in the West Bank town of Hebron. There the arrival of 400 ferociously militant Jewish "religious" settlers has kept the town's 100,000 residents in a state of turmoil for more than a decade. Had Rabin sent Israeli troops then to force the return of Hebron's Gush Emunim settlers to the nearby Gush Emunim settlement at Kiryat Arba, from which both they and Goldstein came, most Israelis would have applauded the move.

No Curfew for Settlers

Instead Rabin put the entire Arab population of Hebron under a lengthy curfew which faced them with severe hardships, some of which continue to this day. Settlers, meanwhile, were free to roam the shuttered streets, vandalizing automobiles, shooting out windows and stealing or destroying the goods in Palestinian shops whenever they were allowed to open.

When white-coveralled, unarmed international monitors were put into the city for three months, instead of allowing them to restore order Rabin restricted their activities to "recording" human rights violations. When their three-month mandate expired, instead of renewing it Rabin sent the international human rights monitors packing. It was clear from that point on that the Israeli prime minister had decided to ignore both the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Principles.

Some 28 percent of the West Bank has been confiscated for settlements or for annexation to "Greater Jerusalem." The pace of settlement building is greater now than under the Likud governments. Settlement expansion has the clear goal of cutting off Jerusalem from the West Bank, and isolating Palestinian population centers from each other. Bypass roads eventually will enable Israelis living on the West Bank to avoid coming into contact with Palestinians at all.

Israeli construction and agricultural industries, always in need of cheap labor, will be supplied by laborers imported from developing countries ranging from Romania to Thailand, 70,000 of whom already are in Israel. West Bank towns increasingly will become Palestinian "Bantustans." They will exist only as markets for Israeli goods and at the sufferance of Israeli authorities until their demoralized inhabitants drift away, to more prosperous Arab states or to join relatives in North and South America.

This Israeli scenario would leave Yasser Arafat as governor of 900,000 rootless refugees crammed into one of the most heavily populated areas of the world living under Israeli regulations which

bar Gaza from direct access to the outside world except through Israeli-controlled borders. The Gazans might even remain subject to the present ruinous Israeli restrictions that make it impossible for their fellow Arabs, or even well-meaning Americans and Europeans, to provide them with the investments or markets that would help them become self-supporting.

Whatever Rabin's original intentions, clearly his policy now is to ensure that "autonomy" for Gaza, Jericho and any other West Bank towns the Palestinian National Authority accepts, fails so that Palestinians can be labeled "incapable of self-government." As for Yasser Arafat, there is little he can do to maintain his place in history other than to continue to go through the motions of negotiating while making no further compromises on sovereignty, territory or Jerusalem.

Arafat's Dilemma

Arafat's present dilemma began with his seeming embrace of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain's occupation of Kuwait. In aligning himself with the inevitable loser in the war that split the Arab world, Arafat alienated the PLO from Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries whose resources had sustained it through a generation of tenacious resistance to Israel. Arafat also jeopardized the large and extremely prosperous Palestinian communities that had grown up in every Arab state of the Gulf except Oman.

Arafat's second major error, it now appears, was signing in desperation an agreement that relied solely on Israeli good will or U.S. pressure on Israel. As Palestinian lawyer Mona Kishmawi charged in a March seminar in Washington, DC, a team of Israeli lawyers checked every word of the Declaration of Principles, but not a single Palestinian lawyer was assigned to read it before it was signed.

In apparently losing his desperate gamble for a sovereign state for the two million Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Arafat also will be accused of having weakened the claims of more than two million others in the Palestinian diaspora for repatriation or compensation for homes and lands lost in 1948. (The 1967 refugees are supposed to be repatriated, but the Israelis now seem to be reneging on this, too.) It's a charge he'll have to live with, while making sure he makes no more concessions that might further undermine Palestinian claims.

The formal death of the Declaration of Principles probably will be certified by Israel's next prime minister from the Likud party, which rejected any agreement with the Palestinians from the beginning. Likud seems very likely to return to power by 1996, despite poisonous personal rivalries among its leaders.

Resuming its rush toward a "Greater Israel," however, will not be an unmitigated victory for Israel. True, it will be free of the demographic burden of some 900,000 Palestinians in Gaza who, together with Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel itself, almost match the Jewish population of Israel and the territories under its control. Now, instead of Muslim and Christian Palestinians becoming a clear majority by the year 2000, that may not happen until a few years later.

The Palestinians double in number every 17 years. By contrast, Israel's Jewish population of between 3-1/2 and 4 million seems to remain virtually static. Even that is thanks only to a continuing trickle of immigrants from areas of the former Soviet Union, offsetting the continuing trickle of Israeli emigrants to the United States.

In the absence of the goodwill that would have been generated by sincere and generous Israeli implementation of the DOP, the chances of politically and economically integrating Israel's tiny Jewish population into the sea of perhaps 200 million Arabs and well over one billion Muslims lapping at its borders will die with the DOP. What will remain is the cold peace with Egypt and the new peace with Jordan. The latter is getting colder by the day. Tour buses taking Israelis to Petra already are being stoned. That's only the beginning if there is to be no peace with the Palestinians.

Both the Egyptian and Jordanian peace agreements are totally dependent upon generous U.S. economic aid extending into the indefinite future, as is the economically unviable Jewish state itself in an era when American economic forecasts are increasingly cloudy.

This is Israel's reward for "winning" the peace game under the zero-sum rules it has imposed on the other players. In all but the very short run, it seems no more attractive than the "penalty" the Palestinians and their beleaguered leader now must pay for losing.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.