After Israeli Elections, Balance Must Be Returned to Peace Process

by Richard H. Curtiss

"Israeli security is far more threatened by a hungry, frustrated population on its borders than by open borders that would allow that population to live a decent, normal life. When that happens, terrorism will stop."—Harvard University research scholar Sara Roy speaking at Middle East Policy Council seminar, Feb. 27, 1996.

Representatives of 27 nations, including heads of state of half of the 14 Arab League member states attending the March 12 "Summit of the Peacemakers" in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh resort, had to keep reminding themselves that 1996 is an election year for Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres (May 29) and for U.S. President Bill Clinton (Nov. 5). Delegates came prepared to put up with a lot of verbal half-truths and evasions, and did.

In fact Arab representatives were not there for a love feast with Israel. They were there to retain the military, political and economic support of the United States against external and internal threats by demonstrating their support for the U.S.-initiated Middle East peace process. They knew people in their own countries are deeply divided over the unbalanced nature of the Israeli-Palestinian peace and the appropriate degree of support for the Palestinians, but united in negative feelings about Israel.

Most Muslims and virtually all Arabs, from pushcart peddlers to presidents and kings, see Israel's presence and conquests in the Middle East as the last Western imperialist grab of Arab lands, and the only one that hasn't been rolled back.

There was no doubt in anyone's mind, however, that the primary purpose of the summit was to remind the Israeli electorate of two things: First, that the Labor government of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his successor, Peres, had taken Israel more than half way out of 48 years of isolation from its Arab neighbors. And second, that the Labor government had nearly doubled U.S. financial assistance to Israel.

In 1993, the first year after Rabin assumed power, with drawdowns of U.S. military stocks by the Israel Defense Forces and the beginning of an annual $2 billion in U.S. government loan guarantees, U.S. government grants and loan guarantees to Israel rose to $6.3 billion. In fiscal year 1996, with fewer military drawdowns but loan guarantees continuing, U.S. aid to Israel totals some $5.5 billion.

Like the summit, President Clinton's subsequent night and day in Israel also were designed to drive home these facts while not giving visible offense to Peres' election rival, Benyamin Netanyahu and his hard-line Likud party.

The Clinton administration has concluded that a Likud election victory will halt the peace process. In fact, Likud has criticized even the Israeli withdrawal from six Palestinian towns and cities that, together, have returned to the Palestinians less than one percent of the original Mandate of Palestine.

Undoubtedly the Clinton visit made its election year point about Israel's increasing acceptance in the neighborhood. Knowing it is an election year for Clinton as well, Peres reciprocated. Trailed by reporters, he introduced Clinton to a group of Israeli schoolchildren as "one of the greatest presidents that the United States has ever had."

Clinton knows, however, that the Jewish support at home upon which he is heavily dependent both for campaign contributions and for gentle media treatment is conditioned on generalized administration support for Israel, and not just for one or another political party in that country. Therefore, Clinton artfully left the impression that, so long as he is president, U.S. financial support will remain available to Israel, no matter what either a Peres government or a Netanyahu government does after the election.

For example, after the four suicide bombings in which 58 innocent victims died and which inspired the Peacemakers Summit, the Israeli government made it clear that its sealing off, one from another, of eight Palestinian towns and 415 villages, and the closure of Jerusalem and Israel proper to Palestinians from either Gaza or the West Bank, were done more for punitive than security reasons. As a result, Palestinians were going hungry and, just in the time that the U.S. president was at the summit with Prime Minister Peres and touring Israel afterward, at least five innocent Palestinians also died while being held up, unnecessarily, at Israeli checkpoints.

A man who suffered a heart attack at a checkpoint near Ramallah died while awaiting the arrival of an Israeli ambulance (since Palestinian ambulances could not go through the checkpoint) that took half an hour to travel three miles. A woman from Gaza seeking to travel into Israel for specialized medical assistance died after being held five hours at an Israeli checkpoint.

A three-week-old baby being transported by ambulance from Qalquilya to Tulkarem, both liberated Palestinian cities, died while the ambulance was being held at an Israeli checkpoint between them. At another checkpoint a woman being rushed to a hospital to give birth to twins was halted. While the vehicle transporting her remained immobilized, she gave birth to one child who died on the spot. Only when the woman began hemorrhaging while lying on the ground in front of the obdurate Israeli soldiers did they let the vehicle resume its trip to a hospital where her life was saved but the second child also was delivered dead.

There have been no retaliations against Yigal Amir.

These tragedies all took place before President Clinton left Israel. Only a few hours after his departure, the international press was invited to set up cameras in front of the two-story stone and cinderblock house in Rafat village, near Nablus, occupied by the widow and two young children of Yahya Ayyash, the "engineer" blamed by the Israelis for seven bombings before Hamas halted them in August of 1995. It was Ayyash's Jan. 5 assassination by Israel's Shin Bet internal security service that broke the "truce" announced by Hamas and set off a renewed round of three suicide bombings by Hamas-affiliated "pupils of Ayyash" in Jerusalem and Ashkelon. While the media watched, the Ayyash home was blown up, as were houses of two other suicide bombers and an adjacent house in the village of Burqa, destroyed accidently during one of the reprisal demolitions.

To date, Palestinians point out, there have been no such retaliations against the homes or families of Israelis like Dr. Baruch Goldstein of Kiryat Arba, who murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer, or Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. Although there can be no more dramatic illustration of the racist nature of the Israeli government, there have been and will be no protests from the Clinton White House.

The election year antics to show the Israelis how tough their incumbent leader is on Arabs are being played out against a background of public opinion polls. Last summer, with polls showing equal voter support for Labor and Likud, Yitzhak Rabin had hoped before facing re-election to reach a deal with Syria whereby the Syrians would grant "full peace now," thereby removing hostile armies from all of Israel's borders, in return for Israeli withdrawal and displacement of Jewish "settlers" from the Golan Heights after election day. But Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, mindful of the Jewish state's unbroken record of reneging on promises or assurances except under U.S. pressure, declined, primarily because he knew there would be no such U.S. pressure from the incumbent administration.

Then Rabin's Nov. 4 assassination broke the public opinion deadlock, giving Peres a 10- to 15-point edge over Netanyahu. After a last, futile try with Assad, Peres decided to move up elections from October to May 1996 to capitalize on his lead in the polls.

However, the suicide bombings, which also included one in Tel Aviv by Islamic Jihad, allegedly in retaliation for another truce-breaking Israeli assassination last Oct. 26 of Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shiqaqi in Malta, caused Peres' standing in the polls to plunge below that of Netanyahu. Even the real or staged confession on television of an arrested Hamas military wing leader charging that the purpose of the suicide bombings was to ensure a Likud victory in the Israeli elections had little initial effect.

By the time Clinton left Israel, however, the polls showed support for Peres back at the level of support for Netanyahu, and rising. Given increasing hopes among Israelis for real peace with their neighbors, Peres again seems to have a better than even chance of winning another term. More suicide bombings could change that, but in that case Peres might resort to spectacular moves of his own. These might be more assassinations or even a military strike of some kind against Iran, which he took pains to depict in his Sharm el-Sheikh speech as "the capital of terrorism."

An Israeli military strike for domestic political purposes would be nothing new. Prime Minister Menachem Begin's aerial strike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 brought him from far behind in the polls to an election victory only two months later.

However, to carry out during or just after an American president's visit what in any other country would be branded by the international community as collective punishment and reprisals, both banned under international law, is another matter. President Clinton's silence implies U.S. approval, something for which individual Americans, and their friends among Arab regimes openly or quietly backing the Middle East peace process, may someday pay dearly.

There is no question that it is in the American interest, and the interest of the Israeli people as well, that Israeli rejectionists, like the leaders of Likud, not return to power. When Israel was created by American pressure in the United Nations and then was allowed to seize and hold half of the land assigned by the United Nations to the stillborn Palestinian state, Arabs everywhere compared Israel to the Crusader Kingdom established on the same Levantine shores centuries earlier. As Middle Eastern resistance to those European interlopers grew, and Western enthusiasm and support for that incursion waned, after 100 years the Crusaders were gone.

For Israel, established in 1948, nearly half a century has passed and its population is no more than five million, of whom some one million are Palestinian citizens of Israel. If Israel's next government makes no effort to finish the job of making peace with its more than 200 million Arab neighbors, sometime before the next 50 years have passed, virtually all Arabs believe, Israel, like the Crusaders, will be history.

That is one reason why Hamas militants, and secular Palestinian rejectionists as well, really do hope Likud will win in May.

A Symbiotic Relationship

Likud has had a symbiotic relationship with Hamas from the latter's beginning in 1987. After the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, the Likud-led Israeli government encouraged the growth of the already existing Islamic Jihad and of the newly established Hamas (the name means "zeal" in Arabic and is an acronym for "Islamic Resistance Organization" in Arabic) as a counter-measure against the growth of support for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, and in order to fracture the leadership of the intifada. Money from Iran and elsewhere was allowed to find its way to Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank, while the Israelis made every effort to stop the flow of outside money to Arafat supporters. It was only in 1989 that the Israelis realized that they had created a monster, and sought to hinder its growth by arresting Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, its paralyzed founder, who now is serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison.

Preventing a return of the Likud's disastrous manipulations by re-electing a government headed by Shimon Peres, however, does not necessarily ensure Israeli continuity. That depends solely on the course he chooses to follow after the election.

Most Israelis have rejected, and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has given up on, what once was the official goal of the Palestine Liberation Organization,a democratic, secular state in which every citizen, Muslim, Christian or Jew, would have equal rights and one equal vote. Such a state would have replaced Israel as a Jewish state, but it would have ensured Jewish continuity in the Holy Land and presumably a rebirth of Jewish communities in the other Arab states from which most have fled.

The second alternative is the Likud vision of a "Greater Israel" extending from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, with Jews controlling the vote and most Palestinians reduced to second-class, non-citizen status. Having no votes and no economic opportunities in an openly discriminatory Jewish state, the Likud theorists reason, would induce the Palestinians to leave. In fact, however, the Palestinians would have no place to go and within 5 to 10 years would outnumber the Jews in "Greater Israel." The history of Israel as both a democracy and a Jewish state would end, probably in a bloodbath, far short of a century after its birth.

The third solution, support for which grows among Israeli Jews with each bomb blast, is "separation" of Palestinians and Israelis into two distinct states. They would have clearly demarcated borders just as unambiguous as those that separate the United States from Mexico and Canada. Under the right conditions, most Palestinians would unite behind this plan as well.

Inevitably, if he is re-elected and then enters into final-stage negotiations for implementation of the Oslo agreements, Peres is going to be thinking along these lines. But to make "separation" work he must demonstrate a generosity and realism that have not been shown in previous dealings by Israeli leaders with the Palestinians.

When the United Nations divided the Mandate of Palestine, it assigned 47 percent of the land to the Palestinian Arabs, who then constituted two-thirds of the population, and 53 percent to the Jews, who then constituted one-third of the population. It was manifestly unfair and the Palestinians reacted accordingly. In the 1948 fighting that followed, the Israelis increased their hold to 78 percent of the land. In 1967 they seized the rest, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, in what they called a "pre-emptive" attack.

Now, Yasser Arafat has agreed to a peace based upon restoration of the pre-1967 boundaries, meaning a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank encompassing only 22 percent of the original Palestine. To achieve a lasting peace, the Israelis must agree, unambiguously, to a return to that so-called "Green Line," leaving the rest to the separate, sovereign Palestinian state.

The United Nations plan in 1947 and 1948 was to keep Jerusalem a "corpus separatum," internationally administered and not a part of either the Israeli or the Palestinian state. Both Israelis and Palestinians, however, want Jerusalem to be their capital. Yasser Arafat is prepared to accept a "condominium solution," whereby the two states share the entire city. If the Israelis want, instead, total "separation," they are going to have to redivide the city,submitting the holy places within the tiny walled Old City to international control,and then returning the other portions of East Jerusalem and the West Bank they have unilaterally "annexed" from outside the "Green Line" to the Palestinians.

The questions of Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlers are the most emotional ones, but in some ways they are the most easily resolved. Palestinians who wish to return to homes within Israel's borders that were taken from them in 1948 must be allowed to return to live as Israelis, or be offered compensation for their lost homes and lands that will allow them to live with dignity elsewhere. The Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank and Gaza must compensate the original owners of the lands they occupy and then agree to live in Palestine as Palestinians, or return to Israel.

The water problem may be the most complicated of all, since both Palestinians and Israelis are to a large extent dependent upon waters that rise in Syria and must be shared with Jordan. Israelis also depend upon water from aquifers that flow under the West Bank. Here international aid will be needed to increase, through desalination projects, the total supply of water available.

At present the Israelis waste water on a colossal scale, primarily on uneconomical agricultural projects whose original purpose was to provide employment for Jews and thereby remold the Jewish people into agrarian laborers. Now, with most of the labor provided by Palestinians or workers imported from as far away as Romania and Thailand, the raison d'étre for the projects has vanished. Whatever agreements are reached must ensure that gross inequities between per capita availability of water to Palestinians and to Israelis are ended.

Finally, "separation" must extend to the economic arena. At present the Palestinians are largely prohibited from selling their agricultural and other products in Israel, and from importing manufactured goods from anywhere but Israel. The system seems designed to provide cheap Palestinian labor for the Israelis, and to keep the Palestinians from developing an entrepreneurial economy of their own.

Any lasting settlement to which Yasser Arafat can agree must provide direct access for Palestinian goods to European, Middle Eastern and other markets. Palestine must have its own ports and airports, and direct and unhindered border crossings into Egypt and Jordan. Duty-free transit of people and goods between the Gazan and West Bank components of the Palestinian state must also be permitted.

None of these problems will be solved permanently by a Labor-dominated government that is not prepared to abandon Israel's practice of imposing edicts from a position of strength on the Palestinians, rather than negotiating with them from a position of equality.

It appears that, if he is re-elected, Shimon Peres is prepared to enter into serious negotiations with the Palestinians in order to further his dream of an Israel sharing in petroleum-generated Middle East regional prosperity. What will be difficult for him to do is to stop cutting the corners in his negotiations.

For example, Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo agreements on the understanding that they are based upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242's stipulation that Israel will withdraw from lands occupied in the 1967 war in return for Arab acknowledgement of Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders.

Arafat complied with the Israeli demand for recognition of its right to exist in 1988, and his recent election victory legitimizes his signature on any treaty. But if Israel retains all of the West Bank and Gaza land it has expropriated for Jewish settlements, that will leave less than 10 percent of the land of Palestine for a Palestinian state instead of the 22 percent implied in Resolution 242. Arafat cannot accept this and retain his legitimacy.

A final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would open the way to recognition of Israel by the Arab and Islamic worlds. But whether the moment is seized depends first upon Israeli voters and the leader they choose. Perhaps there is little more that President Clinton can do to influence Israel's choice in May. There is much that an American president can do after Israel's election, however, to influence how Israel's prime minister approaches the three years of final-stage negotiations with the Palestinians.

Hopefully, President Clinton was listening when Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa replied to rejectionist Arab criticism of Egypt for hosting a meeting designed primarily to boost the re-election prospects of Israel's incumbent prime minister.

"We want to close the file on the Arab-Israeli conflict," Moussa said on March 12, the day before the summit. "We are not in a game to get an Israeli peace. It should be balanced. It should be an Arab-Israeli peace. Otherwise...it would not be durable."

What American presidents do in the next three years may, in fact, determine whether a Jewish state at peace with its Arab neighbors exists 50 years from now or whether, like the Crusader Kingdom, its final passage is marked only by a few picturesque ruins and some blood-soaked pages in the Middle East's ever-astonishing 5,000 years of recorded history.