Clinton's Strangely Homogenous Middle East Peace Team

by Eugene Bird

A remarkable puff piece on the Clinton administration's Middle East peace team of Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller and Martin Indyk was published in The Washington Post of Feb. 24. Written by Post staff writer Laura Blumenfeld, it sought to turn the awkward facts that all three diplomats are Jewish, that two have had close ties with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or its spin-off think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and that all three have lived privately in Israel into some sort of remarkable coincidence rather than an awkwardness that troubles most Americans who learn about it and that vindicates Middle Eastern America-haters.

It's not the first time Blumenfeld has embarrassed the State Department, which sent her to work in the American Embassy in Amman as a summer intern a few years ago. She returned charging publicly that sometimes pithy off-the-record criticisms of Israel by seasoned U.S. diplomats proved that they were "anti-Semites." It would be interesting to hear her characterize similar comments by State Department and White House officials currently involved with Israel, now that all of them are Jewish. But apparently none were careless enough to make off-the-record remarks, other than U.S. Ambassador to Israel Indyk's prediction to Blumenfeld that "no good would come" of her lengthy published gloat over the Jewishness of all of the Clinton foreign policymakers.

In fact it was fascinating to find that the current team members think they are doing a better job than the "Arabists" of yore by basing all current efforts on building the confidence level in Israel, rather than on finding a solution based on international law that all sides can accept. Land-for-peace no longer seems to be in the vocabulary of America's "honest brokers."

Blumenfeld concludes her article on America's official Jewish peacemakers with a remarkably candid summary: "But all three arrived at the same conclusion. A settlement will be achieved not by squeezing Israel as Arabists advocated, nor by coddling Israel as the Zionist lobby might like, but by cajoling the Jewish state to take `baby steps' just like the psychologist in the movie `What About Bob?' Or to make `incrementalist' approaches, a term Ross prefers, a technique he observed at UCLA, watching the tiny daily plot advances on `General Hospital.'"

Foreign policy by soap opera? It is interesting to speculate about how far Carter would have succeeded in "cajoling" Menachem Begin to make peace with Egypt at Camp David.

Carter himself was the ultimate key to making that first lasting peace. He was tough enough to see that both sides had to respect his power or there would never be a peace along the Suez Canal. Both at Camp David and in later shuttle negotiations, he got personally involved and he did not leave to the Arabists or to his Jewish advisers (who never were in charge of the sensitive Middle East peace process) the details of brokering the Egyptian-Israeli peace. Begin had to give up the entire Sinai and move out the settlers. Egypt had to reciprocate for the full Israeli withdrawal with a full peace.

But Carter already had a record of firmness with Begin: He had once threatened to cut off aid to Israel if the Israeli prime minister did not get his tanks and guns back across the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon within one afternoon. This successful action by President Carter was very different from the "incrementalist" approach of the Clinton team, or the equally unique solo Middle East performance of America's first Jewish secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.

Henry Kissinger once told us in 1971 that the Rogers plan of 1970 (which looked remarkably like the Camp David Agreement of 10 years later) had no chance of being implemented because "there was no support for it in the White House." As national security adviser, of course, Kissinger was the White House at that point. Nixon wasn't making decisions anywhere unless Henry supported them.

Kissinger also claimed that he had left Nixon administration Middle East policy up to Secretary Rogers "because of my [Jewish-German] background." Of course Kissinger himself was manipulating everything in the background, and Rogers did not survive long into the second term. When Kissinger then moved to the State Department to succeed Rogers he insisted on taking the NSC hat with him, which left him in sole charge of every U.S. initiative in the Middle East.

Clinton's current all-Jewish team has an equally effective approach to remaining in charge. Members simply rotate the key NSC and State Department seats among themselves.

A real end to the occupation is all that the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese want. Will the Clinton team realize this before it is too late? Or will some judicious threats from America's Arab trading partners and from the European Union achieve a peace that the present U.S. team finds elusive? Maybe they should listen to some different soaps.

Yasser Arafat Does Washington

Yasser Arafat's own diplomats and the Clinton administration laid out a remarkable schedule designed to elevate Palestinian-U.S. relations to the state-to-state level. Palestinian Authority President Arafat spent two hours with the president, had a working lunch with Madeleine Albright and was given a "co-chair" with the secretary of state of a new working group between the United States and the PA designed to meet and iron out both economic and political problems two or three times a year.

Arafat was hosted at three dinners in Washington with the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities and with Jewish- and Christian-American business figures. He also visited the United Nations to make his first call on the new secretary-general.

Perhaps as important as anything else was Arafat's visit to Houston, his first outside the New York-Washington corridor. He spoke at Rice University's newly inaugurated James A. Baker Center, and also met with former President George Bush.

He also made a stop in Georgia to meet with former President Jimmy Carter, who said at their press conference that settlements are illegal. Period.

When Arafat visited congressional leaders, the fanatically anti-Arab chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Ben Gilman, was conveniently absent. Gilman thus avoided questions on why he is holding up the American-promised payment of $10 million in USAID funds for Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian and Arab League sources remarked on the importance of Arafat's meeting with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS), which apparently went very well. The entire visit was, of course, shadowed by the Netanyahu government's announcement that it was building 6,500 houses for Jews only at Har Homa, thus further derailing Middle East peace efforts. The announcement on Har Homa (Jabel Abu Ghneim) was expected, but it confronted Clinton and his peace team with the Jerusalem question they have been trying to push off until the last possible moment in the longest peace process in history.

Perhaps because of the contentious Har Homa issue, there seemed to be a greater willingness by both White House and State Department spokespersons to venture into slightly stronger wording, expressing the opinion that the U.S. wanted both the Palestinian airport and the port in Gaza to be opened because it wanted more trade with Palestine. And on the investment climate in the Palestinian areas, the Department of State spokesman said that until the "regulations" preventing access to the Palestinian areas were changed, one could not expect investments to flow.

The Arafat visit changed little of substance. There was no ringing U.S. declaration affirming land for peace, and no inkling of what the Department might do on Jerusalem, although it did regret the closure of the Palestinian offices there.

The excruciating peace process now is almost two years behind the firm schedule set down in the first and second Oslo agreements. Defining the limits of Israel and of the Palestinian state is proving to be the costliest peacemaking effort in history. It is costing the U.S. about $25 million daily.

How so? Well, there is the $16 million a day in grants and loan guarantees given to Israel (aside from tax-deductible donations, many of them highly questionable). Then there is the $6 million a day to Egypt, about $200,000 a day to the 2.5 million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, another $100,000 a day to other refugees from the Arab-Israel wars and $300,000 a day to Jordan, and then the costs to the U.S. of maintaining certain military efforts in Israel itself as well as others in the Eastern Mediterranean that hopefully will disappear when peace finally is comprehensive.

The U.S. has paid out more than $100 billion just in the 18 years since Camp David. And that is not counting the hidden costs of special deployment of forces, nor the Gulf war, which certainly can be partly blamed on the unsettled Arab-Israel dispute.

But of course the Arab-Israel dispute has never been considered as just another line item in the federal budget. It seems there will always be American money to maintain Israeli occupation of Arab territories.