Forum Evaluates U.S. Role as “Honest Broker” of Peace Process

by Janet McMahon

The Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, the Washington, DC-based educational program of The Jerusalem Fund, held a Feb. 6 symposium entitled “Honest Broker? U.S. Policy and the Middle East Peace Process,” with panelists Richard Falk, director of Princeton University’s Center of International Studies; Dr. Naseer Aruri, chancellor professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; and journalist Phyllis Bennis, currently a fellow at the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Analysis.

Dr. Hisham Sharabi, director of the center, opened the discussion by addressing the unspoken question in the minds of most audience members. The phrase “honest broker,” he said, was “not intended to be ironic.” Nor did the invited speakers treat it as such, although there was not much debate about the answer. The effort rather was to identify and analyze the reasons for the peace process being “deeply flawed,” as Dr. Sharabi expressed it, and to suggest solutions beyond the “cosmetic.”

Dr. Richard Falk, the first speaker, posed the question of why the U.S. has been accepted as an honest broker, by the Palestinians in particular. “What does that say about the peace process itself?” he asked. “Compared to any other country not in the region, the U.S. is the most partisan and the least qualified” to perform that function.

Only the United States, however, was acceptable to Israel. Moreover, the U.S., as the “undisputed geopolitical leader, would not permit any other diplomatic auspices,” which would have represented an erosion of its role and interests. The PLO, Falk said, “should have publicly insisted” on a country like Norway or The Netherlands as an intermediary. “Even if they relented later,” he observed, “it would have pointed up the problem.”

Other factors in the acceptance of the U.S. role, according to Falk, include the media-fostered illusion of U.S. impartiality, as exemplified by its coverage of U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross, and the PLO’s “seeming confusion over what legitimation means,” and its “naiveté and innocence.”

The “peace process,” Falk argued, is in reality a “diplomatic process” that reflects the overall power structure in the region and internationally. The only challenges in the last three decades to U.S. hegemony and pro-Israel policies have been the OPEC oil embargo and the intifada, Falk maintained, and only a similar economic or political shock can provide the leverage to change U.S. policy. “International passivity must be challenged,” he concluded, “in order for the fundamental objective of peace—Palestinian self-determination—to be realized.”

Dr. Naseer Aruri prefaced his discussion of the period from October 1991 to January 1997 “from Madrid to Hebron” by noting that, in 1989, Secretary of State James Baker called Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s peace plan “the only game in town.” Most recently, the letter of assurance from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in conjunction with the Hebron agreement “in effect gave Israel in writing the right to determine the extent of territory from which it will redeploy its troops,” Aruri said.

In the aftermath of the Gulf warwhich, Aruri said, demolished the Arab consensus on Palestine, eliminated an important source of pressure for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, and left the Arab world more divided than ever before Baker’s letter of invitation to Madrid “basically supplanted the U.N. framework” of land-for-peace. Aruri described the Baker invitation as “taken effectively right out of the Israeli script” and ignoring the “fundamental moral issue of the wrong done to the Palestinians” as well as the Fourth Geneva convention applying to occupied territories.

The “deliberate ambiguity” of the Madrid process, Aruri said, led to a “crippling impasse” which lasted until the Oslo agreement in 1993. The Palestinian negotiating team had “held out for 22 months,” Aruri observed, and failed to get Israel to acknowledge its own status as an occupier and to cease building settlements.

A “Conspicuous Absence”

The Declaration of Principles of June 30, 1993 “upheld Israel’s position and made it the U.S.’s,” Aruri said, noting “the conspicuous absence of any reference to the exchange of land for peace” and the stipulation that “all [Palestinian] rights related to sovereignty lay outside the scope of the interim phase.”

The fact that there have been eight agreements following the DOP, he observed, “demonstrates that Israel continued to renege on its original commitment. Netanyahu is right,” he added, that from his point of view “the Hebron agreement is a ‘vast improvement’ over Oslo II,” containing as it does the “reciprocity clause” enabling Israel alone to determine whether there has been Palestinian reciprocity.

In Aruri’s opinion, Christopher’s letter of assurance to Netanyahu on Hebron was “a land-
mark” in which the American secretary of state “stressed/advised/impressed” upon Yasser Arafat the U.S. understanding of the agreement reducing the Palestinian president “to nothing more than a U.S. vassal, really.” Throughout this process, Aruri maintained, the U.S. has served as “Israel’s broker,” relieving the Jewish state of its obligations under United Nations resolutions and thereby giving Israel “carte blanche.”

Phyllis Bennis, after chiding Naseer Aruri for “stealing her line,” posited that the U.S. probably was an honest broker in the sense that a real estate broker is “honest” in having an economic interest in the outcome. The real question, she said, was one of “even-handedness, disinterest and neutrality.” Assessing the second-term Clinton adminstration using the latter criteria, she observed that it would likely be characterized by “continuity rather than change.”

Bennis maintained that Clinton came to office “without much of a connection to pro-Israel” advocates. But, she said, he is a “quick learner” and soon adopted the cause as his ownnot least, she speculated, for its photo opportunities.

The key players in his second term all are known quantities: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who “out-Israelied the Israelis” as U.N. ambassador and was “extraordinarily successful in undermining the existing international consensus” on Palestine; Vice President Al Gore, “strongly uncritical of Israel”; and Ambassador Dennis Ross, with a former AIPAC affiliation, who “told Arafat if he didn’t sign Oslo II, there would be no U.S. aid” for the Palestinians.

Bennis posited that President Clinton’s initial relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “would have been closer without [Clinton’s] attachment to Rabin.” Describing both Clinton and Netanyahu as “committed to neoliberalism representing a certain kind of internationalism” and market democracy, she said the U.S. was “clearly behind” Netanyahu’s goal of a “Levantine NAFTA.”

Having covered the U.N for several years, Bennis observed that the U.S. has “made the U.N. an activist institution, carrying out U.S. policy.” The U.N. has been relegated to the sidelines, she said, except as a relief agency and a provider of development and economic assistance, leaving Israel “one of the few colonial powers left.”

The U.S. views itself as “the sole determinant of Palestine’snot only Israel’s
future,” Bennis concluded, and Bill Clinton’s role in history will be as a “self-cast Friend of Israel.”

In the question-and-answer period which followed, an ambassador in attendance questioned the panelists’ “doomsday proclamations” and asked what their advice would be for the future. Dr. Aruri responded by noting that the preceding discussion had not been merely an intellectual exercise, and that responsibility for “doomsday” ought to be taken by those who made the policy. It was critical, Aruri maintained, to analyze “what happened that led us to this situation.” Professor Falk agreed, saying there was no point in investing further energy in illusions. The diplomatic community, he continued, was too deferential to the peace process, but it was still not too late to rehabilitate the global consensus and redefine the peace process. Bennis observed that the “peace process” as it stands is based on an inversion of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s definition of peace, i.e. “the absence of war without the presence of justice,” and called it “not only a question for diplomats.”

Dr. Hisham Sharabi noted that the mission of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine was “to clarify issues and policies concerning Palestine in the context of the constant and deliberate distortion and silencing of the Palestinian position,” and that an integral part of that effort is “to show what an inauthentic solution is.” Dr. Sharabi expressed sympathy for diplomats, who must operate “under certain definite constraints of their governments. Fortunately,” he observed, “scholars don’t.”