Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1998, Pages 6, 37

Special Report

Whether It’s Clinton or Gore in the White House, “Mideast Peace Process” a Casualty of Monicagate

By Richard H. Curtiss

I hope it’s not immodest to point out that I predicted in a column in the spring of 1996 that if President Bill Clinton were re-elected, he would find that the Israel lobby had withdrawn the magic amulet that previously protected him from media criticism. The reason is that Clinton is only an opportunistic supporter of Israel. He can always find a public reason to do what the Israel lobby wants him to do, but if public opinion changes, so would he.

By contrast, Vice President Al Gore is a true believer in Israel—right or wrong. His university tutor, mentor and life-long friend is New Republic magazine publisher/editor Martin Peretz.

With inherited money Peretz once bank rolled Ramparts magazine, the standard-bearer of the New Left movement in the United States in the 1960s. That was the magazine that revealed that the CIA was subsidizing participation in international conferences and some educational and training exchanges by U.S. labor unions, educational groups and the National Student Association. After the “Ramparts revelations,” CIA funding stopped and so did much of the international work of the perfectly legitimate U.S. organizations, including at least one dedicated solely to closer U.S.-Arab ties.

Peretz didn’t care until one day at a staff meeting the other editors collectively point ed out that somehow Ramparts never had got ten around to criticizing any aspect of Is rael’s oppression of the Palestinians or the Israel lobby’s manipulation of Congress and the U.S. government. Peretz pushed back his chair, walked out of the staff meeting and out the front door of his own magazine. He never came back.

Without his financial support, Ramparts soon folded. But Peretz bought another once-respected, liberal magazine, the New Republic, and turned it into an ideosyncratic journal where he, alone, decides what is or isn’t written about Israel.

Peretz’s fanaticism has rubbed off on Gore, who views the Middle East, and perhaps the entire world, through the prism of Israeli national interest. If he becomes president of the U.S., he will unhesitatingly en list the United States in apartheid Israel’s war against the world. That, in turn, will inevitably tempt Israel’s hawkish Likud government to overreach in its high-handed deal ings with the Arab world, whose combined population is some 250 million peo ple, almost the population of the United States, and gaining.

If Israel, with a claimed population of fewer than six million people, of whom no more than 3.5 million are resident Jews, continues to reject further land-for-peace deals with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, it eventually will be economically isolated or destroyed. When that occurs, it might gravely harm Gore’s United States as well.

Clinton’s not just a lame duck but a sitting duck.

It reminds me of what Lyndon Johnson told an Israeli diplomat right after the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy: “You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.” If Clinton doesn’t finish his second term his successor, Al Gore, can honestly say the same thing to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu and his American supporters know this. That’s why they didn’t call off any of their media dogs on the scent of Monicagate and, even more recently, (Slick) Willy vs. (Kathleen) Willey.

Since we’re talking about past columns, I predicted a couple of years ago that history would depict Clinton as the most morally corrupt U.S. president of the 20th century. Then I had second thoughts and wrote last September that although I stood on the statement I now would remove the limitation to the 20th century—not because I’d learned more about 19th century presidents but because I’d learned more about President Clinton.

Now the whole country is learning a lot more about Clinton. So what comes next? First, his public opinion poll ratings will go down. From here on he’s not just a lame duck president but a sitting duck for any piling on the media may be put up to.

That’s fatal for the Middle East peace process. Syndicated columnist Robert Nov ak wrote in March that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is ready to go public with a U.S. plan that would call on Netan yahu to stop stonewalling and withdraw from 14 percent of the West Bank as a prelude to getting the Oslo accord final status talks back on schedule. It’s a pittance, since the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute no more than 22 percent of the Mandate of Palestine, in which Palestinian Arabs were a two-thirds majority only 50 years ago. Albright’s plan, which would build on the heavily populated 3 percent of the West Bank from which Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres already had withdrawn Israeli forces, would give the Palestinian National Authority only 17 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, or less than 4 percent of Palestine.

But as a prime minister elected on a platform of “no more land for peace,” Netanyahu probably wouldn’t make even that tiny concession, forcing a confrontation with Clinton’s United States. That confrontation should have begun during or immediately after Netanyahu’s Washington visit in February. But the media’s discovery of “Monicagate” gave Netanyahu a reprieve. Now with Clinton so sorely wounded, that confrontation is extremely unlikely to take place at all.

Limited Belligerence

Albright will have to limit her belligerence to the Balkans. She was persistent about Bosnia, finally getting Clinton to do in 1996 what the U.S. should have done four years earlier. She has started well on Kosovo, making it clear to the Serbs that they are not going to get away with four years of genocide there. But whatever she thinks about Netanyahu’s final grab for all of the Holy Land she’ll likely have to keep to herself.

No U.S. secretary of state can undertake a confrontation with Israel without firm backing from a strong president. And Clinton no longer is strong, if he ever was.

It reminds me of the punch-line of a tasteless old joke about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in Washington’s Ford’s Theater back in 1865: “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

Or in this case, what’s the state of play on the future of the White House? The Zionists are betting Gore has a better chance of winning in the year 2000 if he’s running as an incumbent after finishing out Clinton’s second term. However, there seems to be a constitutional complication here.

If Gore assumes the office before next January, he can only run once more—meaning the most time he can serve as president is six years, until the year 2004. On the other hand, if Gore doesn’t assume the presidency until after January 1999, he can run twice more, meaning he’s eligible to serve as president for 10 years—until 2008. That would be good for the environment, his popular, trademark cause, and good for the Israel lobby. The ideal scenario for friends of Israel, therefore, is to drag out the sex scandal in Washington for another year, and then look to the Democrats to prevail upon Clinton to resign.

On the other hand, many Republicans believe their best bet for taking back the White House in 2000 is to let a disgraced Clinton finish his term. Then Republicans can run against whomever the Democrats nominate as a symbol of the moral quagmire Clinton’s Washington has become. For example, in his March newsletter conservative Republican commentator Joseph Sobran wrote: “Clinton has drastically lowered our expectations, and still fallen short of them.”

This Republican strategy would mitigate against a House vote for impeachment, which in any case requires a two-thirds majority. So if he isn’t impeached, can a sitting president be indicted? Since no one seems certain, perhaps it depends upon the gravity of the charges. The sex charges are building up public reaction ranging from disappointment to outrage. But it is on charges of lying under oath, and encouraging (suborning) others to commit similar acts of perjury that a legal case against the president would be built.

Until the constitutional questions are clarified, it’s too early to predict the president’s fate. However, other issues are clearer. Whatever the combative Albright’s desires, a mortally wounded Clinton can’t take on the Israel lobby, and a dangerously mesmerized Gore won’t.

Therefore, not only is the peace process dead, but Netanyahu is free to bide his time, waiting for a major upheaval of the type Israel’s U.S. lobby tried so hard to create with its shrill insistence on unilateral U.S. military strikes on Iraq. If a Middle Eastern upheaval occurs, such as an internal attempt to overthrow King Hussein of Jordan (which might have been triggered by such a military strike against Iraq, or by the earlier Israeli attempt to assassinate Khaled Meshal, a top leader of the Islamist opposition in Amman) watch out!

Netanyahu may seize the opportunity to attempt to implement his Likud party’s solution to the “Palestinian problem.” That would be “transfer,” at gunpoint, of as many West Bank Palestinians as possible across a temporarily undefended Jordanian, Leb anese or Syrian border. If he thinks he can get away with it, Netanyahu might even extend such “ethnic cleansing” to Gaza or to the Muslim and Christian Arab citizens of Israel as well.

Would it trigger a major Mideast war? Net anyahu probably thinks not, but figures the U.S. will come to his rescue if other Arab states resort to military action to halt such Israeli genocide. Maybe that’s what Boris Yelt sin meant when he said, on two public occasions, that unilateral U.S. military strikes on Iraq would trigger World War III.

The Russians don’t have much of an army left but they still have all those missiles—pointed at the U.S. If the Israelis start massacring Palestinians who resist being pushed across a border, and Arab armies rush to the rescue as they tried to do in 1948, and the U.S. then intervenes as it did in 1973, and the Russians respond by putting their armed forces on world-wide alert as they did in 1973—well you get the picture.

It’s just the sort of thing that could happen if “the world’s only remaining superpower” had a disgraced and dramatically weakened president, or a president whose ideological hangups prevented him from discerning where U.S. and Israeli interests diverge. The U.S., unfortunately, seems destined to have both.