Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1999, pages 16-20

The Israeli Elections: Another Chance for Peace Or Just Domestic Job Rearranging?—Three Views

Israeli Candidates Debate Palestinian State, Settlements, Lebanon and Syria, But Peace Is Not an Issue

By Rachelle Marshall

Palestinians must have had a powerful feeling of déjà vu as they watched the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Albanians from Kosovo this spring. The tragedy that befell the Albanians differed only slightly in scale from the one endured by more than 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 when Israeli armies drove them from their homes and their land. But although events in the two places have striking similarities, the reactions of the West then and now could not be more different.

The NATO allies have responded to the plight of the Albanians with a massive air assault on the Serbs, aimed at stopping Serb attacks on Albanian guerrillas and restoring the refugees to their land under the protection of NATO troops. In contrast, the Palestinians expelled by Israel remain in exile, forbidden by the Israelis to return home and denied any compensation for what they have lost. Palestinian villages have been erased from the map, replaced by homes for immigrants from Europe, New York, and Chicago.

Today the inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy are more evident than ever. The Clinton administration has all but promised independence to the Albanians in Kosovo. But when Yasser Arafat visited Washington in late March to discuss a possible declaration of statehood, Clinton warned him sharply against making such a declaration, declaring that statehood is an issue that could only be decided through negotiations with Israel. At the behest of pro-Israel lobbyists, Congress had already rushed through a resolution to that effect.

Palestinians hoped that Clinton would at least promise later U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state if Arafat agreed to postpone the announcement, but no such promise was forthcoming. The Palestinians may not even receive the U.S. aid they were promised when they signed the Wye agreement. Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat assured members of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy on March 9 that the aid packages to both sides were “locked at the hip,” and that Palestinians would not receive their allotted $400 million (over three years) until Israel was given its extra $1.2 billion (in one year). This despite the fact that according to the State Department the Palestinians have fulfilled their obligations under the Wye agreement and, also according to the State Department, Israel has repeatedly violated it. Even the Palestinians’ annual aid package of $300 million has been held up in Congress.

The Palestinians did receive heartening news from the 15-member European Union when, on March 25, the EU declared its support for “the continuing and unqualified Palestinian right to self-determination, including the option of a state.” Although the EU asked Arafat to postpone his declaration of statehood for a year, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu immediately accused the Europeans of trying to force “a dangerous solution” on Israel.

Privately, Netanyahu may have welcomed the EU statement, since he has made Palestinian statehood one of the two major issues in his campaign for re-election. Immediately after the EU’s action he began predicting that a Palestinian state would form an alliance with Iraq and “we would find ourselves with an Iraqi threat on the banks of the Jordan River.” Netanyahu’s opponents, including Labor candidate Ehud Barak and the Center party’s Yitzhak Mordechai, have been noticeably silent on the subject.

The other issue Netanyahu hopes to capitalize on is the status of East Jerusalem, where his government has rapidly increased the number of Jewish settlers while systematically attempting to reduce the Arab population. Although all of the major candidates insist that Jerusalem must remain undivided, Netanyahu sought to score additional points with the far right by ordering three Palestinian service organizations in East Jerusalem that had operated freely for years to transfer part of their functions to the West Bank. Meanwhile several European diplomats, refusing to recognize Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, defied pressure from the Israeli Foreign Ministry by meeting at Orient House in mid-March with several Palestinian officials. The Israelis responded by revoking the travel documents of Palestinian dignitaries Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi.

Aside from the personal animosity between Netanyahu and Mordechai, there are few clearcut issues on which the candidates differ, a fact that prompted one Israeli to describe the campaign as “a dismal play in which there has been little ado about nothing.” A recent editorial in the Israeli magazine Challenge even predicts that, because the next Israeli prime minister will be unable to move forward on Oslo without the support of the other major parties, he will be compelled to form a national-unity government. Which candidate should lead it? According to Challenge, “It is doubtful whether the answer really matters.”

The editorial is only partly convincing. It is true that Center party leader Mordechai says he would consider forming a coalition with Likud, Netanyahu’s party, if he is elected, and Barak has joined with former Likud member David Levy of the Gesher party to form the One Israel ticket. But although differences between Labor and Likud have been blurred, there is one significant difference between the candidates. Unlike Netanyahu, either Barak or Mordechai might be able to achieve a breakthrough on the question of Lebanon.

All three have promised to withdraw Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, but only Barak and Mordechai are willing to resume immediate negotiations with Syria. Netanyahu says he will deal only with Beirut, insisting that the Lebanese government must guarantee Israel’s security before any withdrawal can take place. The Lebanese in turn insist that Israel withdraw unconditionally, in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 425.

Lebanon became a major issue of the campaign after seven Israeli soldiers were killed in one week last April. Polls taken at the time showed that two-thirds of all Israelis believe the government is not doing enough to end the fighting.

After another Israeli soldier was killed on April 12, Israel enlarged the occupied zone by seizing the town of Arnoun well north of it. When a group of journalists approached the scene the Israelis fired on them, seriously wounding one reporter in the back as he ran away.

The Israelis originally had sealed off the town in February, after blowing up several of its houses and forcing most of the 2,000 residents to flee.

Shortly afterward, however, in a dramatic display of courage, students from Beirut liberated Arnoun by tearing down the barbed wire. (See Stephen J. Sosebee’s article in the April/ May 1999 Washington Report, p. 9.)

What none of the candidates acknowledge, because it has been erased from official memory, is that by remaining in Lebanon after its 1982 invasion, Israel created an enemy where there was none before. That invasion violated a year-long cease-fire between Israel and the PLO that the Palestinians had scrupulously observed despite repeated provocations by Israel’s then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.

But meanwhile Arafat had alarmed the Israelis by launching a diplomatic effort designed to enlist international support for a Palestinian state. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was designed to abort this effort by destroying the PLO.

According to former Undersecretary of State George Ball, the Israelis were far more worried about the PLO as a political force than as possible terrorists, and consequently they set out to eliminate the organization’s territorial base in Lebanon and disperse its leaders. By doing so, Ball writes in his book Error and Betrayal in Lebanon , “the Begin government hoped to gain a free hand to impose its will on the leaderless West Bank Palestinians while restricting the concept of Palestinian ‘autonomy’ to the supervision of such tasks as street cleaning and garbage collection...”

The predominantly Shi’i Muslim Lebanese in the south, who resented the presence of the Palestinians in their territory, welcomed the invading Israeli troops with flowers. But their welcome turned to hostility when the Israelis treated the area as enemy territory, desecrating mosques, ransacking houses, and herding the men into detention centers. The Hezbollah guerrilla forces organized and took up arms only after Israel set up a permanent “security zone” in southern Lebanon and refused to leave.

Israel’s continued occupation of Lebanon helped to give Netanyahu his narrow victory in 1996. Many Israeli Arabs refused to vote for Labor Prime Minister Shimon Peres because of Israel’s Operation Grapes of Wrath in April of that year, during which the Israelis shelled a U.N. base in southern Lebanon, killing at least 91 Lebanese civilians who had sought refuge from the heavy bombing. This year the major candidates, aware that Arabs make up nearly 15 percent of the electorate, are making an effort to win their votes. All three, including Netanyahu, are promising to spend more money on schools and other public services in Arab communities, and Mordechai has pledged to appoint an Arab to his cabinet.

Such promises have been made before every election, but this year a new figure in the race might force the winner to follow through. Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, said he would run on a platform demanding an end to the expropriation of Arab land, greater equality in budget allocations, the expansion of Arab communities, and Arab membership on Israeli decision-making bodies. Bishara is counting on a run-off on June 1 between the two top candidates, at which point he will recommend that his supporters vote for Netanyahu’s opponent—but only if he agrees to Bishara’s demands.

For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the one issue that most concerns them, the steady loss of their land to Jewish settlements, is not likely to be affected by the coming election. In the past five years, under both Labor and Likud governments, the settler population has grown by nearly 10 percent a year. Sixteen new settlements were started on the West Bank just in the four months between November 1998 and March of this year. As one settler said, “We continue to build. This government comes and this government goes, and nothing changes but what sits on the ground.”

Although the U.S. envoy to Middle East peace talks, Dennis Ross, has called the settlement activity “very destructive to the pursuit of peace,” the Clinton administration has done nothing to discourage it. The same administration that is willing to reduce Serbia to rubble to restore the Kosovo Albanians to their homes is unwilling to exert even minimal pressure on Israel to stop the dispossession of Palestinians.

Yet with every day that passes the restrictions and deprivations imposed on them by the Israeli government become more severe. The Foundation for Middle East Peace recently listed the individual house demolitions, land seizures, arbitrary punishments, and petty cruelties inflicted by Israeli authorities on the Palestinians during the month of February alone, in order to illustrate the fact that the Israelis are engaged in “systematic, thoroughly conceived oppression, imposed to further nationalist goals.”

Given these realities, whether Arafat declares a Palestinian state this year or next makes no difference unless the Palestinians can eventually take control of their own land and water, and their own borders. This is something no Israeli politician now on the scene will agree to without strong pressure from Washington.

This would mean a drastic change in U.S. policy, which until now has been to support whatever Israeli government is in power. But as political scientist Jerome Slater argued in the March/April issue of the Jewish magazine Tikkun, since the Israeli government is the primary obstacle to peace, such a change is necessary in order to salvage the peace process. Otherwise, he predicted, “There could be “a moral disaster, a disaster to the true national security of Israel, and, sooner or later, a disaster to U.S. national security.”

The fact that the Oslo peace process is currently at the bottom of the agenda while Israel holds an election and Washington focuses on its war to rescue the Kosovars does not make Slater’s warning any less urgent. On the contrary, unless the tensions and resentment created by Israel’s actions are resolved, they could someday erupt in exactly the kind of tragedy currently taking place in the Balkans.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.