Acrimonious Albright–Sharon Meeting Is a Domestic Political Plus for Israeli Hard-Liners

By Eugene Bird

It was, for the sake of the peace process in the Middle East, a critical moment on the road to the Israeli elections and a new coalition government. Ariel Sharon, foreign minister of the Netanyahu government and kingmaker in the 1996 coalition that permitted Netanyahu to undermine the peace agreements, was visiting Washington in mid-April en route to Moscow.

He had just made a statement in Tel Aviv suggesting that the Serbs were really good people who had helped Jews escape the Germans and had rescued hundreds of American pilots. Besides, a Muslim breakaway state in Kosovo would send the wrong signals to the Middle East (meaning the Palestinians).

Sharon Broke the Rules

Secretary Madeleine Albright was trying to concentrate on keeping the NATO alliance together over Kosovo. She really did not need a junior ally like Israel, important as it might be domestically, making noises distinctly out of tune with the NATO effort to end ethnic violence in Yugoslavia. She was visibly upset and it showed in the grim photo-op at the Department of State.

The spokesperson later was to tell a pack of curious correspondents that Albright had spoken with the minister about his stand on Kosovo and his equally anti-American position on Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Jamie Rubin’s words were a shock to all who degrade U.S.-Middle Eastern relations by promoting instead a “strategic alliance” with Israel.

And he continued responding in a similar vein to further inquiries about the settlement policy of the present Likud government for several days afterward. What’s going on here?

Netanyahu Needs Russian Votes

Ariel Sharon, according to the Israeli press, felt he had to confront the Kosovo issue and come down on the side of Russia in order to gain 3 or 4 percent more Russian immigrant votes for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in the May election. He risked Israel’s American alliance to gain 30,000 voters for Likud!

Sharon is a loose cannon, even by Israeli standards. But his actions almost always are calculated to further his own political goals, and this time it was to play to the Russian immigrant gallery, demonstrating his independence of America on Kosovo. He went on to Moscow and said even more outrageous things about the NATO effort for the benefit of Russian TV, which every immigrant looks at in Tel Aviv nightly.

Sharon was immediately disavowed by Netanyahu himself, who said that his foreign minister was speaking personally, and not for the government. The prime minister sent an Israeli field hospital to Skopje, Macedonia to help the refugees and agreed to take 120 of them to Israel.

The peace parties in Israel fear the Russian vote will again put an anti-peace prime minister in power. It is a strange anomaly that the stalled American-sponsored peace process may finally be destroyed by the very immigrants for whom the U.S. donated so much money ($10 billion in loan guarantees and some $5 billion in special aid for resettling Russian immigrants). And destruction of Israeli-Palestinian peace will be far more costly both to the American taxpayer and to the strategic interests of the U.S. in the Middle East.

One could make the case that each year’s delay in finding a way to peace in the Middle East costs the American taxpayer at least $6 billion directly and at least an equal amount in additional mobilization and maintenance of forces in the Middle East. (In fact the political cost is incalculable. It includes the loss of American credibility with the 300 million people in the Middle East and another one billion Muslims, plus the encouragement given to political and religious extremism, “rogue regimes” and “international terrorism.”

Miscalculation by Sharon?

A study of Gallup poll results from the week before Sharon visited the U.S. compared with the week after the Israeli public learned of his Kosovo ploy indicates that, at least in the short run, Netanyahu did not gain but lost. The week of April 9 Netanyahu was the choice of 42 percent of Israeli voters and Labor Party candidate Ehud Barak was chosen by 45 percent for the projected second round of elections to be held June 1. A week after Sharon’s visit, the same pollsters found that Netanyahu had not moved at all but Barak had moved up to 48 percent.

A Quarrel Over Semantics

But the damage to U.S.-Israel relations had been done, and the Department of State continued to return to the subject of settlements. Spokesman Rubin pointed out on April 12 that the U.S. had received repeated promises from Israel’s present and former governments that there would be no new settlements and no expansion of settlements beyond “contiguous territory,” however one might interpret that term. By any interpretation, such a policy would forbid huge expansions of existing settlements on Arab lands on the West Bank and perhaps in Gaza.

Yet the U.S. had found that there were both new settlements and expansion of old ones that violated Israel’s promises made to the U.S. and the promises made at Oslo.

Why Sudden Strong Words?

These were strong words for an administration that knew very well that they were going to influence some Israelis against the present government of Israel in the elections only a month away.

Were the words spoken only because of the tiff over Kosovo? In the past, Israel had sometimes expressed disagreement with American policies in other parts of the world, including Vietnam, and never received such a public scolding. Were Albright and company using the public confrontation to make plain that they would prefer to see anyone but the Netanyahu-Sharon axis in power in Israel at this critical moment?

No one was talking at State. But it did seem clear that the Middle East policymakers at State and in the White House were sending contrary signals on the U.S. attitude toward the Wye River agreement. An unnamed U.S. official was quoted as saying that the next move on Wye River was up to the Palestinians, who needed to complete all their steps before Israel needed to proceed with the next tiny withdrawal.

Off-the-Record Affirm and Officially Deny

That unnamed official (Dennis Ross or Samuel Berger?) was immediately disavowed by Albright spokesperson Jamie Rubin, who said that both parties should move forward and indicated that, so far as the U.S. was concerned, the next move was not contingent on Palestinians doing more on security matters. Then the spokesperson for the bureau of Near East Affairs, Andrew Steinfeld, denied there was a split in the peace team: “We are all one happy family here,” he said.

Well, maybe so. But it is clear that Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Martin Indyk, who returned from his tour as U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv sharing a mutual dislike with Netanyahu, has been given the task of wooing the Gulf states to support U.S. efforts in Iraq and Kosovo. And Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates both have been the most substantial providers of support for the Kosovar refugees with large shipments from the Gulf of food, medicines, tents and blankets.

Double-Sided Diplomacy

Meanwhile, the Ross team has appeared to have been given the job of keeping the lid on Palestinian statehood, at least before the Israeli elections on May 17 and June 1. U.S. statements and responses to correspondents at the Department have verged on being pro-Palestinian and definitely anti-Netanyahu, except for that mysterious unnamed official. It’s a sly game that conforms precisely with Clinton generalship: Keep the Palestinians happy with concessions aimed at holding off any formal statement on statehood until a new government (hopefully) is in place in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, be absolutely ambiguous about the reasons for Wye River withdrawals not being implemented. And above all, avoid direct involvement in the morass of 33 Israeli political parties competing in the May 17 first round of voting for prime minister.

But this does not mean that clear signals should not be sent to the Israeli public about who is going to be blamed if the Wye River agreement and follow-up final status talks are not implemented after the elections. That would be Israel.

A sort of messy crossing of the Rubicon has occurred during the seven months since the president invested so much time and effort to save what he considers his very own Middle East peace process. U.S.-Palestinian relations have begun to come in the front door of the White House.

The Government of Israel Lobby Remains Frozen

Of course, there is still the formidable Government of Israel Lobby, now somewhat puzzled as to what to do on Capitol Hill, the traditional fortress guarding the disasterous U.S.-Israeli “strategic relationship” created since 1980 by Israel’s U.S. lobby. In any case there will be no new aid until after the Israeli elections. And no new initiatives that might assist the return of the Likud and Netanyahu to power.

What if that happens despite all of this obvious preference for a new prime minister and a new foreign minister in Israel? That is a bridge the administration (and some members of Congress) would have real trouble crossing.

In such a case U.S. relations would be difficult with a renewed Likud government that has turned into broken dreams the peace process in which the U.S. has invested so much hard work and heavy funding. The U.S. therefore clearly has taken a stronger stand on settlements than ever before, although that stand has had no practical effect in changing the Sharon-Netanyahu policies on the ground.

Such concerns about the future of the U.S.-Israeli relationship underlay a minor scheduling flap at the upcoming annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. A Solomon-like decision was made to let Netanyahu speak at the conference but not to permit his Labor Party opponent, Ehud Barak, to make an election-eve appearance.

Steven Grossman, outgoing co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and former head of AIPAC (when Israel had a Labor Party government), was brought back to the AIPAC board to make the justification on the basis of his own 1996 decision to permit incumbent Labor Party Prime Minister Shimon Peres to appear, but not Netanyahu. A sitting Israeli prime minister may speak, Grossman said, but not his opponent.

The failure by Israel to carry out its solemn undertakings at Wye River to both Clinton and Yasser Arafat may have ended the Clinton administration’s policy of indulging Israel and excusing her conduct on several fronts. Time will tell whether the administration is also prepared to take up such other hurdles to the U.S.-Israel relationship as settlements, torture of American citizens, failure to open Israeli markets to American goods, release of Palestinian political prisoners, house demolitions, the promised Gaza port and corridors connecting Gaza with the West Bank, water sharing, the continued cavalier treatment of promised time-lines for withdrawals, and of course the all-important end of closure of Palestinian areas. Although this is the nitty-gritty of the peace process, the administration has only paid lip service to actually dealing with these very crucial issues.

Optimistic as one might be about the very recent and long overdue critical appraisal of Israeli performance on settlements, the peace process cannot be revived so long as the U.S. provides military and economic support and political protection of Israeli governments bent on deferring peace as long as possible in order to seize virtually all remaining Arab land.

In this situation, any objective observer must conclude that, despite recent statements, the Clinton administration’s intent is to hand on to the next administration the task of dividing Palestine, sharing Jerusalem and bringing the 20-year Israeli occupation of south Lebanon to an end. Negotiations on the Golan seem even further down the American-Israel priorities list regardless of who forms the next government in Tel Aviv.

Eugene Bird, a retired foreign service officer, is president of the Council for the National Interest and diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.