July 1996, pg. 12

Did Israel’s 1996 Election Kill the Peace Process?—Six Views

A Retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer

The Death of the Peace Process Endangers Both Israel and the U.S.

By Richard H. Curtiss

No one will ever know what Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would have done if he hadn’t been assassinated. Judging from the remarks of his widow, Leah, he was prepared to trade land for peace or, in her words, “take risks for peace.”

Nor will anyone really know what Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres would have done if he had not been defeated on May 29. On the one hand he clearly had a unique vision for an Israel at peace with its Arab neighbors and economically integrated into the Middle East, perhaps with Tel Aviv as the region’s commercial and financial heart—the role once played by Beirut. Such an Israel might eventually have freed itself from its dependence on American foreign aid.

On the other hand, during his most recent seven months as Israel’s prime minister, Shimon Peres continued lavish spending on Jewish West Bank settlements and networks of by-pass roads that not only connected those settlements to Israel, but also isolated West Bank Palestinian towns and villages from Jerusalem and from each other.

Surely Peres was astute enough to realize that there would be no peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors in the absence of a fair settlement with the Palestinians. So what was he thinking? Perhaps he didn’t know himself.

What we do know is what Israel’s new prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, will do. He has said it over and over. Not just on the campaign trail, but in every meeting he has attended in his rapid rise through the ranks of the hard-line Likud party to his present position as its elected and undisputed leader.

There will be a three-fold thickening of Jewish settlements, no Palestinian state, no sharing of Jerusalem, and, outside of Gaza, no land for peace with either the Palestinians or with Syria. “Peace for peace,” he calls it.

That’s a formula for no peace at all. Instead it’s a blueprint for following Israel’s first half-century of siege and unending war with its Arab neighbors with another half-century of more of the same.

Given present demographics, it pits Israel’s four million Jews against 200 million Arabs. The latter are backed up by their Muslim co-religionists, numbering a billion people, one-fifth of the human race. These are impossible odds already, and the disparity grows with every year. Binyamin Netanyahu’s program will lead not to the salvation, but to the certain dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state.

It’s worth noting, however, that whatever Israel’s new leader may say about freeing his country from dependence upon foreign aid, it will be impossible to carry out his plans without continuation of Israel’s annual “entitlement” of $5.5 billion in U.S. grants and loan guarantees. Therein may lie the salvation of Middle East peace, and of Israel.

Back in the 1970s, the late Undersecretary of State George Ball published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “How to Save Israel in Spite of Itself.” No one seriously argued with his premise that U.S. aid to Israel had to be tied to Israeli performance at the peace table. But at the same time every American political leader who read the article realized that you don’t get re-elected to anything in the United States by challenging the Israel lobby.

George Bush was the first U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to put that conventional wisdom to the test. In August 1991 he went before the television cameras to ask that Congress delay consideration of the $10 billion in loan guarantees being demanded by the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir until after Shamir had sent his delegates to the Madrid Conference, the first formal step in the “peace process” that, five years later, seems to have died in the Israeli election of May 29.

“There are 1,000 lobbyists up on the Hill, and I’m only one little guy down here,” Bush said, and he was literally correct. On that very day the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had brought in members from all over the country to plead with their representatives in Congress for the loan guarantees. By going around the Israel-friendly mainstream media and directly to the American people, however, Bush struck a responsive chord. A snap public opinion poll only two days later found that 86 percent of the American people supported the president on that issue.

So, instead of Israel getting its loan guarantees in 1991, Shamir brought down his own government in January 1992. In the subsequent Israeli election he lost to the Labor Party led by Rabin. In their first post-election meeting in June 1992, Bush promised Rabin the loan guarantees. Meanwhile Shamir, who had grudgingly sent a delegation to Madrid, admitted that had he stayed in office he would have stalled for another five years before agreeing to give up any land for peace, and by then it would have been too late.

Bush won the battle, but lost the war. There is no doubt that his harsh treatment of Israel’s Likud government contributed to the hostile media climate that most Americans believe had a major role in Bush’s electoral defeat in November 1992.

The moral that Bill Clinton drew was the same one observed by most of his predecessors. In dealing with Israel, Clinton concluded, you don’t use sticks, only carrots.

That is precisely the policy he followed throughout Israel’s 1996 election campaign. Clinton made it clear in every way possible that he hoped the government of Shimon Peres would be returned to power—hinting even that a Peres victory in the spring would help assure a victory in the fall for Clinton, the friendliest American president in Israel’s history.

But at the same time President Clinton stated repeatedly that the U.S. could work with any elected government of Israel. To indicate otherwise, Clinton advisers said, would only prompt Israelis to vote against what they would perceive as U.S. interference in Israeli affairs. This goes to the heart of the oldest dispute among America’s Middle East policymakers. One party, personified by Samuel Lewis, who served as U.S. ambassador in Israel for 10 years, maintains that any U.S. criticism of Israel, or attempts to put strings on U.S. aid to Israel, only make the Israelis, and their U.S. lobby, “circle the wagons.”

State Department Arabists, on the other hand, maintain that it is American reluctance to apply the same rules and procedures for aid to Israel that are applied to every other U.S. aid recipient in the world that makes Israel so difficult with its Middle East neighbors—and with the United States.

In the 1990s, the U.S. has put both theories to the test. In 1991 George Bush used carrots and sticks, and brought down an intransigent Likud government. In 1996 Bill Clinton used carrots and carrots, and the intransigent Likud government has come back, with exactly the same dedication to a “Greater Israel” to be secured by eternal hostility to every other country in the Middle East.

In my opinion, there’s still time to save Israel in spite of itself. The way to do so remains exactly the same as in George Ball’s time: Tie U.S. aid to Israel to Israeli performance at the peace table.

Eight years ago I made a number of talks in which I predicted that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians soon would get their act together and speak the magic words renouncing terrorism, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and agreeing to a settlement based upon the land-for-peace formula in U.N. Security Council Resolution 242.

No audience received my talk more skeptically than did the U.S.- Egyptian Chamber of Commerce in Cairo, many of whose members are Egyptians or Egyptian Americans. But some members of the American Embassy staff in Cairo who were present asked me to give the same talk the next day at their full-dress weekly staff meeting. They listened, took notes, and gave me a standing ovation.

I mention the fact that I was right in 1988 solely as a prelude to making some new predictions in 1996. I must add, however, that when I expressed these new predictions in talks after the Israeli election, both Palestinians and Israelis in the audiences I addressed in the U.S. expressed skepticism about my assessment of the other Arabs. I can only reply that the Egyptians underestimated the Palestinians in 1988, just as I believe the Palestinians are underestimating their fellow Arabs in 1996.

The outcome of the Israeli election has come as a great shock to the Arab world. To please the U.S., some leaders of major Arab countries had invested personal political capital in the peace process, some against their better judgment.

Much more clearly than our own leaders, they have recognized that Netanyahu’s victory, with about 55 percent of the Israeli Jewish vote, is the end of the “peace process” as we have known it.

The results are going to be just as profound as those that followed the Arab catastrophes of 1948 and 1967. The 1948 Arab defeat by Israel led to the overthrow of the governments of Egypt and Iraq. The 1967 Arab defeat by Israel led, eventually, to the rejection of unrealistic Arab political rhetoric, and a serious effort to modernize through education and hard work.

The Arab catastrophe of 1996 will be the catalyst for the Arab unity that has proven so elusive for so long. The Arab rulers who have been closest to the United States will lead the caravan, in order to restore their credibility with their own people.

The difference between the crisis of 1996 and those of previous years is that now the Arabs have experienced and knowledgeable people running most of their governments, a surplus of Western-educated technocrats, and the funds to buy whatever expertise is missing.

The Arabs have learned that they cannot prevail militarily against Israel so long as it has American support. They also have learned that refusing to sell oil to the United States or other countries that back Israeli intransigence doesn’t work. There always is someone willing to step in and supply the industrialized world’s energy needs.

What will work is judicious use of the financial resources generated by Middle Eastern petroleum, still more than 60 percent of the world’s reserves, and Middle Eastern natural gas, amounting to a similar percentage of the world’s supply.

Any industrial country that spends a large share of its money for Middle Eastern energy supplies, but gets none of it back in the form of purchases by Middle Eastern consumers of aircraft, automobiles, electronic equipment, processed food, clothing, and other consumer goods, not to mention university educations and vacations abroad, is soon going to be in serious trouble. And a country like the United States, that has defied its European and Far Eastern allies and trading partners for so long over America’s unyielding and, in their view, counter-productive support of Israeli intransigence, is extremely vulnerable.

No one knows all of this better than the hundreds of thousands of young Arabs with American B.A.s, M.A.s and Ph.D.s who are back in their own countries and, in many cases, in key positions in their governments. They are not anti-American. Quite the contrary. Many of them are touchingly loyal to the friends and families of friends they met in the United States.

But, like most Arabs, their first loyalty, after that to their own people, is to their dispossessed fellow Arabs—the Palestinians. They will do what they have to do to force the Israelis to give back to the Palestinians a land of their own. That may mean using combined Arab knowledge, and purchasing power, to make Americans pay a very stiff price if our government decides to throw its support behind a renewed Likud effort on behalf of “Greater Israel.”

If George Ball were living today, I feel sure that ever since the Israeli election he would have been working on another article. This time I believe he would have entitled it “How to Save America, in Spite of Itself.” We Americans had better start thinking about what he would have written.