Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1998, Pages 7-8

Special Report

A U.S. Ultimatum Fizzles Out While Congress Pledges All-Out Support to Netanyahu

By Rachelle Marshall

What do the recent nuclear bomb tests by India and Pakistan have in common with Monica Lewinsky? Answer: They got Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu off the hook.

Last January the Lewinsky allegations surfaced just as Netanyahu arrived in Washington for an expected showdown with President Bill Clinton. But the looming scandal diverted everyone’s attention and the prime minister returned home with his hard-line position intact. In late May, just when Clinton seemed close to going public with his proposal for a partial Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank, the start of a nuclear arms race in South Asia set off alarm bells in Washington, and Middle East peace negotiations were again off the screen while the administration dealt with the new crisis.

In fact, “going public” would mean only that Clinton would at last confront Netanyahu with a long-threatened ultimatum: accept the U.S. plan or face possible consequences. Details of the proposal are already well known and Yasser Arafat has agreed to them, even though this means settling for far less than the Palestinians had originally demanded. Arafat undoubtedly hopes to make Israel appear the stubborn party and assure that the United States does not further water down the plan before announcing it.

The deal gives to Israel far more than it could reasonably expect under Oslo, and to the Palestinians far less than former Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were prepared to grant. Instead of turning over 40 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians, Israel would hand back only 13 percent, in withdrawals stretched over 12 weeks. During that period the Palestinians would have to demonstrate to Israel’s satisfaction that they were acting to “prevent terrorism.” Specifically, they would have to impose a ban on “incitement” against Israel, extradite to Israel Palestinians wanted by the Israeli authorities, detain Palestinian prisoners longer, and reduce the size of the Palestinian police force. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was prompted to comment, “The Israeli demands mean Arafat has to put all his people in jail.”

But even if the Palestinians fulfilled these requirements to Israel’s satisfaction, they would end up with total control over only 18 percent of the West Bank, with water resources remaining in Israel’s possession. The rest of the territory, Areas B and C, would still be under full or partial Israeli control, and the Israeli army would be allowed to return to the areas it evacuated whenever Israel claimed its security was in danger. Finally, as a major concession to Netanyahu, the plan calls for moving directly to final status talks after the next troop withdrawal, skipping the third pullback mandated by Oslo and with Israel still in control of all but a few scattered areas of the West Bank.

A Gift Package to Netanyahu

The American formula was a gift package to Netanyahu that Alexander Lubotsky, a member of the prime minister’s governing coalition, hailed as “a big victory for Israel.” Nevertheless, Netanyahu rejected it, insisting that relinquishing more than 11 percent of the West Bank would endanger Israel’s security.

Why is he balking over a seemingly insignificant amount of territory? According to Lubotsky, “Netanyahu is trying to get an even bigger victory.” He may succeed. As White House deadlines come and go with no agreement in sight, Israel continues to take over more of the West Bank for settlements—last year 5,000 new units went up and the settler population increased by more than 10 percent. There has been no easing of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, who suffer from increasing poverty and are still subject to arbitrary arrest, preventive detention, and restrictions on travel and trade. Netanyahu has been able to solidify his support from the right while facing little challenge from a divided Labor opposition whose leader, Ehud Barak, lacks popular appeal.

After Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned that Israel’s refusal to accept the American peace plan might cause the Clinton administration to “reexamine our approach to the peace process,” Netanyahu scored points at home with a defiant response: “We don’t accept dictates,” he said, “we’re a sovereign country.”

Like a group of wind-up dolls, his supporters in Congress immediately went into action. A majority of House members sent Clinton a letter saying his withdrawal plan was “counterproductive” and that Israel should not accept it. One of the authors, Rep. Bill Paxon, called the plan “extortion,” and House Speaker Newt Gingrich charged Clinton with “blackmail.” A letter from 81 senators urged Clinton not to pressure Netanyahu. (In contrast, a poll conducted by the pro-peace Israel Policy Forum showed that 80 percent of the Jewish Americans surveyed approve the administration’s efforts.)

Not content with cheering Netanyahu from Capitol Hill, congressional leaders traveled to Israel during the Memorial Day recess to pay homage in person, and, incidentally, take on the role of Middle East peace negotiators. On May 11, Secretary Albright had said in a speech to the National Press Club, “In only two years we have gone from a situation where Israel had some form of peace negotiation, relationship, or promising contact with every Arab state except Iraq and Libya to a stalemate which has eroded regional cooperation, stalled Arab-Israeli contacts and caused optimism to be replaced by a sense of fatalism and helplessness....”

Albright’s words were an unmistakable indictment of Netanyahu, who in his two years in office has reignited the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and set the peace process spinning backward. Scarcely two weeks after her speech Gingrich and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt arrived in Israel and repudiated the secretary of state by declaring that Americans had no right to tell Israel what to do, conveniently forgetting that Congress freely exercises such a right when it comes to Iran, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and half a dozen other countries. They not only urged Netanyahu to reject the White House plan but, according to Israeli officials, encouraged him to go even further than he thinks necessary in challenging Clinton, promising that Congress would back him to the hilt in any confrontation.

At the request of the State Department the two self-appointed ambassadors canceled visits to the proposed site of a new U.S. embassy building in Jerusalem and to a new Israeli settlement on Jabal Abu Ghneim, just east of Jerusalem, but they repeatedly expressed support for Israel’s claim to all of the city and for Israel’s right to build settlements wherever it chooses. The lawmakers were not inhibited by the fact that these assertions contravene U.N. Security Council resolutions and international law, as well as pre-empt future negotiations. Before they left they promised to bring before Congress Netanyahu’s request for an additional $1 billion to pay for more bypass roads for the use of Jewish settlers. Since the new roads would require the seizure of even more West Bank land and further isolate Palestinian communities from one another, congressional approval of Netanyahu’s request would be equivalent to taking an axe to the peace process—an axe paid for exclusively by Americans.

By the second day, the congressional visitation turned from a pilgrimage into a circus. After Gingrich told the Knesset that “we cannot allow non-Israelis to substitute their judgment for the generals that Israel has trusted with security,” State Department spokesman James Rubin angrily accused him of undermining U.S. peace efforts. The next day the Los Angeles Times reported that Gingrich had earlier referred to Secretary Albright as “an agent of the Palestinians,” whereupon both the State Department and the White House erupted, calling the remark “highly offensive,” extremely provocative, and “outrageous.”

Gingrich responded to the charges with an air of pious innocence. At a meeting with Arafat and other Palestinian leaders in Ramallah he assured his listeners that “we are working very hard to…bring peace, security, and freedom to every child in the region.” Afterward, referring to James Rubin’s reaction to his Knesset speech, Gingrich plaintively asked reporters, “Why would he want to attack me when I am overseas trying to be helpful?” A news photo of Arafat and Gingrich grinning broadly and holding hands resembled nothing so much as the finale of a clown act, just before the performers go backstage to remove their makeup. It was probably no coincidence that on the day the photo was taken Netanyahu was off touring the Great Wall of China.

A more realistic scene had taken place the day before in Jerusalem, when Israeli police attacked Palestinian legislators who had gathered to protest a settlement that the extremist group Ateret Cohanim had begun constructing in the Muslim quarter of the Old City, not far from where the Israelis demolished a center for disabled Arab youth last year. Although the new settlement was illegal, Israeli authorities did not try to stop it until Palestinian and Israeli peace groups staged protest demonstrations. When someone tore down one of the temporary huts at the site scores of police charged the demonstrators, beating the Palestinians with riot sticks. Among those roughed up were Faisal Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi, and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. Erekat afterwards accused Netanyahu of “pushing Palestinians and Israelis to a cycle of violence.”

But in fact the cycle of violence has never ended. Since the killing of an Orthodox Jew last February, at least six Palestinian workers have been stabbed in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Mea Sharim, whose inhabitants do not recognize the state of Israel and have traditionally been friendly to Palestinians. One of the stabbing victims, 51-year-old Khairi Algam, died but the government refused to pay his family the compensation Jewish victims of terrorism are entitled to because his attackers were not “a military or nonmilitary force against the state.”

Israeli Provocations

Much of the continuing violence is provoked by Israeli police and soldiers. In mid-May, when Palestinians attempted to march toward the main shopping street in Arab East Jerusalem to commemorate the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs in 1948, they were stopped by a wall of riot police brandishing clubs. When angry youths began throwing stones, police responded with a hail of rubber bullets. At noon the same day, demonstrators who gathered on the steps of the National Palace Hotel for a silent vigil were beaten and forced to disperse by mounted police. By the end of three days of demonstrations in Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, scores of Palestinians had been injured by rubber bullets and at least five killed, including an 8-year-old boy and a 55-year-old nurse, Zamal al-Wahidi. Several of the injured were medics.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem called attention to another form of brutality by Israeli authorities when they reported that of more than 1,000 Palestinians detained last year for interrogation, at least 850 were tortured, even though most were later released without being charged. Prisoners were handcuffed in excruciatingly painful positions, violently shaken, forced to wear hoods soaked in vomit or urine, denied sleep and use of a bathroom, and exposed to freezing air. B’Tselem presented its evidence to Israel’s High Court of Justice, with a petition asking that the General Security Services (Shin Bet) no longer be allowed to use torture. On May 20 the Court passed the buck by ruling that the issue should be decided by the Knesset. Given the nature of the present government, the decision allows Shin Bet to continue indefinitely destroying the minds and bodies of young Palestinians and, in doing so, to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture that Israel signed in 1991.

With the free hand given him by a Congress willing to scuttle Middle East peace to curry favor with right-wing Jews, and an administration distracted by other concerns, Netanyahu has no reason to soften his tough policies. On the contrary, he seems to be moving in the opposite direction. In a speech in New York in May he declared bluntly that only “land and strength” could preserve peace, meaning Israel’s land and Israel’s strength. Just before leaving Israel, Netanyahu invited the leader of the extremist Molodet Party, Raveham Ze’vi, to join his cabinet. Molodet’s charter calls for expelling all Arabs, including those in Israel, “as a way to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict over the land of Israel.” Ze’vi was once described as “Meir Kahane in general’s uniform,” a reference to the late founder of the outlawed Kach party and a violent racist. According to James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, since a majority of Knesset members would accept a compromise peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu could form a new government if the ultra-rightists walked out. Zogby concludes that he brought Ze’vi into the cabinet not to save his coalition but to include someone whose ideology is as rigid as his own.

Despite Netanyahu’s secularism and surface polish, he is as fanatic as any religious zealot. His father was a close associate of Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the pro-fascist Revisionist movement, whose aim was to make all of Palestine and more part of a Greater Israel. Netanyahu’s vision, David Remnick wrote in the May 25 New Yorker, is based on lines from an old Revisionist hymn: “The Jordan has two banks: this one is ours, the other one too.” In today’s world the prime minister’s stubborn extremism could prove dangerous. The New York Times recently reported that Arabs are growing increasingly pessimistic about chances of Middle East peace except on Israel’s terms, and some are now suggesting that Arab states follow the example of India and Pakistan and develop a nuclear capability of their own if they want to stop being kicked around by Israel. It is unlikely that this will happen soon, but the prospect alone should be alarming enough to make the Clinton administration and Congress stop kowtowing to Israeli extremists and instead adopt a policy designed to reduce tensions in the Middle East rather than intensify them.