No surprises: Netanyahu Does not Soften his Rhetoric in First U.S. Visit

by Eugene Bird

The only surprise in the five-day visit of Binyamin Netanyahu to Washington and New York was that he chose to focus largely on persuading the already committed pro-Israel choir and broke no new ground. It was Likud positions all the way, even before one audience of largely Arab correspondents sponsored by Middle East Insight magazine. No surprises. And therein lies the problem.

He had an opportunity, according to the always imaginative pro-Israeli press published in both the United States and Israel, to set off a whole new Likud kind of peace process by proposing that Israel unilaterally move out of Lebanon, as suggested by his own generals who want to leave that killing ground. That would have posed an awkward dilemma for President Hafez Al-Assad of Syria, who used the Israeli occupation of Lebanon's south to justify Syria's occupation of much larger portion of Lebanon. Netanyahu did not do that, and in fact told the Lebanese ambassador to the U.S., who appeared at one event and asked a question, that the first priority was"action" to shut down Hezbollah. No opening there.

Netanyahu also made clear that he has not promised to meet with President Yasser Arafat, and that negotiations with the Palestinians awaited some further "proof of compliance." President Bill Clinton could not even get Netanyahu to promise to end the closure of Palestinian areas which has devastated the Palestinian economy and cut off the favorite American tract of economic prosperity through investment in the Palestinian enclaves. No flexibility there.

Netanyahu seemed to be energizing the hardest-line supporters of Israel, both on Capitol Hill and among American Jews, while giving nothing to the Americans or the Arabs. Still, the Clinton administration feels it got through the difficult visit without completely losing its pet peace process. It may or may not turn out to be right.

The White House and the State Department argued that nothing had changed: land for peace, the final status negotiations with the Palestinians, and resumption of peace talks with Syrians all were reaffirmed by President Clinton, denied by Netanyahu, and matters left there.

Netanyahu's Three No's

Optimists could cite only the possibility that the new prime minister's statements were negotiating positions by Israel. Speaking of the Palestinians, he said: "They have their positions and we have ours. We shall negotiate." But what, asked many correspondents at the State Department, is left to negotiate when Israel's new leader firmly sticks to his three no's: No sharing of Jerusalem, no return of the Golan Heights, and no Palestinian state.

President Clinton supposedly told Prime Minister Netanyahu in private some of the harder facts of life, one being that the U.S. is still firmly wedded to the principle of land for peace. Netanyahu told the Arab correspondents that even at Madrid Israel had not agreed to land for peace, but only to base negotiations on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 (which call for Arab acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in the 1967 war). How can the conflict between U.S. and Israeli statements be reconciled? The Department of State refused any real comment on 242, but reiterated the land-for-peace formula.

On Jerusalem, the State Department did choose to distinguish itself from Netanyahu. On June 12, it had sent to its posts in the area a reminder of the ground rules for American diplomats, meaning for the most part those assigned to the American Consulate General in Jerusalem. They were instructed not to hold any official meeting with the Palestinians in Orient House, which has a few Palestinian Authority guards and a great number of Israel Defense Forces guards around it. The cannot hold meetings with Faisal Husseini or others at Orient House, but they can attend receptions and other affairs at the site.

Honoring Commitments

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said, perhaps for the first time, that the department expected both parities to honor their commitments under the Oslo agreements, including the ones on Jerusalem, He went on to cite the fact that final status talks already had been opened by the government of Shimon Peres on May 4 at Taba, and that the issue of Jerusalem was included in the basket. "There are clear differences on that issue between Israel and the Palestinians...They need to negotiate it. They need to resolve it together."

And the department spokesman repeatedly asserted that Netanyahu had made clear there were no preconditions. In fact, to the Arab correspondents, the prime minister did assert that "They will come with their positions, we will come with ours. We shall negotiate."

One rumor surrounding the talks, not confirmed by the department, was that the State Department's peace talks coordinator, Ambassador Dennis Ross, had suggested that President Clinton pick up the telephone and try to persuade President Assad to resume negotiations on the five-power "monitoring" of hostilities in South Lebanon. According to the ground rules for the fighting there, no civilians are to be targeted by either side. According to the rumor, Netanyahu refused to agree to resume negotiations, even if the Syrians agree.

The warnings from Israel’s prime minister in his dour message to Congress about the whole Middle East and its possible nuclearization probably were well received by Defense Secretary William Perry’s team at the Department of Defense, where Netanyahu visited and got a new round of intelligence support. Real-time intelligence gathered by U.S. satellites now will be made available to the Israelis, presumably including such intelligence on the Arab states.

But a hint at trying to create a new international coalition to target the so-called rogue states Iran, Iraq and Syriahad overtones of the efforts in the 1950s to create the Middle East Defense Organization that led directly to the Baghdad Pact riots and the eventual overthrow of the most moderate and pro-Western regime in the Arab world, that of Iraq. A new American-Israeli attempt to organize against the radical Muslim states would likely create the same backlash against the moderate regimes. Does Washington want that history to be repeated?

The first round of talks with the new and obviously telegenic prime minister went about as well as could be expected, but the consensus among the correspondents is that the Palestinian track is the only one that will see much action between now and the end of the year. Final status talks will be even further delayed while the new government of Israel sorts out its own differences on “separation” from the Palestinians, which the prime minister declares he does not want, and begins to define how much to require from the Palestinians in the way of new security measures before further redeployment from Hebron takes place.

There are now more than a quarter million foreign workers in Israel, including not only Thais and Romanians but also Egyptians, and about half of those are “illegals.” They have displaced the Palestinians, and by now even lifting of the closure may take the Palestinian economy only back to a subsistence level.

The administration next was looking forward to the visit of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in late July. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was slated to return early from an Asia trip to explore what further efforts can be taken to salvage the Clinton peace efforts in the Middle East. There is talk of yet another visit by the secretary of state (his 26th) to the Middle East some time after that.

What many expected from Netanyahu was a “July Surprise” with an imaginative move on Lebanon, an immediate partial lifting of the closure, and some new initiatives aimed at widening the support for Israel among moderate Arab states. But the surprises will have to wait, probably until after the American election, when Israel will re-evaluate how to maximize its American support, depending upon the election results. Netanyahu’s goal will be to involve whichever candidate wins in November in a new peace process that the American president can call his own, even if it is being invented largely in Netanyahu’s Israel.