Will the End of the Peace Process Be Followed by "A Nice Little War"?

by Eugene Bird

Whenever the Middle East became too quiet, which was rare, my first boss in the Department of State used to remark, "Time for some saber rattling by Israel." And sure enough, there would be an outbreak of cross-border violence, sometimes brazenly inspired by Israeli provocations. The response from the Arabs, whether from Syria, the Egyptian front, or with Jordan along the Green Line would never be long in coming.

Is this a moment in the 50-year history of Israel when a new Middle East war will break out? There are plenty of signs, particularly from the Israeli side, that this could occur. But the peace process team at the Department of State does not yet seem concerned enough to even consider direct involvement of the new secretary by scheduling her first visit to the Middle East since her appointment.

A Last Option

Back in 1955-56 as the war clouds gathered, that same boss, Donald C. Bergus, later a key figure in promoting the 1970 Rogers Plan shot down by Henry Kissinger, also had a ritual when he returned to our office from presenting the latest Near East Bureau proposals to then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He would throw onto my desk the latest carefully drafted plan to stop the drift toward war and say, "Well, I guess there's nothing left but to have a nice little war."

Israeli columnists in the past two months have speculated on whether or not a low-level "encounter" is about to take place. Speculation has focused particularly on Syria, and on the possibility of a second intifada breaking out. By early June, speculation was replaced with hard news about how the saber rattling on the issue had begun. The Israeli press revealed that orders had been issued by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to consider all options in the present situation, including the demise of the Palestinian National Authority as a result of open "confrontation," a polite word for using Israeli tanks and heavy weapons if necessary on the civilian population of the liberated Palestinian cities.

Is this a "nice little war" moment in the Middle East? Jeremy Salt's description of the run-up to the 1967 war in a publication by the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine looks remarkably like 1997: Low-level but increasing violence, frayed tempers showing in the exchanges between Egypt and Israel and even between Jordan and Israel, frustrating stalemate on the Palestinian front, and almost daily incidents in south Lebanon.

If this war should occur, it might well center on armed "confrontation" with the Palestinians for the first time since 1948. The intifada raged for five years, but it was limited to stones on the Palestinian side. None of the other wars after 1948 featured significant Palestinian armed action with the exception of brief resistance by a few hundred outnumbered armed Palestinians in Gaza during the 1967 war.

Outgunned, the estimated 45,000 lightly armed Palestinian National Authority police would be quickly overrun. This would give rise to the question, "With whom do the U.S. and Israel negotiate in a post-Palestinian National Authority period?" This is the question Tom Friedman of The New York Times posed at the National Press Club in April. There is no answer, of course, and that apparently is exactly what Netanyahu, torch-bearer of the "Greater Israel" ideology, has in mind.

An Increasingly Irrelevant State Department

The Department of State seems increasingly irrelevant in persuading Israelis that their long-range interests lie in implementing the land-for-peace resolution and in keeping to the schedule laid down in Oslo I and II.

This U.S. unwillingness to require Israeli compliance with even the two accords signed in President Clinton's presence at the White House in 1993 and 1995 on redeployment and on West Bank settlements is what makes the American role ambiguous and ineffective. Historically, when the U.S. has failed to persuade Israel to carry out a logical withdrawal from captured Arab lands, either a stalemate or war results, usually very quickly.

This time it does not appear to be a case of benign neglect by U.S. policymakers. It seems to be a moment in which the Department of State and, in fact, the entire administration and Congress, stands helpless before an Israeli government that refuses all advice from America, Europe, Egypt, Jordan and, of course, the Palestinians.

The U.S. is the only player able to exercise leverage with the Israelis, but Netanyahu assures his backers that there will be no cut in either U.S. military or economic aid because Clinton and both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are deathly afraid of Israel's powerful and many-faceted lobby in Washington.

When the Palestinian "Mr. Jerusalem," Feisal Husseini of beleaguered Orient House, was in Washington in June, he found a Congress very unfriendly to the Palestinians and wanting only to talk about the problem of assassinations of Palestinians who sell land to Israelis. When he was asked about Jabal Abu Ghneim (Har Homa), he replied, "Look, if most of this was Jewish land before 1948 and they want to claim it now, we should have the right to claim our land in West Jerusalem, where we owned 70 percent of it and have never been allowed to return." He was depressed by what he learned about the administration unwillingness to take a more active role in the settlement issue after the president called the Har Homa decision "unhelpful."

A meeting held days before by deputy peace team head Aaron David Miller with most Arab ambassadors or their representatives in Washington was typical of what Husseini encountered. Miller was reported to have told the Arab ambassadors that the administration could do nothing about stopping the settlements. He said, "That may be unfair, even illogical, but it is realistic."

He did not explain whether it was fear of the government of Israel's formidable lobby that made it impossible to do anything even now about the settlements, which are largely built with American aid dollars according to economic observers of the Israeli scene, or whether it was administration fear of the lobby-driven Congress that made it impossible even to suggest a meaningful delay in settlement building when a recent U.S. intelligence report indicates that 20 to 25 percent of the completed settlement housing units remain empty.

Miller, the longest-serving member of the peace team, who began in the early 80s in policy planning, has originated many of the proposals which have fed the peace process. Yet at this meeting he is reported to have asked the Arab envoys, "Do any of you have any ideas we might try out?" There reportedly was dead silence, even from the Egyptian envoy.

Washington Dead End

The peace process has reached a dead end, it seems. Rescue, if there is to be one, will have to come from new appointments that are finally surfacing. One pertinent appointment is that of Thomas Pickering, one of the longest serving and most professionally adept career ambassadors in U.S. history, as undersecretary for political affairs, the State Department's number three spot. In addition to his past services as U.S. ambassador to Moscow and to troubled El Salvador, he has been U.S. ambassador to both Israel and Jordan.

Another potentially pertinent appointment is that of long-time pro-Israel activist Stuart Eizenstat as undersecretary for economic affairs. Eizenstat was a foreign foreign policy adviser in the Carter White House and spent most of the Republican years working for national Jewish organizations. Most recently he has been the U.S. ambassador to the European Community.

In that job he twisted arms and legs in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe on behalf of compensation for Jewish refugees and restoration of Jewish property by those governments after 50 years. He used the full power of his position to gain agreements that are very favorable to various Jewish agencies and individuals.

Eizenstat also was the key negotiator in placing enormous pressure on the Swiss government to re-open the issue of Swiss bank accounts and gold from Nazi sources, heading a huge effort of research through more than one million pages in U.S. and foreign archives and producing a 200-page report described by some Swiss sources as "prejudiced."

(Palestinians have recognized that there is a parallel between Jewish claims in Europe and Palestinian claims in Israel, which holds many lands and accounts of "absentee" Palestinians, meaning Palestinian refugees. The Palestinian owners reportedly are waiting in the wings to try to get American help with Israel on these "absentee" accounts and on property, particularly the enormously valuable properties of Palestinians in West Jerusalem. For example, the American Embassy in West Jerusalem is to be built on land partially owned by Palestinians and the Islamic Waqf Trust in West Jerusalem.)

The Eizenstat tenure at the State Department certainly will not be helpful to the parallel claims against Israel by the Palestinians, which probably will have to be raised in international fora. Nor will the now almost certain appointment of Martin Indyk, the former AIPAC official who now serves as U.S. ambassador to Israel, to the position of assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.

Some observers suggest that Pickering could become a counterweight to Dennis Ross, who also had AIPAC connections in his pre-government period, in the peace process, if it is revived. But there is little reason to think that Pickering, despite his brilliance, will be a threat to the current team. His track record indicates that he will stay strictly within limits set by the White House and by Congress, even while bringing a greater professionalism and polish to U.S. involvement.

It would be surprising, for example, to find Pickering urging even behind closed doors that Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would be an effective first step toward reopening serious talks with Syria. Hemmed in by a Congress bent on supporting Israel, even with Netanyahu provocations threatening to precipitate a war that will be called a "confrontation," Pickering very likely will opt for pursuing the peace process along the path charted by Miller and Ross. This is based on a public position that the U.S. can do little about the settlements, and nothing about Netanyahu.

So a nice little war, by some other made-in-Israel name, is a possibility later this year. Preventable? Of course. But the politics of Washington keep the so-called "only remaining superpower" acting like tiny Israel's puppet.