Israeli Cold Warriors and U.S. Likudniks: Threats to Mideast Peace

By Eugene Bird

"Kremlinologists! They are all simply trying to create a new Cold War!" The speaker was Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the unofficial chairman of the peace establishment in Israel. Peres, who was the key to recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization by veteran warrior turned dove Yitzhak Rabin, was reacting to a criticism of ideas in his book, The New Middle East. The book was published primarily to persuade Israel's American supporters that the peace process is irreversible, and that they should cease their opposition to Israel dealing with Arafat.

The occasion was a mid-June visit to his Jerusalem office by Americans from the Council for the National Interest, a group dedicated to supporting a land-for-peace settlement. An Israeli scholar had told us the day before that Peres' book was "naive." Any peace would be cold. Period. We repeated that opinion to Peres and he exploded.

The soft-spoken, mostly unsmiling Peres was not about to give ground to the new cold warriors in Israel. In fact, later that day he tangled in the Knesset with second generation Likud party leader Benny Begin in what the Israeli press described as the sharpest and most vituperative confrontation of Peres' career. Perhaps we contributed to his mind-set by citing what we knew would be unwelcome criticism.

One Peace: Two Governments

There almost appear to be two governments in Israel. One is devoted to furthering the peace process, first with the Palestinians, second with Jordan, and third with Syria and Lebanon in a carefully planned construct of what the political traffic in Israel can bear. Giving up any settlements, and any territory on the Golan immediately and abruptly seem to be beyond the capability of even this peace-oriented government.

The second Israeli government consists of the galaxy of organizations carrying out Israel's 50-year-old policy of retaliation against the Arabs wherever they can be found. This includes confronting Hamas on the West Bank and in Gaza, shooting some of its followers on sight, and arresting and imprisoning others in the vain hope that this big-stick policy, even as the Israel Defense Forces negotiates re-deployment, will somehow help the PLO and Fatah achieve a stronger position in carrying out the peace. Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat warns of the dangers of keeping any prisoners even one day longer and calls for the release of the religious leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.

Re-Sealing Houses After Peace

On the West Bank, the IDF is re-sealing rooms or houses that the followers of Mubarak Awad, the Washington-based Gandhi of the Palestinian movement, had unsealed without permission after the Israel-PLO agreement. For years the IDF has barred more than 1,000 families from occuping their houses for real or alleged security offenses by one or another family member. The day after we were in Nablus, yet another 17-year-old was shot to death during demonstrations. The IDF refuses to use ordinary crowd control techniques as urged by the United States.

When we asked Meretz peace party Member of the Knesset Naomi Chazan if the Israeli military actually asked the Labor government (of which Meretz is a member) for permission before launching kidnappings and heavy-handed "retaliatory" shelling and bombing of civilians in south Lebanon, the answer was, "Of course we are consulted."

Could you have stopped such activities that do not seem to be in accord with the peace process? we asked.

"Not so long as Hezbollah continues rocket attacks," was the answer.

That there is a tacit agreement with Hezbollah that permits rocket attacks on the occupied zone in south Lebanon (although not into Israel) seemed to make no difference to her. When we later met with the foreign ministers of Lebanon and Syria, both asked us point-blank if Israel, backed by the U.S., really wanted peace. We said yes, but the question hung in the air.

Israel's Think-Tank Strategic Warriors

A third and key force in creating and carrying out Israel's foreign policy is the academic and think-tank establishment. As in America, the members are spin-offs from the armed forces and intelligence organizations. Most appear to be cold warriors like the one we quoted to Foreign Minister Peres. At present they are creating new careers for themselves in the wake of last September's peace agreement, warning of the dangers of getting too close to Arab states or expecting more than minimal agreements with them. No compromise here.

"The Lebanese?" said one of them to us. "I have nothing but contempt for them." He would not specify what he had done during his years with Israeli intelligence (Mossad), but it is a good bet it had something to do with manipulating Lebanese Christian politicians or militias on behalf of Israeli interests, a disappointing exercise, as it turned out, for most Israeli political warriors.

Likud in the Background

Our group talked with Likud's shadow foreign minister, Zalman Shoval, former Israeli ambassador to Washington. He was up-beat about Likud prospects in the next elections, despite the party's internal rivalries. From other sources we heard a good deal about the new connections between Likud, a party wanting to alter drastically the terms of the current peace process in order to prevent a Palestinian state, and American Jewry and the U.S. Congress.

There are highly visible and very active Likud-oriented members of the key American Jewish organizations who are working diligently to plant doubts about the Labor party and its peace agreements in the minds of U.S. senators and representatives. Questioning every step Arafat makes, the Likud-Americans are dedicated to an inflexible policy on Jerusalem and on the settlements. No compromise. These Capitol Hill strategic warriors are increasingly attacking Foreign Minister Peres and his vision of a new Middle East.

Civil Guard to Man Road Blocks?

The Israelis are reportedly training a new Civil Guard to man checkpoints, a step in the right direction if it gets the Israeli army out of the business of contact with and cracking down on Palestinians.

We talked with the Palestinian police, and with Freih Abu Medein, "justice minister" for the PLO entities. The police seem effective in throttling back violence, with a sharp drop to almost zero in ordinary crimes already recorded for Jericho and Gaza. Mr. Abu Medein said there were 20,000 weapons in the hands of Gazans, most procured since last September from Israeli sources. These will be banned from public view, he said, and eventually picked up by the Palestinian police. The combined Palestinian-Israeli orange flag patrols seem to be working well on roads jointly held by the IDF and the Palestinians. But how any Palestinian economy can work, given the checkpoints and licensing barriers to commerce, is beyond comprehension.

A Peace Between Arafat and Rabin, Not Between States

Yasser Arafat has his own peace process refuseniks. Our group talked with a key member of one radical PLO faction that rejects the process and is just waiting for it to fail. "This is not a peace between equal countries nor even a peace between unequal national states," Dr. Riad Malki told us at a meeting on the Mount of Olives. "It is a peace between Arafat and Rabin." Malki, a member of the rejectionist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and now the founder of the Palestine People's Party, implied that if either Arafat or Rabin left the scene, the peace would be dead.

Unlike the Likud, these dissident PLO factions do not have American partners. They certainly have no supporters at all in the U.S. political establishment and little in the way of resources to carry out their ideas. They would become important only if the peace process were reversed.

The Likud knows that it cannot reverse the peace process entirely, and Ambassador Shoval indicated it is not serious about trying to do so. It appears, however, to be using the same old tactic of recruiting American Jewish and congressional support for the hard-liners. This is an easy game to play, since some members of Congress want to believe that the PLO should still be treated as an enemy. There is little any thinking person can do to reverse that mind-set. According to reports, substantial money is flowing to the Likud from radical American Jewish supporters—a million dollars just to support anti-Arafat demonstrations, according to one report.

All of these forces in Israel are focusing on what the U.S. will do next in the Middle East peace process. One thing that has improved is U.S. reporting on the Palestinians. It should help Americans to be wary of early judgments. Peres told us, "It is at the beginning. There will always be mistakes by lower-level military commanders." Our group felt that the more Israeli policy was run by civilians and civilian concerns, the better things would be for all.

As he departed Paris in June after his most successful meeting to date with Arafat, Rabin had admitted in a press conference that he was surprised at the extent of opposition in Israel and among Jewish groups abroad to the peace agreement with the PLO. Hopefully, we Americans will not contribute further to that opposition by supporting more of the same kind of "Kremlinologists" that so concerned Foreign Minister Peres in Jerusalem.

Eugene Bird, a retired foreign service officer, is president of the Council for the National Interest in Washington, DC and diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Report.