Congressional, Administration Pandering Has Nearly Destroyed Peace

By Eugene Bird

When a Department of State official was asked in late July, after events in Bosnia again had spun out of control, whether the lifting of arms sanctions proposed by Senator Bob Dole had influenced the talks between the Clinton administration and European officials, and the resulting decision to use NATO forces to strike back at the Serbs, his face lit up.

"Definitely," he replied. "The Dole bill was raised three times and discussed at the London Conference in mid-July. The fact that the president faced such a threat from Bob Dole made it easier for the British to come around and join us in taking effective action at Goradze."

It is an old trick of diplomats, at least American diplomats, to use the threat of congressional action that allegedly would have worse consequences for the client state than the formula that the American diplomat is proposing. What can one do in the face of a foolish or out-of-control Congress, the argument goes. The objective is to get recalcitrant allies, or even enemies, to say yes to something they may not like at all.

In Haiti, for example, the Clinton administration actually found very useful the threats of Republicans in Congress to force a pullout of U.S. forces in order to gain concessions from Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on elections.

How differently the Arab-Israeli dispute is handled. Instead of being able to warn Israelis to speed up the peace process or face congressional action to do so, the White House is forced to warn Palestinian negotiators that if they do not acquiesce in actions that clearly violate the human and civil rights of their weary population, they will lose what minor U.S. assistance they are getting because of the Congress and its attitude problem toward everyone in the Middle East except Israelis.

For example, before he departed this summer for his new posting as American ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk had to warn a member of the Palestinian Tourist Committee that his planned 22-story tourist hotel in East Jerusalem would not be allowed to qualify for American investment insurance. Indyk explained that the Congress simply would not permit the U.S. to insure this project, which was to be funded by private investments from the United States. The usual forces working in Congress on behalf of a foreign government called Israel could make big trouble for the Clinton administration if it encouraged any investment by American citizens in East Jerusalem.

The rules are clear. On its merits the hotel project would qualify hands down for such insurance against political and other risks to American investors. The Congress was judged to be adamant, however, about helping Palestinian Americans create some "facts on the ground" of their own in a city where U.S. foreign aid money is being expended to make huge Jewish building projects possible.

Only Israeli political requirements were taken into account.

Israeli-American entrepreneurs are going all-out to build 10,000 new hotel rooms in and around East Jerusalem, some of them on the West Bank, to lure Christian pilgrims and possibly even tourists from Muslim countries if full peace is realized. Are these projects qualifying for U.S. government-backed insurance? No one is talking.

It is not just the Israel lobby that is to blame for the present selective enforcement or disregard of U.S. laws and policies pertaining to the Palestinians and Israel. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which lobbies openly for any elected government of Israel, is just doing what it is paid to do. (Mostly with U.S. funds recycled back to the U.S. by the Israeli government to buy U.S. political influence.) What makes Israel lobby actions so devastating to the peace process and to U.S. interests in the Middle East is the unfortunate absence of an adequate countering lobby to the array of Jewish organizations that back up AIPAC's work.

This creates the conviction among members of Congress and their staffs that to ignore AIPAC dictates and vote their consciences is to invite political, financial and media demolition of their re-election campaigns. The manner in which former President George Bush's commanding lead in public opinion polls was undermined in a matter of months after he openly challenged AIPAC's campaign to force him to sign $10 billion in loan guarantees for Israel is cited as proof of the Capitol Hill maxim: "Don't mess with Israel."

If a representative or senator under pressure to vote for yet more aid for Israel and against giving the Palestinians or Arabs anything, even to support their participation in the peace process, would publicly denounce the process by which aid to Israel has become the only sure beacon lighting the way to re-election, what would really happen? He or she might be re-elected for daring to speak out. Any takers?

The Three-Percent Peace

The new draft agreement on redeploying Israeli troops from 4 of the 16 municipalities on the West Bank will cede perhaps only temporary control to the Palestinian National Authority over only 3 percent of total West Bank territory outside the claimed areas of East Jerusalem.

Faisal Husseini, PNA President Yasser Arafat's top representative in East Jerusalem, calls it a formula for inviting further struggles by the Palestinians to get rid of the occupation.

The strange rumors that surrounded the negotiations in their supposed final stages, which already are 15 months behind the schedule laid out in the Oslo agreement, included a statement by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that only 15 percent of the West Bank would be freed of Israeli troops. A day later, when Husseini reacted by calling a press conference and warning both Arafat and the Israeli negotiators that no Palestinian leader could sign off on such an agreement, Israeli negotiator Yoel Singer hastened to reassure everyone that the figure was 30 percent.

A few days later, the Christian Science Monitor reported in an op-ed piece by Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace that the real figure was 3 percent, not 30 percent, of the area of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

However, even that 3 percent, comprising only areas within the municipal boundaries of the West Bank towns, will not necessarily have seen the last of Israeli troops. The agreement specifies a whole series of events, and some less clearly defined ones as well, which would not only halt the Israeli redeployment (it no longer is being called a withdrawal, at least not until after the next Israeli elections), but reverse it. If a right-wing Israeli government in late 1996 decides on its own that the Palestinians have carried out terrorist actions or anti-Israeli activities too egregious for the government to ignore, the Israeli troops can be ordered back into these same cities.

If the draft agreement is one-sided, it is due in part to the unwillingness of the United States to insist on some fairness in Israeli peace efforts. Only Israeli political requirements were taken into account. Rabin describes what he has in mind for the end of the process as a "Palestinian entity that is less than a state and which works together with Jordan and Israel in a system of economic amalgamation and cooperation."

Sister Miriam Ward, a U.S. peace activist who has been searching for a formula for peace between Palestinians and Israelis for almost 25 years, told a State Department official in July after her latest trip to the area, "Palestinians do not want to go back to the intifada. They want the peace to succeed. But if the result is a bantustan in the West Bank with roads for Jews only cutting off Palestinian Authority areas from one another, there will be no peace."

The response of the American official was surprisingly strong. He said, "We certainly hope not and we would oppose any such division of the West Bank." But then he went on to suggest that, in reality, the United States had to leave it up to the parties. "We do not have and have not had any means of dictating the terms of these agreements," he said, ignoring Israel's total dependence on the U.S. for aid, trade and military security.

It has been suggested in Israel that the draft agreement which has been designed to pave the way for Palestinian elections and legitimization of the Palestinian Authority, will be the beginning of a series of very lengthy negotiations, purposely drawn out to do two things: 1) test the Palestinian Authority's stomach for repressing Hamas or any other Palestinian groups that may challenge the continued occupation of Palestinian land and denial of water resources to the Palestinian community; and 2) give the Jewish settlers reassurance that a Labor-Meretz government is not about to abandon a single settlement or remove a single settler while it continues to expand the ring around Jerusalem.

Seen in that light, and with the U.S. government restricting its role to offering bad advice based on good intentions, the highly limited Israeli West Bank redeployment is in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the Oslo agreement. In fact, its only objective is to provide re-election insurance for the Labor party.

Palestinian concerns would not be addressed by a return of 3, 15 or even 30 percent of the West Bank. For Palestinians the real issues are ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as soon as possible, and regaining control of their own water resources and access to Jerusalem. None of these things are going to happen. They are not even in the Israeli cards, and the American dealer is not offering to produce new cards to be dealt in this game of continuing the Israeli military occupation by another name.

Hamas Leader Fights Extradition

"Why is this guy being given such special security?" The question asked by an Immigration and Naturalization Service guard at the New York detention center was addressed to the lawyer of Musa Abu Marzook, Hamas political leader and resident alien seeking U.S. citizenship. Mr. Abu Marzook had been arrested when he tried to re-enter the United States because his name was on a new U.S. government "Watch List."

The lawyer, Stanley Cohen, who has defended several other Palestinians and once again is fighting for the constitutional rights of a client targeted because of his political beliefs, not because of any actual crimes against the United States, responded bluntly, "You are looking at a man who may well become the president of his country."

At present that seems unlikely, considering the fact that all polls indicate Hamas has no more than 30 percent support among the people of Gaza and only about 20 percent among West Bank Palestinians. There is no doubt, however, that the name Abu Marzook may yet become as revered among Islamists (the new fashionable term for so-called Muslim fundamentalists) as Yasser Arafat has been ever since the 1970s and '80s among ordinary Palestinians.

After being detained in mid-July by immigration officers as he sought to return with his family to the United States after being deported from Jordan, Abu Marzook became the subject of debate in the Israeli cabinet over whether to seek his extradition to Israel. By mid-August, the U.S. government had refused to release him in exchange for his offer to give up his right ever to re-enter America, and the Israeli government had prepared an eight-page indictment which accused him of raising funds used for Hamas-sponsored terrorism and of actively plotting such attacks.

American officials admitted they had no reason to hold him and that the Israeli charges seemed less than persuasive. The U.S. judge nevertheless ordered him held for up to 60 days while the Israeli government reviewed its case against him.

Policy-makers in Washington seemed less than enthusiastic about arresting a political leader of Hamas in the middle of the peace negotiations. It would only make it harder for Palestinian National Authority President Arafat to persuade his people to support further implementation of the peace agreement with Israel. In any case, only if Israel could make a case that Abu Marzook's acts extended beyond fund-raising for supposedly benign Hamas social, medical and educational services would he be extraditable to Israel.

As it stands now, Abu Marzook seems a stereotypical example of the kind of local leader who drives colonial powers to excesses by daring to suggest that the occupation of their country should end now, and on terms approximating those laid down in the United Nations charter, rather than at the convenience of the occupying power.

Of course, as in everything touching or impinging on Israel and its definition of the peace process, new rules are invented and radical natural rights advocates on the model of Tom Paine have to be punished in hopes of curbing the tide of independence.

Hamas will gain support from this incident, according to Washington observers, and even according to many of the Clinton administration officials associated with shepherding the peace process through the tortuous sieve of Israeli legalisms toward publicly defined Israeli borders. Nevertheless, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin has decided it cannot show a bit of lenience even toward the civilian arm of Hamas. And the Clinton administration policy is to give Rabin whatever he judges he needs to coerce the Palestinians into a peace without control of either their land or their water and with Jewish settlements intact.

What is clear is that new names are being added to the American watch list every day, based on close consultations with Israeli security officials (and perhaps with help from Amman, Cairo and even Gaza). Already past the 70 mark, according to leaks, the confidential watch list is expected to expand drastically if the counter-terrorism bill passes, a valid reason for alarm by Muslim and Arab Americans, and all other U.S. residents holding green cards.

Eugene Bird is president of the Council for the National Interest.