How to Tell if U.S. Mideast Effort is Serious or Just P.R.

by Richard H. Curtiss

"In the contest with the Palestinians, Israel holds virtually all the cards: an established state, overwhelming military superiority, possession of the ground. Correspondingly, Israel has the dominant responsibility for deciding whether there will be peace. And it is in Israel that the fundamental obstacle to the peace process now lies. The obstacle is the absence of political leadership for peace. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is an ambiguous figure...His focus is on satisfying the coalition that keeps him in power, many of whose members oppose any imaginable agreement with the Palestinians."—Columnist Anthony Lewis, New York Times, Aug. 11, 1997.

Two years ago The New York Times carried an article describing a White House gathering on a summer night in July 1995. President Bill Clinton was receiving a drumbeat of criticism from Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole for his inaction in the face of appalling bloodletting in Bosnia, including the Serb massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men who had been under U.N. protection in Srebrenica and Zepa. So Clinton finally gave in to cautious but persistent goading on behalf of the Muslim-led multi-sectarian Bosnian government by his ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, and his National Security Council director, Anthony Lake. Clinton told Lake that "the status quo is not acceptable" and the rest is history. In less than four months the bloody Bosnian war was halted by the Dayton agreement.

On Aug. 9, staff writers Steven Erlanger and Alison Mitchell described in The New York Times a similar White House meeting. The subject this time was the dying Middle East peace process. Their article, describing the June 19, 1997 gathering as "the meeting that transformed the U.S. stance in the Middle East," obviously was based on "authorized leaks" from within the Clinton administration.

The meeting took place after another failed trip to the Middle East by State Department Middle East peace negotiator Dennis Ross, against a background of intelligence reports warning of inevitable new violence by Palestinians frustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's obvious unwillingness to make further land-for-peace withdrawals. Meeting with President Clinton were Vice President Al Gore, Albright, national security adviser Samuel Berger, and Ross.

For 90 minutes they discussed how the Clinton administration could get peace negotiations started again. That meeting set in motion a process that has accelerated since the July 30 suicide bombings in a West Jerusalem vegetable market in which 13 civilians and the two suicide bombers died.

Whether the results will turn out to be little more than a public relations exercise, or a serious attempt to restart the land-for-peace process that has ground to a halt because of U.S. unwillingness to face down Netanyahu will be quickly discernible. If Clinton continues only to insist that Yasser Arafat must somehow control the "terrorism" by his Islamist opponents, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, something that neither the Israelis nor the United States have been able to do on their own turf—it means Clinton has decided to run out the clock for the next three years until both he and Netanyahu finish their current four-year terms in office. On the other hand, if Clinton insists that Netanyahu fulfill his own obligations under the Oslo agreements, the U.S. initiative is serious.

On the day the West Jerusalem bombings stopped the clock, Dennis Ross had been preparing to leave once again for the Middle East to urge Netanyahu to freeze settlement activity, open the land corridor linking Gaza and the West Bank previously promised to Arafat, and also to stop stalling and allow the Palestinians to open the airport and the seaport they already have constructed in Gaza.

Since then, seizing the excuses presented both by the real bombings in West Jerusalem and the false "bomb plot" in Brooklyn, Netanyahu has set the clock further back by halting the turnover to the Palestinian Authority of millions of dollars in taxes and customs revenues collected daily from Palestinians by Israeli authorities. This is a clear violation of the Oslo accords and it will paralyze all Palestinian Authority activities, including police work, in the West Bank and Gaza.

Netanyahu also has stepped up demolitions of Palestinian homes built without permits—which have almost never been granted to Palestinians for the past 20 years—and he has imposed new internal closures that not only keep Palestinians from leaving the West Bank and Gaza, but also halt travel between the seven Palestinian West Bank towns from which the Israelis have withdrawn.

These actions can only provoke more Palestinian "terrorism," which in turn will provide excuses to revoke still more provisions of the Oslo accords until Netanyahu has fulfilled his election campaign pledge to halt all land-for-peace giveaways. Unless Ross, and subsequently Madeleine Albright if she travels to the Middle East by the end of August as she says she may, show that they are prepared to address these regressive measures forcefully, by halting or reducing aid to Israel if Netanyahu continues his defiance, their current travels will be no more than a public relations exercise.

That's exactly what Netanyahu wants. Even before the West Jerusalem bombings he, in effect, had told Ross not to bother coming if he expects to discuss anything but clamping down on "terrorism" with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. For his part, a desperate Arafat, whose political prospects are only as viable as the peace process, has encouraged a return visit, even though he has publicly expressed distrust for Ross, who is Jewish and who had ties with the Israel lobby before accepting a Bush administration political appointment to the State Department. Arafat is even more anxious for Albright to visit, and soon, especially if she is serious about peace.

Speaking on behalf of Arafat, Palestinian Minister of Education Hanan Ashrawi said: "We cannot address Israeli security as the sole objective of the peace process. If they want to restore the security cooperation, it has to be done in the context of restoring all the components of the peace agreement."

Columnist Anthony Lewis, who also happens to be Jewish, summarized the dilemma in the column quoted at the beginning of this article: "American diplomats...know that the real difficulty in the peace process lies in the complexities of Israeli politics. But they veil any criticism of Mr. Netanyahu's obstructive actions because they think speaking out might arouse his extremist supporters, and antagonize some Jewish groups at home. What hope is there for progress toward peace in these circumstances? A realistic answer is: not much."

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.