The Peace Accord's "Hall of Shame"

By Leon T. Hadar

"Yasser Arafat in the White House! I can't believe it." "Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization making peace? I didn't expect this to happen in my lifetime." "Rabin and Arafat shaking hands. No Middle East expert could have predicted that. "

How many times recently have you heard or read a Middle East "analyst" or "observer" expressing similar sentiments in the aftermath of the PLO-Israeli accord?

Well, many readers of this magazine probably have been thrilled, if not ecstatic, over these developments. The accord, with all its uncertainties and vagueness is, after all, a tangible step toward fulfillment of the dreams of many of us who have supported Palestinian self-determination and independence, Israeli-PLO negotiations and the two-state solution. It is, at the minimum, a small move in the right direction.

But surprise? Going through my columns of the past two years I cannot resist a sense of pride that so many of my observations have turned out to be right on the mark.

These include pointing out that many American Jews have begun to out-Zionize the Israeli public; predicting that Israel's loss of its claim to be a U.S. "strategic asset" would increase American diplomatic pressure on the Jewish state; arguing that the pressure of the Bush-Baker team would lead to the shattering of Israel's political status quo; forecasting the Israeli Labor Party's election victory; suggesting that the Labor victory and the formation of a centrist-leftist coalition would produce a Hadar gradual change in Israeli foreign policy; and predicting that the political enigma called Yitzhak Rabin could become an Israeli de Klerk.

In February 1993, my column, headlined "Israelis Set the Stage for Direct Negotiations with the PLO," suggested that the Labor-led coalition consists of a majority of Knesset members who support direct talks with the PLO. "The consensus that is emerging in the Israeli foreign policy establishment is that only a more direct involvement by the PLO in the peace talks—a move that is already supported by more than 40 percent of the public—could put the talks back on track and tip the balance of power in the occupied territories in favor of the more moderate forces." So Washington Report readers shouldn't be too surprised.

In the July/August column, "Shimon Peres: Rabin's Challenger from the Left," I analyzed many of the trends that subsequently led to the Sept. 13 handshake, including the "effort on the part of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin, to open negotiations with the PLO and to accept the idea of Palestinian independence alongside Israel." I noted that the Clinton administration, under pressure from the Israel lobby and to the dismay of Peres and his advisers, was trying to downplay those efforts. I suggested that, for the first time, Israel's government includes players that are more inclined to reach accommodation with the PLO than are the U. S. administration and its American-Jewish supporters.

It would be magnanimous to forgive critics who called those with whom they disagreed "Israel bashers," who referred to Bush and Baker as "anti-Semites," who eschewed talks with the PLO—and try to gently co-opt these former opponents. But it's difficult to be magnanimous after noting that so many of those who attended the signing at the White House were not those who fought so hard that this day could arrive, but those who were at the forefront of the quarter-of-a-century-long effort to prevent what they were about to witness from happening.

The same people who sought—through the policies they pursued, the legislation they passed and the articles they wrote—to scuttle every move toward U.S. recognition of the PLO or Israeli-PLO negotiations and to portray those who supported such things as "anti-Semites" or "self-hating Jews" were now pleading with Chairman Arafat for an autograph "for my grandchildren" or seeking to be photographed with the man they had called a "terrorist" and compared to Hitler.

And there, presiding over the signing ceremony as White House Middle East adviser, was Martin Indyk, the smooth-talking Australian-born former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employee who, as head of the pro-Likud Washington Institute for Near East Policy, made every possible effort to marginalize the PLO.

What a contrast to the Desert Storm victory parade. Then we didn't see Pat Buchanan and other leaders of the opposition to the war sitting next to President George Bush as he reviewed the U.S. troops returning from the liberation of Kuwait. At that time the Washington Times prepared what it called the Gulf war's "Hall of Shame." It compared the predictions and statements of major public figures who had opposed the war against Saddam Hussain with its actual results.

Media "Wisdom"

We cannot expect any of the mainstream media, all of which played major or minor roles in propagating the conventional anti-PLO wisdom, to compile any such Peace Accord "Hall of Shame." Most U.S. publications played down reports emanating from Middle Eastern newspapers on the secret PLO-Israeli negotiations. Both Arafat and Peres were described as irrelevant players, and most media attention was focused on. a possible breakthrough at the Washington peace talks on the Israeli/Syrian front.

So I've compiled a small list of some who, in addition to the mainstream U.S. media as a whole, did their utmost to prevent that White House handshake from occurring.

President Clinton and his advisers: During his campaign and after his election, Bill Clinton made a conscious decision to place the Arab-Israeli peace process at the bottom of his agenda. Making Asia and trade his foreign policy priorities and shifting public attention to domestic issues was calculated to be politically cost-effective by avoiding a high-profile presidential role in the peace talks that inevitably would lead to a confrontation with Israel and antagonize American Jewish campaign donors and voters.

The Clinton approach had converted the peace talks in Washington into an exhausting ritual, with the administration intervening only enough to make sure the talks would not collapse altogether on its watch. Both the Clinton White House and the State Department treated with skepticism bordering on hostility Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres' effort to deviate from the Madrid process to get the PLO directly involved in the negotiations. Through leaks to the press, Peres was described by unnamed U.S. officials as a "dreamer," and the moribund Madrid formula as "alive and well." Ironically, this U.S. attitude of benign neglect forced the two sides to get their act together themselves to make peace.

The Congress: If, by contrast, the Clinton administration had tried to reignite the peace talks by re-opening the U.S.-PLO dialogue, almost every member of Congress would have jumped on an AIPAC led bandwagon to condemn the move. How ironic, therefore, to see PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat greeted as an honored guest on Capitol Hill by the Democratic and Republican leaders of both Houses. No longer will signing "sense of the Congress" letters condemning the PLO elicit generous AIPAC-orchestrated campaign contributions. Instead, all of the AIPAC drafted anti-PLO legislation introduced by compliant congressmen has to be rescinded by the congressional representatives of the American people because an Israeli prime minister decided it was time to extend a hand to Yasser Arafat.

The American-Jewish leadership and the Israel Lobby: Lenin referred once to Moscow's "fellow travelers'' in the West as "useful idiots. " Some American Jews, brainwashed for years by Israeli propaganda, may have sensed on Sept. 13 that they had played the same role. For many mainstream Jewish leaders, the news was no less traumatic than the 1939 Stalin/Hitler Pact was for American communists.

Some American Jews, who in recent years have become more Catholic than the Israeli pope, still have not recovered. From their secure homes in Brooklyn or Beverly Hills, many are calling Rabin and Peres traitors to the Israeli cause.

The American-Jewish community as a whole now faces an identity crises. For many, the Jewish state and the need to safeguard it from the "terrorist" PLO stood at the center of their identity as Jews. If Israel follows through on the initial agreement by making peace with the Palestinians and integrating itself into the Middle East, many American Jews are going to lose a "cause," in the same way that many Cold Warriors have felt purposeless since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Who is AIPAC going to compile secret files on and smear for trying to "legitimize" the PLO? Rabin? Peres? To AIPAC and the mainstream American/Jewish leadership the message is now loud and clear: Get a life!

A. M. Rosenthal/William Safire/Charles Krauthammer/Norman Podhoretz, and the rest of the pro-Likud, neo-conservative cabal: Before Sept. 13, they were buying new suits in which to celebrate the coming election as Israeli prime minister of their matinee idol, ''Bibi" Netanyahu. They were counting on the lack of progress in the peace talks and the "menace" of resurgent political Islam to return Likud to power in order to implement its vision of Greater Israel.

It's therefore no surprise that they have been joined by such power-hungry non-Jewish politicians as Jack Kemp and Jeane Kirkpatrick in expressing opposition to the PLO-Israeli accord. They all can only hope that it will fail and "Bib)" again can aspire to the role of Israel's Winston Churchill, called upon by the electorate to save the Jewish state from Labor party "appeasers." So much for those who warned American Jews not to "intervene" in Israeli domestic politics, or to criticize the Jewish state when Likud was in power.

"Bib), ''the Likud party and the Jewish settlers: Their world has collapsed upon them. Increasingly they are perceived from inside and outside Israel as dark forces from the past. Polls suggest that more than 60 percent of Israelis support the accord, and that support is growing for the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Opposition is concentrated around hard-core elements of the right and, in particular, the nationalist-religious elements of Gush Emunim, who are threatening to establish an independent "state of Judah" in the West Bank if Rabin and Arafat carry out the agreement.

Indeed, the Jewish settlements could still be the time bombs that shatter the peace agreement. Those of us who have characterized them all along as a "major obstacle to peace" may, unfortunately, prove to be right.