Getting Their Acts Together

If each time you read that Middle East peace has been derailed, you feel you read that last month, here are some tips for understanding where the peace process may be headed and why it keeps on going there despite the setbacks so regularly reported in the U.S. press. When we talk about the Arabs we're talking about 21 sovereign states plus the PLO. That's more political entities than in all of Western Europe. So when we say the Arabs may never get their house totally in order, that's about as astonishing as saying there may never be a United States of Europe.

That said, however, all of the Arabs directly concerned with an Arab-Israeli peace are getting their act together. It began a year ago when PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat reconciled with President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The left-wing extremists walked out of the PLO in protest. It was the best thing that ever happened to the PLO. With King Hussein's help, Arafat then convened a meeting of the Palestine National Council, the only parliament the Palestinians have, in Amman despite the fact that Israel and Syria refused to let PNC members living in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon attend. Arafat got a quorum anyway, and after a fierce debate, was confirmed as the leader of the PLO, the only government the Palestinians have.

The next step was the Hussein Arafat agreement on negotiating with Israel, signed in February, 1985. That set off the search for Palestinians acceptable to both the PLO and Israel for a joint Jordanian-Palestinian negotiating team. Think about that. Can you imagine us allowing the Soviets to veto candidate after candidate for the U.S. negotiating team at Geneva? Nevertheless, both Hussein and Arafat have permitted the Israelis to do this. Is there any doubt, then, that they are sincere about wanting to negotiate a peace agreement?

Now we see King Hussein and President Assad of Syria wrapping up an agreement. Israel's claque in the U.S. press says it means Hussein is about to sell out Arafat, since everyone knows that Assad and Arafat have long been bitter enemies. That's wishful thinking by people who don't want Israel to have to negotiate peace with anyone. Hussein and Arafat were also once enemies. Hussein and Assad have been bitter enemies right up until the present negotiations. The fact is, personal differences aside, all of the Arab confrontation states are putting together a united front that can negotiate and make whatever agreement is reached stick with all of the Arabs.

One reason is Iran. When the Iraq-Iran war broke out, Syria and Libya broke ranks with the other Arab countries and supported Iran. It meant Iraq's major pipeline for exporting oil was cut off where it entered Syrian territory. The ultimate loser was Syria, however. Iraq now exports its oil through new pipelines transiting Turkey and Saudi Arabia. For its part, Syria has never replaced the transit fees from the closed-down pipeline that were a critically important source of its foreign exchange.

Meanwhile, the Iranians have outrageously abused Syrian friendship. Shia extremists who blew up the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine and French army barracks in Beirut and who are holding kidnapped Americans and Frenchmen and generally making Lebanon uninhabitable for all foreigners are Iranian-funded and directed. Unchecked, they will almost certainly draw Syria into another war with Israel. Further, Iran is not only subsidizing Shia extremists in Lebanon, it is arming the Sunni fundamentalists who have been fighting the Syrians in northern Lebanon as well. In short, the Syrians have finally learned that if you have Khomeini's Iran for a friend you don't need an enemy. Syria is putting pressure on both Shia and Sunni fundamentalists in Lebanon to cut out the terrorism and that's why those extremists are suddenly so eager to release their American and French prisoners via some sort of exchange agreement.

A not-so-hidden factor in all this is Saudi Arabia, and the smaller oil-producing states that generally follow its lead. Jordan, Syria and the PLO all receive generous subsidies from the Saudis and their friends, as does Iraq's war effort. For years the Saudi subsidies were paid to Syria, for example, just the way U.S. subsidies are paid to Israel. No strings. Syria could go right out and sabotage initiatives by the PLO, Jordan or Iraq and, although the Saudis might not like it, nothing would happen. Israel can go right out and undermine U.S. initiatives for peace by building more West Bank or Golan settlements, and nothing happens either. That's changed in the Arab world, and it's the best thing that could happen there. If it changed in the U.S.-Israel relationship, it would be the best thing that could happen to Israel, and 50 percent of the Israeli population would agree with that statement.

That brings us to what's happening right now in Israel. It was inevitable that the moment the Arabs began to get their house in order, things would start to fall apart in Israel. The Israelis have not had to confront the real possibility of making concessions for peace for several years now, because they could always point to someone running out of control in the Arab camp. That may soon no longer be the case.

It is dangerous to over-simplify Israeli politics. But one can easily sort out the parties in terms of their positions regarding the three peace scenarios. One scenario is to maintain the status quo, keeping the occupied territories and their inhabitants under some sort of Israeli hegemony. A Jewish state in which very soon more than half of the inhabitants would be non-Jews doesn't make a great deal of sense, however.

The second scenario is to keep the West Bank and Gaza, bring down King Hussein's regime in Jordan, and expel all of the Arabs from the occupied territories (and perhaps from Israel too) into the resulting East Bank Palestinian state. That is the program of the Likud block, one of whose two rival leaders is scheduled to take over the Prime Ministership in Israel next fall. If it's Ariel Sharon, Israel will likely be bombing Amman within weeks of the changeover. He wanted to bomb Amman instead of Tunis a month ago. If it's Yitzhak Shamir, he may be a bit more subtle, but Israel will find a pretext to pour Palestinian refugees into Jordan, seeking to destabilize King Hussein's regime by sheer numbers.

The third scenario is to give back the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Arabs and grant sufficient internationalization of Jerusalem to permit unlimited Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish access to all of that city's holy places. In short, acceptance without reservation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula, which has been the ostensible basis of U.S. Middle East policy since 1967.

What is happening in Israel is that Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who heads the Labor Coalition, seems to be shifting scenarios. He was once considered a "hawk" within that coalition, following the first scenario of hang on to the West Bank and let the chips fall where they may. But when the Likud Block took power, that policy didn't help Israel.

Instead it left Israel politically polarized. Its economy is in a shambles from maintaining a huge standing army and wasting money on "settlements" that have no economic justification. Israelis now talk seriously about the possibility of civil war if the present policy continues much longer.

So Peres, who has had the benefit of having someone else take the blame for the failure of a policy he once advocated, is now talking about peace. His primary concern is Israeli domestic politics. He doesn't want to turn over the Prime Ministership to the Likud next fall. He is seeking to break up the present Labor-Likud coalition government and either replace it with a new coalition of Labor and the religious parties, or call for new elections which might give him a clearer mandate. Peres wants Likud to walk out of the coalition now, and that's one reason he is talking about the peace they don't want.

Peres' hints that he is interested in the third scenario may, therefore, be nothing but domestic politics, and many seasoned Israel watchers think that's the case. We're not so sure, however. Peres is a very flexible man. It may be that he has looked into the future and seen the same thing we see. If Likud takes over the leadership of Israel next summer and carries out the expel-the-Arabs scenario, there will almost certainly be another war. If the U.S. bails out Israel with an airlift as it did in 1973, the Israelis will probably win, but at great cost to themselves and great risk to world peace. It might be, however, that the U.S. would be sufficiently angered at the unabashedly racist policies of Likud that this time it would not intervene on Israel's side. The Arabs, after all, would not be fighting to push the Israelis into the sea, but only to retain land that the U.S. agrees must stay with the Arabs.

With or without a war, when Likud has had its way it will be a different Israel: A permanent garrison state whose only national product is arms and mercenaries. The grandchild of the Holocaust survivor will become a new kind of wandering Jew, Uzi in hand, ready to direct genocidal operations for any ruler anywhere so unpopular that he must hire mercenaries to suppress his own people.

The kind of Jew who now supports Peres and the Labor Coalition will leave Israel, since he has relatives and ties with Western Europe and the Americas. He doesn't have to live in a state that lives by the sword. Only the Oriental Jews will be left, stuck in a little Sparta only partially of their own making, and almost certainly watching their all-important ties with America's Jews wither and die.

That's the future Israel's "peaceniks" have been fighting to prevent. Now is the perfect time to forestall it since Likud is being torn apart by the Sharon-Shamir rivalry. And if Peres is successful, it's just possible he will go for the third option—real peace with the Arabs based upon Resolution 242.

To find out, the Arabs have to keep their house in order, and the U.S. has to get its own act together. We think the direction being followed by the Reagan Administration, while sometimes uncertain and always too slow, is nevertheless sincere and may eventually be effective.

We wish, therefore, that certain Congressmen would stop signing everything Israel's lobby writes and puts in front of them, stop thinking about campaign contributions related to the Middle East, and start thinking about peace. And Americans in general can start understanding what's happening in the Middle East right now if they stop simplisticly thinking Arabs versus Israelis and start thinking moderates versus extremists and peace makers versus peace breakers. That's how we can get our act together.

—Richard Curtiss