Just Reducing War Risk Will Not Produce Reconciliation

By Robert G. Hazo

In the late 1980s, at the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, an older Palestinian said on national TV, "This is the beginning of a process that will end in the establishment of a Palestinian state." After the Taba agreement (sometimes called Oslo II) regarding autonomy of different sorts in small parts of the West Bank, an older Israeli said on national TV, "This is the beginning of a process that will end in the destruction of the Israeli state."

He said this despite the fact that the agreement was celebrated at the White House at an event presided over by President Bill Clinton with not only the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat in attendance, but also Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Hussein of Jordan on hand as witnesses.

At this point, given the complexity and enormous number of variables in the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is impossible to predict whether either statement will come true.

In the short term, it may safely be said that Israel, given the weakness of the Palestinian negotiating position, certainly has had more gains than it has conceded in the final text of the 400-page agreement. Foreign Minister Peres was not engaging in mere rhetoric when he argued in the Knesset: "We did not concede anything! The agreement did not create the reality! The reality created the agreement!"

This statement also shows how far the Israeli government has moved since the early 1980s from the Begin-Sharon strategy of "creating facts." At that point Israeli plans were more ambitious than realistic. One such plan was to take Lebanon out of the Syrian and Arab orbit and put into place a compliant Maronite government responsive to Israeli leaders. However, they had not reckoned with the new Maronite president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, who knew that their plan was unrealistic and who had no wish to see Lebanon become an Israeli client.

They also had underestimated the resistance put up by both the Palestinians in Beirut and the Syrians to the east, as well as overestimated the terror inspired by the Sabra-Shatila massacre of September 1982.

The latter was intended to provoke a Palestinian flight from Lebanon just as the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 provoked a flight from Palestinian villages whenever they were approached by the militias of the future Jewish state. This time, however, the Lebanese resistance, especially that of the hitherto voiceless Lebanese Shi'i, drove out most of the Israelis from Lebanon. And, of late, the Israelis and their Lebanese allies have paid a heavy price in blood extracted by the Iranian-financed Shi'i Hezbollah militia for retaining Israel's nine-mile "security zone" in southern Lebanon.

In the past two years alone, almost 50 Israeli soldiers have been killed, plus a large number of Arab turncoats, as well as a larger number of wounded in both groups. (For the impact of such Israeli casualties bear in mind that Israel's 5.5 million population is about 2 percent of America's 260 million. A comparable American casualty figure would be 5,000 military deaths—nearly 17 times more than the total of American combat and accidental deaths in the Gulf war of 1991.)

Israel's strategy of Balkanizing Syria also has been abandoned, as well as the idea of making Jordan into a Palestinian state and deporting or "transferring" most of the Palestinians under Israeli rule (both in the occupied territories and in Israel itself) to that state.

Also abandoned, for now, is the idea of making the Egyptian-Israeli treaty into a document that would lead to real peace, not just a permanent cease-fire, especially regarding trade. Indeed, when King Hussein of Jordan, fearing Jordan would be left out of the action after the Oslo agreement of which neither he nor Mubarak had been told, signed a peace treaty, Israel began to rush the process of commerce with Jordan. Realizing that the ultimate goal of this thrust was access to the oil money of the Gulf, King Hussein has put a damper on trade that is likely to remain.

Further, all efforts by Israel and the United States to draw Syria into the peace process have failed. Indeed, Syria has condemned the Israeli-Palestinian agreements and also holds in contempt the recent Jordanian treaty (as well as Sadat's Egyptian treaty), despite the apparent success of the recent economic summit in Amman.

As a result of all of these developments, and of the increased insecurity in Israel, the occupied territories and Lebanon, Rabin faced options that were and are much more constricted than in the early 1980s, as his successor, Peres, faces now.

What is the Alternative?

The question Rabin asked publicly, "What is the alternative," while opting for the so-called "peace process," may well have echoed Arafat's own thinking as he found himself increasingly isolated in Tunis and facing the emergence of new leadership in the occupied territories. It would be revealing to know which of the two, aware of the Oslo process, made the decision to try to raise it to a level of serious negotiation. For his part, Rabin was being held up by a very thin majority and was encountering fierce opposition from Likud and its American supporters, a large number of whom called him a traitor. For his part, Arafat is faced with massive disappointment in the Palestinian diaspora at what little he has gotten so far. He has two answers. One is, "Something is better than nothing." The other is, "The process, given time, will lead to a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital."

That is possible, if unlikely, under Arafat's leadership. He has demonstrated again and again he is willing to enter negotiations even when he has few cards of his own to play, and that he is capricious and unwilling to at least hear out his more cautious advisers. Arafat's acceptance of unconscionable delays, his concessions on the amount of land over which the Palestinian Authority will exercise supervised control, on the roads configured to prevent the growth of Palestinian unity, on the expansion of Israeli settlements and on the control of water, all preclude development of a genuine Palestinian economy, the sine qua non of any effective kind of independence, however restricted. West Bank Palestinians not only will be physically separated from Israel and from each other, they also will be politically and economically weakened. For example, no fewer than 70,000 Thais and Romanians have been imported to marginalize and perhaps eventually eliminate West Bank Palestinian labor in Israel. If Palestinians become to any large degree dependent on the American dole via Israeli disbursement, the dream of sovereignty will be in danger of melting in the face of subsidy.

If separation (in the name of security) is the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, it seems that the isolation of Israel is becoming the policy of the confrontation states. The Egyptian peace treaty has not led to any kind of normalization. Israeli tourists have been killed in Egypt and trade has been stubbornly restricted. Very few Egyptians visit Israel. Despite the fairly recent peace treaty with Jordan, King Hussein also is discouraging excessive Israeli-Jordanian interaction. Despite strong American pressure, Syria (and Lebanon under Syrian pressure) will not even discuss peace on Israeli terms.

Some time ago the then-prime minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, said on a visit to America to encourage more American subsidy that a time would come when Israel would no longer need American aid. Despite that statement, there is no known plan that will enable Israel to come even within hailing distance of economic self-sufficiency. Nor can there be one without the Israeli economy being integrated into those of its Middle Eastern neighbors. However, those neighbors, rightly or wrongly, seem to be as wary of Israel's economic imperialism as they have been of its military power. The Arab policy, therefore, has become one of political and economic distance from Israel. What we see, given Iraq's removal from the conflict and Syria's inability to achieve strategic parity and its having to settle for strategic deterrence, is not a cold war but a cold peace. And one that is very likely to stay that way.

Blocking the attainment of real peace between the Arabs and the Israelis are the massive obstacles of Arab hatred and distrust of Israel and Israel's contempt for and distrust of Arabs. The Arab-Israeli conflict is still, in this writer's view, a terminal struggle. However, what seems somewhat less likely now is a bloodbath, despite weapons of mass destruction on both sides.

Instead, what the middle and long-term future may hold is a slow but ineluctable enfeeblement on both sides. Israel may in fact realize the fear of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, by becoming just another Levantine state as the professionals in its population, gradually and reluctantly, leave for greener pastures. The Arabs, too, may not realize the gains their resources should make possible in the 21st century because many of the current regimes kept in power by massive security infrastructures will not undertake the radical social, economic and political reforms that are necessary for modern states to be viable in a technological sense.

The Arabs may have an edge in the long run, however, since demographic and other forces may sweep aside some of the barriers to inter-Arab cooperation. Nevertheless, Middle Eastern leaders should face up to the fact that although the peace process is making an eventual bloodbath unlikely, it will not halt the progressive enfeeblement of both Arabs and Israelis. In the absence of sorely needed farsighted leadership, both sides very likely will lose by becoming politically and economically irrelevant in an increasingly inter-related and economically-driven world.

Robert G. Hazo is chairman of the Middle East Policy Association.