Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1998, page 138

Publishers’ Page

A Jim Borgman Cartoon Shows...

...Yasser Arafat and Binyamin Netanyahu perched at the very top of a fragile house of cards as Bill Clinton tells them, “now shake hands, gently.” Just as implementing the 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords depended upon Israeli goodwill, the last of which apparently went out of the peace process with Binyamin Netanyahu’s election in 1996, the attempt to pick up the pieces at Wye depends upon Israeli good faith, which has been conspicuously lacking since that same event. Netanyahu was narrowly elected on a platform of “no more land for peace.” Instead he promised the Israeli electorate “security.” He has never explained how Israelis are going to get security at home, however, if their government reneges on the land-for-peace deal and goes back to war with the Palestinians.

From Oslo, Yasser Arafat Expected...

...To take control of 90 percent of the West Bank and Gaza in three equal Israeli withdrawals which were to take place before the beginning of the final status talks, which in turn were to be completed by May 4, 1999 after settling the really difficult issues of sharing Jerusalem, final Israeli and Palestinian borders, and the deal-breaking question of sharing inadequate water supplies. All Wye did was settle the amount of the second withdrawal. If Netanyahu carries it out, as promised, it will give the Palestinians full control of only about 18 percent of the West Bank and shared control of another 22 percent, along with Palestinian control of 60 percent of Gaza.

However, If Netanyahu Seizes Upon...

...Inevitable security mishaps as excuses to avoid carrying out his Wye commitments, it will mean he has no intention of ever making peace with the Palestinians. Instead, he will be looking for an opportunity to “transfer” them all to Jordan or other Arab countries, just as his Likud predecessors always planned to do. If he does carry out the second withdrawal in accordance with Wye, but then tries to turn the resulting lines into final borders, it will just be a sneakier way to get into transfer mode, since no Palestinian leader can accept them.

Either Way Yasser Arafat Had Better...

...Fulfill his vow to declare a Palestinian state on May 4, since the nearly universal international diplomatic recognition that will follow will be his only remaining asset. He already has lost virtually all support in the Palestinian diaspora, for whom Oslo offers little hope of repatriation. Now if he gives in to Israeli pressure to postpone the declaration, he will lose his remaining support inside the West Bank and Gaza, too. That will put things back to where they were before Madrid, Oslo and all the rest, with intermittent wars between 250 million Arabs and fewer than 5 million Israeli Jews, whose only hope is that they will receive extensive support from the U.S.—which will cost Americans dearly.

Given This Gloomy Picture...

...Any sensible U.S. president and Congress would use resulting American leverage to force Israel to accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from lands seized in the 1967 war in return for Arab recognition of Israel’s right “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” But that won’t happen without some outside pressure on both the president and Congress to offset the extremists running Israel’s powerful U.S. lobby. That’s where the Washington Report and our Arab-American, Muslim-American and unhyphenated-American readers come in. We talk about that in several places in this issue, including p. 33and in the account of the AMA convention on p. 104. To quote from the text of Congressman David Bonior’s talk on p. 76...

“Together We Can Change the World!”

Subscribers to Other Voices...

...May be a mite confused at the final four listings in its December table of contents. In fact they saw those articles in the November issue. Anyway, we have it right in the Other Voices listings on p. 5 of this magazine, which are there to show non-subscribers what they’re missing by not paying an additional $15 for the Other Voices supplement.

This Washington Report Went to Print...

...On the same day all our readers (we hope) went to the polls. So in the January issue we’ll be discussing how the new congressional lineup affects Mideast policy; in March we’ll review the Middle East statements of the various presidential possibilities for year 2000; and in April we’ll have complete tables on how much every congressional candidate in the U.S. took from pro-Israel PACs in the 1998 election cycle (along with career totals) and also listings on Arab-American and Muslim-American PACs. With that information we expect to put out a fifth edition of our classic book Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of U.S. Middle East Policy.

The Bad News Is...

...We ran out of the fourth edition of Stealth PACs even before election day. Unfortunately, another of our AET books, A Changing Image: American Public Opinion and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, also is out of print, and we’re down to our last dozen cases of Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters With the Middle East and Islam, though we hope the supply on hand will see us through Christmas and maybe Eid al Adha. We hope to resissue all three books in 1999.

The Good News Is...

That our newest book, Fifty Years of Israel by Donald Neff, has been completed (see advertisement on preceding page) and also that Paul Findley’s classic, They Dare to Speak Out, long out of our catalog because we couldn’t keep up with the demand, will be back in our catalog by the next issue. If you’re looking for Christmas presents to give and you don’t find these titles on the book list enclosed with this issue, the Neff book lists at $18.95 but we sell it for $16, and the Findley book lists at $16.95 but we sell it for $8.50.

More Good News Is That...

...Our mystery project started in November. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, it means you didn’t contribute to it. But to launch it we dipped a little into the magazine’s assets. When we looked at how rapidly public opinion is evolving (see p. 66), we knew we couldn’t wait to collect the amount needed to keep it going for a year, so we just launched it and are hoping to ride the wave to spectacular results.

Which Brings Us to the Subject...

...Of money. We’re delighted we’re getting between 1,000 and 3,000 visitors daily from all over the world on our Web site. We’d like to think they’re subscribers using the site for quick research. But we know most of them are browsing through each issue of the magazine without subscribing. That may considerably enhance our importance in the greater scheme of things. But it may also kill us financially if it reduces paid subscriptions. So we hope Web heads will at least donate something before 1998 is over to help keep the magazine, and the Web site, afloat. Subscribers will be receiving our second and last fund-raising appeal of the year in the next few days. When we sent the first one in May, we vowed that although our rent hadn’t been paid since 1996, we were going to put out eight issues this year or go down with all flags flying. Well, this is the eighth issue of 1998, but the rent still hasn’t been paid for two full years, and neither has the printer for this issue. So if this appeal doesn’t bring in at least $60,000, as did the first appeal in May, we’re out of here, literally. Please don’t let that happen! Join the 1998 Angels’ Choir (see preceding two pages) if you haven’t already, move to a better seat if you have, or if your voice isn’t in tip-top shape this year, at least take a place in the congregation. For every choir member there are several donors of lesser amounts who at least crowded into the building. Be a donor now and...

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