Both Parties Now Are Waiting to Assign the Blame For Failure of the Middle East Peace Process

By Richard H. Curtiss

The escalating pace of “summit meetings” to set dates for the beginning of “final status” talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders is more and more dictated by U.S. election-year politics, and less and less by Middle Eastern realities on the ground. Whatever happens or does not happen between Israel and Syria, it is more and more certain that there will be no serious agreement in this millennium between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on their problem, which is at the heart of virtually all U.S. troubles in the Middle East, and to some extent throughout the world. And that prediction holds whether you believe the millennium ends next Dec. 31 or a year later on Dec. 31, 2000.

The problem, in the words of an old song about Kansas City, is that these two leaders “have gone about as far as they can go.” Neither Yasser Arafat nor any future Palestinian leader can settle for what the Israelis, under Barak or any foreseeable leader, are willing to offer. And even though the long-term existence of Israel depends upon achieving a Middle East peace now, before the regional demographics become hopelessly stacked against the Jewish state, neither Barak nor any electable Israeli leader seem able to contemplate offering the minimum the Palestinians can accept.

These realities are there for anyone who has been paying attention to see. But they can’t be acknowledged by Clinton administration officials desperately seeking to come up with any kind of photo opportunity that can be labeled a major advance toward Middle East peace before the November 2000 election. So here are the realities that administration officials won’t acknowledge.

Barak’s Likud party predecessor, Binyamin Netanyahu, was elected on a promise that there would be no more land for peace. But then much of the Israeli electorate turned against Netanyahu and voted him out. But, in retrospect, the discomfort wasn’t over Netanyahu’s obstructionism. It was over the fact that his unconcealed intransigence was attracting to Israel the blame for the breakdown of the U.S.-funded “peace process.”

On the other hand, Netanyahu’s predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, before his assassination, had given away virtually nothing. All he really did was appoint Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority to police the seven main West Bank population centers for Israel—while Rabin garnered international support as a peacemaker.

Barak has revived Rabin-style Zionist expansionism.

With his lip service to land-for-peace, Rabin was buying time for Israel to continue expanding West Bank settlements and continue building the Jews-only roads that linked the settlements with Israel, and also separated the Palestinian population centers from each other.

Now Barak has revived Rabin-style Zionist expansionism while making peace signs with a smiling face. But so far Barak has not even carried out all of the withdrawals agreed to by Netanyahu. Through the Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and now Barak governments, there has always remained an unbridgeable chasm between what a majority of Israelis are willing to give, and what a huge majority of the Palestinians are willing to accept.

The Palestinians have made it clear that they can accept a shared Jerusalem or a Jerusalem divided as it was before 1967, so long as it can serve as the Palestinian as well as the Israeli capital. But the Palestinians can’t give up Jerusalem completely, for any price, because as far as all of the world’s Muslims and many of its Christians are concerned, Jerusalem isn’t something the Palestinians can just trade away.

Meanwhile Barak, like his predecessors, is saying Jerusalem must be the eternal, undivided capital of Israel. There’s no room for compromise here.

Nor on final borders. The Palestinians have said they must have back the 22 percent of the original Mandate of Palestine that lay on their side of the cease-fire line between the end of the 1948 war and Israel’s 1967 military occupation of the rest of the Holy Land. But Barak has said Israel will not withdraw from more than 40 percent of the West Bank and Gaza lands it occupied.

However, that’s only 8 percent of the original Mandate of Palestine. The original U.N. Partition Plan of November 1947 gave Israel 53 percent of the Mandate and the Palestinians 47 percent. It may be conceivable for Arafat to reduce his people’s claim from 47 percent to 22 percent of their homeland, which in effect he did when he accepted the land-for-peace formula in U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 of Nov. 22, 1967. It would be impossible, however, for any Palestinian leader to reduce his claim to 8 percent of Palestine and remain a Palestinian leader!

The Issue of Refugees

And what about refugees? U.N. Security Council Resolution 194 of 1948 mandated that Israel must offer the Palestinian refugees a choice of repatriation or compensation. Although the descendents of the approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were driven out or fled in 1948 and the additional 250,000 refugees created in 1967 now number approximately 4 million (in addition to the 3.5 million Palestinians remaining in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel), it’s not unthinkable that, if the price were right, many of those refugees would choose compensation instead of repatriation. But no Israeli government has ever even entered into discussions of the matter.

Barak has said bluntly that the refugees are going to have to stay right where they are. But what Palestinian leader can he find to agree to that? Arafat can’t. He’s the elected leader of the Palestinians in the former occupied territories. But no Palestinian refugees or their descendents in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada or the Arabian Peninsula had any role in electing Arafat or any other leader to represent them.

Without direct negotiations they are not going to give up the rights the United Nations gave to them, and in its own national interests the last thing the U.S. should do is be a party to any abrogation of their rights.

The simple truth of the matter is that for every one of the 4 to 4.5 million Jewish citizens actually residing in Israel, there is a Palestinian refugee living somewhere outside the borders of the former Palestinian Mandate. And those four million-plus Palestinian refugees are in addition to the 3.5 million Palestinians living inside those borders in the West Bank (1.5 million), Gaza (1 million), and Israel proper (1 million). There are far too many refugees to be ignored, if Israel is ever to enjoy a lasting peace.

The remaining problems are negotiable. The Palestinians can live with demilitarization of their state (like Costa Rica, which has no armed forces, only police, but enjoys the highest standard of living in Central America ) if the Israelis accept that the Palestinian state has to have full control of its own economy—meaning borders, airports and seaport. And the region’s water shortage probably can be conquered, if the U.S. and other donor nations are willing to invest enough money in desalination plants, and the Israelis give up the wasteful practices that result in consumption per Israeli of at least four to five times the amount of water consumed per Palestinian.

But with no compromise in sight on Jerusalem, borders or refugees, there will be no peace. The Likud understood this. It never has deviated from the plan it inherited from Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist movement that gave birth, via the wartime Jewish terrorist militias, to the present day Likud party.

Jabotinsky’s plan for dealing with the the Palestinians, inherited in turn by Likud prime ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Binyamin Netanyahu, is called “transfer.” It calls for the expulsion, by whatever means necessary, of the 3.5 million Palestinians remaining within Israeli-controlled borders on both sides of the “Green Line” separating Israel from the occupied territories. The plan’s details call for destabilizing Jordan (or Lebanon or Syria) and in the resulting chaos putting the Palestinians across Israel’s borders so violently, quickly—and bloodily if necessary—that the deed will be done before the world can react.

Binyamin Netanyahu’s failed 1998 attempt to assassinate Jordanian Hamas leader Khaled Meshal and to blame Jordan’s late King Hussein, thus setting off an insurrection of Palestinians to bring down the Jordanian monarchy, was only the latest attempt to accomplish this.

What the Labor core of Yitzhak Rabin’s and now Ehud Barak’s supporters will do to cope with the problem of no peace with the Palestinians is not so clear, even to themselves. But the Likudniks have no patent on the doctrine of “transfer.” Its pedigree predates the split within Zionism after World War I that led to Jabotinsky’s Revisionism. The plan was clearly enunciated by Theodor Herzl, father of modern secular Zionism, when he wrote more than 100 years ago:

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population [the Arabs] across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. The property-owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”

In fact, Israeli laws that bar any non-Jew from residing or earning a living on land that has passed through the hands of the Jewish National Fund, meaning more than 90 percent of Israel’s territory today, go a long way toward putting Herzl’s idea into effect.

As to how and when, Barak probably will seize on another wave of suicide bombing, or other violence by Palestinians, to postpone any more West Bank withdrawals, even from the 40 percent already agreed upon, and blame the Palestinians for the death of the peace process. This, particularly if it occurs during the coming U.S. election year, would provide time, and U.S. funding, to complete the network of settlements in the West Bank being built to make a viable Palestinian state impossible. And, at least for the duration of the administration of lame-duck President Bill Clinton, there would be no serious U.S. protest, and probably not even a cutoff of U.S. funding to Israel.

Increasingly the signing ceremonies, three times in the White House, and others at Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, have been nothing but reiterations of the unfulfilled pledges from the previous signings. At this point that’s all the Clinton administration will look for in upcoming photo opportunities.

Are there alternatives to this bleak scenario of “transfer,” which instead of ending the Israeli-Palestinian problem that has occupied the entire 20th century might touch off in the Middle East the first nuclear exchange of the 21st century, particularly if nuclear-armed Muslim countries no longer have to worry about what would happen to Palestinians if nuclear blasts wiped out Tel Aviv, Haifa, or West Jerusalem?

Peace will come when the 270 million Americans who now fund Israeli excesses come to their senses. Or when a billion Muslims in the Middle East and Asia apply enough unified economic pressure to force us to come to our senses, while the Europeans, most of whom already understand but are not united enough to take action, stand by and applaud.

If the world is lucky, the final result may not be Israel and Palestine but a unified or “bi-national” state, with Jerusalem as its capital, guaranteeing equal rights for all of its residents, regardless of religion. It may be a symbol of piety, peace and prosperity providing unhindered access to its sacred sites to pilgrims from around the globe. Or by then it may be a blackened ruin, mute testimony to yet another opportunity lost by partisans of peace.

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