Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2001/02/12/transformation_in_israel.php
Monday, February 12, 2001
Shimon Peres, Prime Minister of Israel after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, was one of the most prestigious and hopeful doves in Israel. His vision of the future of Israeli-Arab relations was luminous.
He thought there was a silent majority in the Arab world for a reasonable settlement with Israel. The carrot was to be a shared and beneficent economic future. Instead of vast expenditures on weapons, both sides would cooperate on economic development. Israel, with irrigation, had famously made 'the desert bloom.' Both sides could share in the new international economy brought about by electronics. The Arab world, long a spectator in the modern world, would join it at last. You can read a version of this vision regularly in Thomas Friedman's foreign-affairs column in the New York Times.
Today, Peres speaks of the 'peace process' in the past tense. The Israeli Left is dead. Labor Party Prime Minister Ehud Barak lost in a landslide to former tank general Ariel Sharon. Sharon has been contemptuous of the 'peace process' from its beginning seven years ago in Oslo, Norway.
Those who believed in the 'peace process' argued that there was 'no alternative' to 'peace.' Of course, there was always an alternative: deterrence, and the Israeli armed forces.
But, surely understandable, a weariness with the standoff between Israel and its neighbors gave rise to a peace movement in Israel—'give peace a chance'—and this, in turn, led to the election of the Rabin-Peres Labor government.
As they made concessions to the Arab side, however, without much reciprocation, and as terrorist bombs went off in Israeli population centers, doubts about this course led to the election of Bibi Netanyahu, who promised 'peace with security.'
And it seemed clear that the Oslo 'peace process,' initiated with handshakes and signed documents, would bring neither. It was a paper 'peace process' that did not touch the Arab population.
As it unfolded, Israel made one concession after another to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. This led to the situation today in which 97 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
I always thought the structure of the 'peace process' was faulty, in that it left to last the most difficult question of all: sovereignty in East Jerusalem—the 'Old City,' where most of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sacred sites are located. The idea was that a negotiation itself would generate 'confidence' and that, when it came down to the end, there would be such 'confidence' that the intractable endgame would be manageable.
In my view, Arafat would gladly accept all of the 'confidence'-building gains he could get, always demanding more, and that when it came to the Old City, the 'peace process' would collapse. Arafat has never said anything to the Palestinians other than that East Jerusalem would one day be the national capital.
Against the more skeptical and harder line Netanyahu, President Clinton intervened with both feet, even sending James Carville and other cutthroats to help elect Barak.
It has to be said that Barak did his best. His concessions went far beyond anything advanced before. This former tank general even offered most of the sparsely settled Jordan Valley. Now this is a strategic territory, blocking a tank attack through Jordan against Israel. He offered Arafat effective control of the great Dome of the Rock, which sits atop Temple Mount, the mosque with its golden dome the third most sacred Muslim site.
Clinton put enormous pressure on both Barak and Arafat to settle. We do not yet know how many billions of dollars he offered to the Palestinians. He was a lame duck and wanted this 'peace' achievement for a 'legacy.' He probably wanted a Nobel Prize.
Arafat would not close the deal. He might well have feared for his life if he gave up East Jerusalem. The memory of Anwar Sadat, murdered for the Camp David peace with Israel, is vivid in the mind of every Arab leader. For Arafat, war of some sort might well have seemed the better option.
And there is a real question as to what degree Arafat controls the Palestinians. After all, Hamas, with its active terrorist fighters, also has deep roots in the form of schools, clinics and so on within the Palestinian territory population.
It might have looked to Arafat that war would break out whether or not he agreed to Barak's offers. Hamas and other radical groups have never wanted anything less than the destruction of Israel, which, since 1948, probably a large majority of Arabs regarded as an alien interloper in their part of the world.
I believe that in his frantic haste to get an 'agreement,' Clinton pressured both sides too hard. Twisting arms for peace, he at least helped bring about the present state of war. The Arabs saw that Israel would not give up East Jerusalem. They believed Arafat thought it would. The clarification was deadly.
The Israeli doves have had a taste of the Arab 'street,' the violent masses feared by their own rulers. One symbol of the recent mini-war was the two Israeli soldiers who had made a wrong turn into Ramallah and were butchered by an Arab mob. The doves at last know that there is no significant body of moderate Arab opinion that desires any sort of peace compromise.
Last month, the Palestinians celebrated the founding of Fatah, a political and military organization of Arab Palestinians founded by Arafat during the Eisenhower administration. From its beginning, Fatah was committed to the destruction of Israel, and is encouraged in this still by Arafat's rhetoric. To Arab-speaking audiences, even now he promises that the Palestinian flag will soon fly over the Old City of Jerusalem.
On the celebration of Fatah, the New York Times reported from Ramallah, capital of the Palestinian Authority: 'There were armed youths in black ski masks and black-checked head scarves riding jeeps, children with bandanas that said 'Jerusalem is Ours' and swaggering gunmen in full battle gear: rifles with sniper scopes, ammunition belts, bandoleers, grenades and bullet-proof vests. This was a celebration of armed resistance, and from here, negotiations with Israel seemed a distant mirage.
''These bullets should not only be fired in the air, but at the chests of the occupation [that means Israel] and the settlers,' one speaker exhorted the crowd.'
The Times report concluded soberly: 'The surging bloodshed has put many in Mr. Arafat's own movement in a militant mood that seems to have left him little room to accept compromise peace proposals put forward recently by President Clinton.' That is putting it exceedingly mildly, even while the Times editorially continues to expect something from the 'peace process.'
The fact is Yasser Arafat is not Anwar Sadat. After Israel crushed the Arab armies in the 1973 'Yom Kippur War,' Sadat made a deal which returned the Sinai to Egypt in return for an actual peace. But Sadat, unlike Arafat, ruled an actual nation—Egypt. He controlled the army and the police. When he signed an agreement, it meant something. Arafat has been a revolutionary without a nation since the 1950s. His promises to the Palestinians have been pipe dreams. Unlike Sadat, he controls nothing. He can't deliver, and probably doesn't want to.
The period of the rubber bullet is over. Israel is immensely stronger militarily than Egypt, Syria, and Jordan combined. If the war escalates, this could be clarifying. It would demonstrate the balance—or imbalance—of power. After all, that is the purpose of war as a permanent human institution. As a 19th-century German general remarked: 'The French have French theories: We have German realities, like infantry, artillery, cavalry.'