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Pro-Israeli editorials/columns

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Israel's 2001 vote: Hardly a peace bid

Amos Perlmutter – The Washington Times – December 7, 2000

     As his government coalition continued to shrink, Prime Minister Ehud Barak called for an early election
     set for spring 2001. In a matter of less than two years, both Prime Ministers Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu have failed to achieve a final status agreement with the Palestinians. Neither has succeeded in creating conditions for peace with either of their diametrically opposed strategies or goals.
     Mr. Netanyahu's effort to postpone the final decision on the Palestine State was the essence of his strategy. Mr. Barak promised the electorate that within his first year in office peace would be reached and a Palestine State would exist, in agreement with Israel supported by the United States. The vicissitudes of history are clever indeed.
     The goals of the two prime ministers, one to postpone the formation of a Palestine State and the other to help create it, have been frustrated by the leader of the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat is in fact the nemesis of Oslo, and has created conditions that have brought upon the fall of two Israeli governments and prolonged the misery of the Palestinian children he sends to war against the Israeli Defense Force.
     Will the next Israeli election bring upon the resolution to this conflict? I have grave doubts because of the election platform strategies of the two parties. Both are cognizant that 56 percent of the Israeli electorate favors Mr. Barak's ideas for peace. However, the opinion polls fail to ask what they would favor if the violence continues, or if they believe either of the major party candidates will be able to achieve the peace.
     Mr. Barak is running on a peace platform he calls "a graduated permanent agreement," which means he is willing to gradually return 50 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority even if Mr. Arafat does not declare "end of conflict." This agreement also would postpone the decisions on Jerusalem and the refugee right of return, and create an Israeli security zone in the Jordan Valley.
     This new program in essence denies some of the serious concessions that Mr. Barak made at Camp David last August. There he proposed the return of 93 percent to 95 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, insisting on a Palestinian declaration of "end of conflict." Also, Palestinian sovereignty would have been extended to a number of their neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and there would have been a shared sovereignty over the Old City and, especially, the Temple Mount.
     Two serious concessions made at Camp David are not included in the so-called "graduated permanent agreement." The Camp David proposal made an effort to deal with the right of return with Israel's partial compensation of the refugees (a tacit Israeli recognition of responsibility), and also granted Palestinian sovereignty over the Jordan Valley linked to Israeli security deployment along the river. The reason these contentious issues are absent from the new Barak plan is that he can only win the election if these issues are kept off the table at this time.
     Mr. Arafat rejected the "graduated permanent agreement" immediately. So did the right-wing parties led by Likud.
     How will the two parties differ in the election? Mr. Barak has opted to continue with Oslo. His oscillation between calling Mr. Arafat a partner or not is empty rhetoric. Mr. Barak's plan is Oslo in different language. Likud's platform is clear. Their view is that Oslo is dead, and they call for a new negotiation modality that gives priority to Israeli security needs and imposes Palestinian reciprocity for Israel's territorial concessions.
     What did the polls tell us about the wishes of the people of Israel? The Zemach Poll of Nov. 30, quoted in Ma'ariv on Dec. 1, demonstrates that voters on the right give Mr. Netanyahu 66 percent with 9 percent for Mr. Sharon; while on the left polling results are surprising. Shimon Peres gets 26 percent, 2 percent less than Mr. Barak's 28 percent, and the leading dove, Avraham Burg, also has 26 percent. In answer to the question "Who would you like to be the candidate of the right for prime minister?," the results were Mr. Netanyahu, 59 percent; Mr. Sharon, 21 percent; and Silvan Shalom, 14 percent. The same question for the left resulted in Mr. Peres 29 percent, Mr. Barak, 26 percent; Mr. Burg, 26 percent. It is remarkable that Mr. Peres and Mr. Burg garner more votes on the left than Mr. Barak. It is also remarkable that Mr. Sharon and Mr. Shalom make up 35 percent of Israeli preference for prime minister on the right. To have Mr. Sharon in the government is a much more serious problem for Mr. Netanyahu that having Mr. Peres in the government would be for Mr. Barak.
     The election will demonstrate that Israel's electorate is as divided as the American electorate. The difference between the two is that the composition of Israel's government is an existential matter, while in the United States it is a matter of more or less taxes or the type of prescription drug program that comes out of the Congress.
     The Israeli election will be conducted during increasing Palestinian violence. Mr. Arafat will not wait peacefully for Israel's election results. Violence will only enhance the chances of the right or will stiffen Mr. Barak's position. He may even abandon his "graduated" program. The Palestinians will not surrender one iota of their demands, and will continue their diplomatic strategy of violence.
     Therefore, the 2001 election will not create a sustainable coalition for peace. Israel was once notorious for its cohesive party system, which is now nonexistent. There is no party discipline, and the coalition in the Knesset continues with their fratricidal lack of resolution.

Amos Perlmutter is a professor of political science and sociology at American University and editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies.[p]
   
   

The Peace Paradox

Henry Kissinger -- Monday, December 4, 2000 – The Washington Post

Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in calling for new elections for the Israeli Parliament, also has indicated that he will use the interval to resume the so-called peace process. Since the last Israeli-Palestinian negotiations four months ago turned first into stalemate, then into intifada, it is important to deal with two questions: What went wrong? How can another debacle be avoided?

The realities that produced the peace process in the first place have not changed. Neither side can defeat the other. The Palestinians cannot win because Israel is too strong militarily, and Israel cannot win because the Palestinians are too strong politically. Both sides are therefore condemned to coexistence, the chief issue being whether this comes about as a military stalemate or from some sort of agreement.

Failure to keep these fundamentals in mind was a principal cause of the breakdown of negotiations. President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak had convinced themselves that the peace process resulted from nothing less than a Palestinian conversion to peace in the abstract rather than from the pursuit of historical Palestinian objectives by less violent means. This is why both ignored Yassar Arafat's repeated warning that the time was not yet ripe for a summit. Whatever one's judgment of Arafat's motives, it is important to understand the philosophical gulf between the way Israel and America define peace and the way the Palestinians do.

Israel regards peace as a culmination of the struggle for a homeland and defines it as a normality that ends claims and determines a permanent legal status. Israeli and American leaders were applying the concepts of the 20th-century liberal democracy; but the Palestinians--or at least many of them--live by convictions more comparable to those of Europe during the 17th-century religious conflicts. To them--and to many Arabs--Israel is an intrusion in "holy" Arab territory. The territorial compromises proposed by Israel and American mediators are viewed as amputations of their cultural and theological patrimony.

When Barak opened the Camp David summit by offering Arafat something like 92 percent of the pre-1967 West Bank territory, he was going far beyond any previous Israeli prime minister. But to the Palestinians, the 1967 borders represent a concession in themselves, fully acceptable, if at all, only to the most dovish among them--always cited by Israeli and Western intellectuals as the genuine expression of Palestinian convictions, though recent events have produced little evidence to that effect. The majority of Palestinians treat territorial compromise the way France accepted Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871--as an imposition to be reversed at the first opportunity. And a significant minority--surely larger than the doves--do not accept the state of Israel and favor all-out confrontation.

Thus what Barak considered a huge concession was, to Arafat, a minimum offering that he would not be able to present to his constituency as a significant achievement. If he risked accepting it at all, he was bound to treat it as a stage in a process of the ultimate fulfillment of Palestinian demands that he has been careful not to make explicit. In addressing Palestinian audiences, Arafat never strays far from the vocabulary of Jihad and the recovery of Jerusalem, however ambiguous his language to Westerners.

It is also why the Israeli demand at Camp David that the quid pro quo be a formal renunciation of all future claims--the essence of reasonableness to Americans and Israelis--proved impossible for Arafat. In the face of 3 million Palestinian refugees, he could give no such assurance without losing the support of a significant segment of his constituency.

Arafat no doubt was reinforced in his stonewalling by the precipitate Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, which he was more likely to interpret as weakness than generosity, and by Clinton's eagerness for an agreement. In any event, when Israeli territorial concessions were made conditional on Palestinian "compromises" regarding the holy places, the looming stalemate headed for a blowup.

Paradoxically, the focus on finality proved the principal obstacle to agreement. The linkage of the holy places to the territorial disputes expanded the negotiation from a Palestinian to a pan-Arab, even a pan-Islamic, issue, simultaneously extending Arafat's influence and limiting his flexibility. So long as the controversy concerned territory, moderate Arab leaders could treat it as a Palestinian problem and even urge some compromises. But once that religious issue was on the table, no Arab leader could ignore the looming fundamentalist threat to his own rule. Therefore, Clinton's appeals to Egyptian and Saudi leaders, urging them to intervene with Arafat, were doomed to frustration.

Camp David failed because American and Israeli policymakers had deluded themselves about the nature of the peace process. The emotional outpouring that followed Yitzhak Rabin's handshake with Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 caused a growing segment of Israeli opinion to treat the peace process as a mutual psychological adjustment--an attitude encouraged by an American administration prone to treat international schisms as misunderstandings.

All this obscured how deep-seated the conflict really was. Until then, both sides had acted as if they could wear down the other: the Palestinians by intifada and the mobilization of global political pressure on the model of so-called wars of liberation; Israel by refusing any dialogue and enlisting American support in that course.

The Oslo agreement was, however, less a conversion than a recognition by both sides of objective necessities. The Palestinians, having backed Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, had isolated themselves from most of the Arab states, which were looking to Washington as the most influential outside power. The Oslo agreement provided recognition, maneuvering room and an end to some of the most onerous aspects of Israeli occupation.

Israel under Yitzhak Shamir, on the other hand, had clashed repeatedly with the Bush administration over American pressures for progress toward peace even before the Palestinians had come to the table with Israel. The new government of Rabin wanted to put its relations with Washington on a stable basis and saw in the Oslo process a means to achieve a greater control over its destiny. And it was driven by a mystical, almost eschatological, desire for peace by an ever greater part of the Israeli population, which had moved from the pioneer spirit of the early generations to an accommodating business ethic.

In the process, it was forgotten that the important operational aspect of Oslo was a tacit bargain, which deferred the most difficult issues--final borders, Jerusalem, demilitarization--to some final negotiation down the road. It was hoped that, in the interval, a process of reciprocal moves would build confidence between the parties. The opposite happened. Israel was supposed to give up incrementally control over additional territory prior to the final negotiation. In return, the Palestinians were to make additional moves toward a more peaceful atmosphere between the two peoples. But the quid pro quo for Israeli territorial concessions proved hard to define. As a result, in Israel, the process began to appear like a series of unilateral concessions just to keep the process going, while the Clinton administration grew increasingly impatient with what it considered the foot-dragging of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Barak took office in the aftermath--and partly as a result of an American-Israeli diplomatic controversy. He was determined to avoid a clash with the one ally on whose support Israel depended, and he wanted to make sure that Israel would not be blamed for any failure of negotiations. Moreover, he was in a hurry lest Arafat declare a Palestinian state unilaterally, weakening Israel's bargaining position even further.

But the emergence of a Palestinian state is no longer an Israeli bargaining card. Statehood had been inherent in Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's offer of Palestinian autonomy at the first Camp David summit in 1978. It was implicit in the Oslo accords. Even today, Arafat is treated as a head of state when he travels. Within a measurable time, a Palestinian state will be recognized by most nations, including Europe, even were America to hold back for a while. Israeli ambivalence on this subject gives Arafat a permanent means of pressure. Once the state has been declared, the challenge will be coexistence with Israel--which, intifada or not, remains the option neither party will be able to avoid indefinitely.

Barak, a former commando, sought to resolve all these issues in one fell swoop, encouraged by an American president with great confidence in his persuasive ability and little experience with the tragic in history. Between them, they convinced themselves that the ultimate problem was psychological and that Arab distrust could be overcome by unprecedented Israeli territorial concessions. The effort was bold but bound to self-destruct, either before or after an agreement--as I repeatedly emphasized at that time. It now becomes crucial to draw the right lessons from the experience. These are:

First, negotiations must not start where the last ones left off. The parties are not ready for a final settlement--at least not on terms both sides can accept. At this stage, rather than a peace agreement, the formula of the second Sinai accord of 1975--that the agreement stands until superseded by another agreement--would serve the purpose.

Second, the challenge of coexistence remains. Any new negotiation should seek to achieve a definition of coexistence between two societies sharing a territory only 50 miles wide. It should attempt to reduce friction between the two societies by separating them to the greatest extent possible.

Third, the territorial issue should be settled separately from other issues. But the resolution can no longer be--indeed, in my view, should never have been--the 1967 borders, in which Israel's major cities are linked by a corridor only nine miles wide. This does not provide an adequate buffer against the sort of guerrilla war that has characterized the conflict.

Fourth, in defining these borders, major consideration should be given to Palestinians' concerns for their ability to lead a life of dignity within an economically viable entity. Palestinian territory should be made more contiguous and Israeli checkpoints significantly reduced. It is also time for Israel to review its settlement policy, especially with respect to those settlements that are most exposed and a constant invitation to new outbursts of violence. They should be consolidated now, with or without an agreement.

Fifth, the next U.S. administration should seek to redefine the purpose and direction of a new "coexistence approach" before launching its own diplomacy. It should not bow to international pressures to plunge in immediately and "do something." In recent years, the United States has been too involved in the minutiae of the negotiations and not sufficiently attentive to overall purposes. It has used up credibility by involving itself in detail and personalities or in seeking to shape outcomes by influencing Israel's domestic politics.

Sixth, thoughtfulness will be more important than speed.

The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm that has clients with business interests in many countries abroad.
   
   

Into the Next Mideast Whirlwind

Jim Hoagland  -- December 3, 2000 – the Washington Post

America's great national uncertainty ends in a matter of days. But the Middle East's new time of confusion stretches months ahead, promising sharp surprises and explosive problems for the new U.S. administration.

Nearly a decade of relative stability in Arab-Israeli affairs has been swept away by the spectacular failure of the Camp David peace talks last summer and the shock of two months of bloody Palestinian insurrection and overwhelming Israeli military retaliation this autumn.

The inflated reputation of Uncle Superpower--of the United States as a uniquely omnipotent force able to settle foreign conflicts on its terms--is among the casualties of the renewed Arab-Israeli conflict. America's role in the Middle East must be reassessed and altered to reflect a changed reality in the region.

This will be true whether the next president is Al Gore or George W. Bush, whether the next prime minister in Israel is Ehud Barak or Bibi Netanyahu, whether the next Palestinian leader is Yasser Arafat the peacemaker or Yasser Arafat the terrorist overlord.

Either Arafat can show up. A lifetime of guerrilla war, exile and betrayal by and of his fellow Arab leaders keeps Arafat always poised to jump to the next burning deck. To see Arafat committed irrevocably to any position is to misunderstand his dilemma and nature profoundly.

Diplomacy designed to lock Arafat into "finality"--the aim Barak set for himself at Camp David--turns out to be Mission Impossible. Arafat lives by the Napoleonic dictum that nothing is as permanent as the temporary.

This could bring another big surprise for Barak, who has been forced to call early elections in Israel for next spring. With polls solidly against him, Barak's only chance for survival appears to be to strike a deal with the Palestinians and turn the election into a referendum on peace.

Logic suggests that Arafat would prefer to deal with Barak, who offered the Palestinians the most generous peace terms ever contemplated by an Israeli leader, and not with Netanyahu, who as prime minister argued endlessly over the terms of the Oslo peace accords and implemented them partially and grudgingly.

But logic is an often faulty guide in the Middle East. Arafat may well prefer to haggle with Netanyahu over details rather than face the pressures of a brave new world of finality.

An essential point has emerged with new clarity from the post-mortems conducted on the corpse of the Camp David failure: Barak's own extreme uneasiness and disillusionment with the Oslo agreement that Arafat worked out with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1993.

Barak went to Camp David to force Arafat to choose. The Palestinian's alternatives were accepting either a real and swift peace or the responsibility for blocking it, the Israeli leader's comments since Camp David suggest.

Either way, the Oslo process would be overtaken. Israel would shed the difficulties of carrying out partial withdrawals and other incremental steps mandated by Oslo. Those interim measures in Barak's view were bleeding Israel in domestic and international opinion and achieving nothing in return. Oslo was over.

That at least is what Arafat heard. Stoking the fires of rebellion in Gaza and the West Bank bought him time and an opportunity to blacken Israel's image as thoroughly as the failure at Camp David had damaged his. It may be easier for Arafat to pursue those objectives with Netanyahu in power.

The first adjustment for U.S. policy is to recognize that the Oslo process cannot be meaningfully revived. That is a cost of Barak's daring at Camp David.

And Washington can no longer rely on the relatively benign strategic environment that helped check political radicalism and terrorism in the Arab world in recent years.

Hopes for a fresh start in Syria have been dashed. Israeli officials accuse President Bashar Assad of giving Islamic guerrilla forces in southern Lebanon a green light for operations against Israelis.

Jordan's untested young monarch, King Abdullah, has, as part of an accommodation to Iraq, shaken up his intelligence service to remove key figures who cooperated with the CIA against Saddam Hussein. Egypt is also promoting reconciliation with Iraq and has moved toward resuming a Cold War footing with Israel by recalling its ambassador.

In the Clinton years the United States had the luxury of operating as a facilitator of hopes for a better future in a calmer Middle East. The new president faces the more demanding task of asserting and protecting U.S. interests in the midst of a whirlwind. It is easily his most urgent priority.
   
   

New Elections in Israel

Editorial – The Washington Post --  December 2, 2000

ISRAELI PRIME Minister Ehud Barak's decision this week to call new elections in the face of his government's imminent collapse presents Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with a choice between peacemaking and indefinite conflict. If Mr. Arafat does not reach an understanding with Mr. Barak before Israelis go to the polls, the dream of an independent Palestine could be put off for years. Mr. Barak's popularity has plunged in the wake of the violence that has plagued the region; absent a peace deal, he is likely to be replaced by someone who would be far less accommodating in negotiations than the current government is prepared to be.

Mr. Barak has made clear that he will continue to seek a deal in the months before the election. It's fair to worry, given that his political life rests in Mr. Arafat's hands, that Mr. Barak will be tempted by concessions he would not otherwise consider. But there is a political check against such a scenario. Many Israelis already suspect that Mr. Barak has offered the Palestinians too much. More concessions might bolster such suspicions and thereby damage his prospects in the elections. Polls suggest that many Israelis, despite the violence and notwithstanding their doubts about Mr. Barak's toughness, continue to support a peace deal. Even now, that is, Mr. Barak may have a window in which to produce a deal, if it is broadly consistent with the principles he embraced before the violence began.

In the wake of his election announcement, Mr. Barak proposed an interim deal that would allow the Palestinians to declare a state. The Palestinians quickly rejected any such arrangement, but Palestinian independence remains on the table. It won't stay there long if Mr. Arafat lacks the courage to compromise, and so helps usher Mr. Barak out of office.
   
   

Clinton's Syria Memo

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN – The New York Times – December 1, 2000

Memo to: Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria

From: Bill Clinton

Dear Bashar,

Since I will be leaving office soon, time is short, and I need to be blunt. I think you're playing with fire and are perilously close to making the biggest mistake of your short political life. I'm talking about Shabaa Farms. I told my National Security Council staff yesterday that whoever my successor is needs to know that the most dangerous spot in the world today, the most likely stage for a big war, is not the Taiwan Strait, not the DMZ between North and South Korea, not Kashmir. It's Shabaa Farms.

You know what I'm talking about. Israel unilaterally withdrew all its troops from Lebanon last spring in accordance with U.N. Resolution 425. The Lebanon-Israel boundary line Israel withdrew to was personally certified by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. And the U.N. stated clearly that Shabaa Farms — this little stretch of frontier at the intersection of the Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian borders — was part of the Syrian Golan Heights, now occupied by Israel. Therefore, it should not have been returned to Lebanon by Israel, but should be returned to Syria as part of any Israeli-Syrian Golan peace deal.

Despite that U.N. verdict, you have encouraged the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah, to keep launching raids against Israel at Shabaa Farms, claiming it's Lebanese territory, even though your official maps always showed it as part of Syria.

Bashar, I know you're taking advice from your dad's old adviser Farouk Sharaa, from your tutor from the General Intelligence Directorate, Bahajat Suleiman, and from your brother-in-law, Gen. Asef Shawkat, who all believe that the only way to get the Israelis to do a deal on the Golan, on Syria's terms, is to keep bleeding them from Lebanon. And I also know that you think you're actually behaving in a very controlled fashion. You've told the Palestinians in Lebanon they're not allowed to operate in the border area, so they don't do something crazy. And you've told Hezbollah that all their attacks must be confined to Shabaa Farms. And Hezbollah is very disciplined. I even noticed at the Cairo Arab summit you publicly used the word "Israel," which your father never liked to do, and you referred directly to Prime Minister Ehud Barak. I'm not deaf.

I know you think you're signaling Barak, in your brutal Syrian way, that you want to resume negotiations — but you are using totally unstable chemicals. And if one of these Hezbollah raiding parties somehow slips through Shabaa Farms and into northern Israel, Israel will not let you change the rules of the game and move the war from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. Here's what the Israelis told me they would do in response: Israel will attack every Syrian tank and missile battery inside Lebanon. But in order to do that Israeli jets will also have to destroy the Syrian radar and missile batteries just inside Syria that also cover Lebanese airspace. That means a Middle East war. Goodbye, Syria. Goodbye, Nasdaq. Hello, oil crisis.

Bashar, did your late father ever tell you what Barak did last year? One night, it was about 3 a.m., Israeli F-15 fighter jets, using Israeli-designed electronic countermeasures and laser-guided smart rockets, flew into Lebanon in the dark of night and blew up 10 tanks belonging to your Palestinian guerrilla pal Ahmed Jabril. Do you know how many rockets the Israeli jets fired in the dark to knock out those 10 tanks? Eleven. Do you know how accurate that is? You couldn't score that high in Nintendo.

I know you think the Israelis have gone soft, Bashar, but you could be dead wrong. Barak is in a tense political battle. Many Israeli generals believe Israel's deterrence capability has been badly eroded and they may need to put on a real sound and light show that will demonstrate to the whole region just how sophisticated its air force has become. You could suffer a huge blow. And with you now moving closer to Iraq — reopening the Iraqi oil pipeline through Syria, renewing trade with and flights to Baghdad and holding secret discussions with Saddam Hussein about Iraqi backing for Syria in the event of an Israeli attack — neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore will protect you.

Bashar, your dad was a master at manipulating people around him. Be careful that you don't become the puppet of your father's puppets. It will end badly for you, and even worse for Syria.

 
 
   

Mideast on Hold

Richard W. Murphy -- Friday, December 1, 2000

It is almost time to launch a basic reassessment of America's leadership role in the search for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. "Almost" allows for the faint possibility that President Clinton's latest effort to reconcile Israeli-Palestinian differences might succeed in bringing them back to the negotiating table to reach a final agreement.

According to Israeli press sources, Clinton recently reviewed revised American proposals on final status issues with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. If they do not respond positively, Clinton will finally be obliged to accept that time has run out on his efforts to mediate an overall settlement. And if, as is likely, the standoff continues, the next American president will face the decision whether to involve himself as deeply in the Middle East peace process as has Clinton.

Neither Barak nor Arafat has publicly rejected Clinton's package. Barak, however, has decided to face an early election and may be inhibited from pursuing peace talks during the election run-up. As for Arafat, he will best be able to respond favorably to the proposals if he can claim that he won Clinton's package through the sacrifices made by the more than 250 "martyrs of the al-Aqsa intifada." Should this seem far-fetched, there is in fact a precedent for such a claim. Anwar Sadat's definition of the 1973 October War as an Egyptian victory enabled him to prepare the Egyptian public for the first Camp David agreement and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979.

If on the other hand, the sides remain deadlocked, as is probable, the new president will confront the fact that American bridging proposals on difficult final status issues between Israelis and Palestinians have been creative but not sellable. Despite the good intentions and exhaustive efforts by the American peace team, U.S. dominance of the process has conveyed the image of a bullying superpower. In order to create space in the process, American negotiators should fall back and regroup, engineering a broader leadership of the peace process by including the European Union and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as full partners.

In the eyes of the Palestinian Authority and those of the rest of the Arab world, the United States has simply been rubber-stamping Israeli negotiating positions. Though Israel will be reluctant to welcome the European Union and Annan into any mediating role, it may come to recognize that the involvement of these parties could enhance Arafat's ability to accept bridging proposals he cannot currently accept from the United States alone.

The moves that the Israeli leadership must take to reach agreement with the Palestinians will be politically extremely difficult. Should a Likud coalition succeed in the election, it will try to pull back from every forward leaning position that Barak has taken. No U.S. administration will want to appear to be pressuring Israel on issues such as the status of Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees. And even with the unlikely possibility of a strong Labor-led coalition government, Washington's leverage over Israeli decision making will be strictly limited. Our failure to persuade successive Israeli governments to refrain from building settlements on the West Bank and Gaza is a case in point.

In addition, beyond the peace process that has so absorbed the attention of the White House and the secretary of state, the United States has other interests to protect in the Middle East. Shared leadership in future negotiations could help insulate Arab irritation with Washington over the peace process from the issue of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf, stationed there to contain Iraq and protect global access to Gulf energy sources.

Sensible as it may be, any shift in the American position on the peace process must be carefully justified to the American public, Congress and the regional players. Obviously the United States must not abandon a major role. The current situation is volatile and if the present violence spreads, it will endanger the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties and destabilize other friendly Arab regimes. Moreover, if Washington is seen as walking out on mediation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will be that much harder to raise significant support in Congress and abroad to meet the demands, financial and others, of a comprehensive agreement.

Stepping back from the peace process and forming a broader leadership will improve prospects for an overall agreement between Israelis and Palestinians and also provide greater security for U.S. interests in the area.

The writer is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 
   

Risky moves in Lebanon

Editorial – The Boston Globe – November 30, 2000

THE HEZBOLLAH BOMBING of an Israeli patrol Sunday, on the Israel side of the blue line drawn between Israel and Lebanon by the United Nations, should be regarded as a deliberate sabotaging of Lebanese security by Hezbollah's two masters, Iran and Syria.

Before Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon last May, the regimes in Tehran and Damascus could argue that they were entitled to authorize Hezbollah's guerrilla attacks on Israeli soldiers and Israel's Lebanese collaborators in southern Lebanon. Back then the secular, pan-Arab rulers of Syria and the theocratic Shi'ite dictatorship of Iran could present their sponsorship of Hezbollah bombings and ambushes as their way of assisting Lebanon to assert its right of self-defense against foreign occupation.

But now that Israel has withdrawn from Lebanon everything is changed. The UN drew its frontier between the two states with fastidious care. Under UN Resolution 425, calling for Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, that border should be patrolled and protected by a Lebanese government.

Since the Lebanese government remains in thrall to Damascus, however, and since the Syrians want to suppress burgeoning protests against their own continuing occupation of Lebanon, the officials who speak for Lebanon are not free agents. They cannot defend Lebanon's true interests. They cannot fulfill their obligations under UN Resolution 425 because, at present, it does not suit the rulers of Iran or Syria to replace Hezbollah guerrillas in the south of Lebanon with Lebanese troops.

Consequently, Beirut is forced to acquiesce to Damascus and Tehran, permitting cross-border raids against Israel that could provoke a wider regional conflict. Those raids also defy the writ of the UN and violate the border it drew in consultation with both states.

Hezbollah's rationale is to assert that the area it has infiltrated and bombed - a small patch of territory known as Shebaa Farms - belongs by right to Lebanon. This is what Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has said - despite the fact that Shebaa Farms was taken from Syria in the 1967 war and was long considered to be part of the land Syria was to retrieve once it struck a peace accord with Israel.

That Damascus is now saying it cedes the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon is a display of sham generosity. Since sisterly Syria has de facto control over every inch of Lebanon, its land grant amounts to shuffling a tiny asset from one Syrian account to another.

Every member of the UN Security Council that wants to avoid a dangerous conflagration in the Middle East needs to pressure Syria and Iran to call off their Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon.

Barak's Gamble
Editorial -- The LA Times – November 30, 2000

The Israeli leader, linking his fate to a revival of the peace process, has only months to produce.


     Abandoned by his coalition partners and backed by only about 30% of Israelis, Prime Minister Ehud Barak has agreed to put his political future on the line next spring, two years ahead of scheduled elections. He announced the decision to accept early elections as an overwhelming majority of the Knesset, Israel's legislature, was preparing to vote no confidence in his leadership. Barak's swift political decline began last summer when the U.S-organized Camp David summit conference failed. His peace proposals--the most comprehensive ever offered by an Israeli leader--were rejected by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Now two months of Israeli-Palestinian violence has further increased disappointment in Barak and impatience with the peace process he has championed.
     Palestinian analysts say Barak should expect no help from Arafat as he fights to hold on to power. Two years ago Arafat quietly urged Israeli Arabs, who account for about 20% of the population, to support Barak. Since then, his associates say, the Palestinian leader has come to distrust Barak, which appears to mean that he won't rush to resume talks or strike a partial deal that could help vindicate the prime minister's faith in the peacemaking process.
     Arafat should rethink that stand, and the Clinton administration, in its waning weeks, should do all it can to encourage him to do so. Arafat surely knows that what Israelis will be voting for isn't just their political leadership but the fate of peace efforts for years to come. An electoral victory by the right-wing Likud Party, whether headed by its current leader, Ariel Sharon, or a renascent Benjamin Yetanyahu, a former prime minister, would probably erase all the proposed concessions on territory, sovereignty and the status of East Jerusalem that Barak offered at Camp David.
     Arafat scorned those concessions as insufficient, though--as American officials complained--he avoided making any concrete counteroffers that might have kept the bargaining going. Instead he walked away, adding further to Palestinian frustrations about the lack of progress toward statehood and setting the scene for the latest explosion of violence.
     It's not the business of Palestinians to decide who will govern Israel, but who governs Israel very much concerns Palestinians. A government whose chief supporters are those determined to hold on to the West Bank won't give Palestinians the independence and dignity they seek. If Barak can restart negotiations and present at least some accomplishments to the electorate next spring he has a chance of retaining power and keeping peace efforts alive. He hopes the election can be a referendum on the peace process, but for that to happen there has to be an active process that is worthy of endorsement.

 

Israel Is Set to Vote--and This Time, It Will Swing to the Right

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI – The LA Times -- November 29, 2000

JERUSALEM--As Israel prepares for elections following the failure of Ehud Barak's government, the question of who will run against him is hardly straightforward.
     Though Ariel Sharon currently heads the Likud opposition, the party's candidate could turn out to be former Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In every poll taken in recent months, Netanyahu has beaten Barak by as much as 20%, while Sharon has only lately inched ahead of the Labor Party leader. Astonishingly, in barely 18 months in office, Barak has managed to make much of the country nostalgic for Netanyahu, who as prime minister alienated almost all his party colleagues.
     Yet Barak, Israel's most-decorated war hero and a brilliant strategist who beat Netanyahu in a landslide vote, has acquired the very reputation for arrogance and incompetence that led to Netanyahu's downfall. And except for withdrawing Israeli troops from Lebanon--which has turned out to be a security fiasco, bringing Hezbollah terrorists to Israel's northern border--he hasn't implemented any campaign promise. The ex-general who assured Israelis that no one could be better trusted than him with the country's security has so far failed to quell Palestinian violence. And the candidate who promised to sign peace agreements with Syria and the Palestinians within 18 months of entering office has instead presided over the total collapse of the Oslo accords. And now, with car bombings returning to Israel's streets, many recall the drastic decline in terrorism during Netanyahu's rule.
     In fact, Barak's candidacy is by no means guaranteed. Labor left-wingers may try to oust him in party primaries. Even former prime minister and Oslo architect Shimon Peres--who is 77 and has never won an election (he was appointed prime minister after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination)--is considering a primary race against Barak.
     Ironically, almost no one wants the coming elections. A clear majority of Israelis had hoped to see Labor and Likud unite in a national unity government that would deal with escalating terrorism and threats of regional war. And both Sharon and Barak preferred a national unity government to elections, in part because both fear the return of Netanyahu. But Netanyahu's supporters in the Likud parliamentary faction repeatedly blocked Sharon's entry into the government and are now preparing the way for their leader's comeback.
     After last year's electoral defeat, Netanyahu disappeared from public sight, preoccupied with a police investigation into alleged bribery. Following his exoneration, he began making limited media appearances, conceding that he'd made mistakes and implying that next time he'd do better.
     Since the intifada, he's appeared publicly with greater frequency, presenting himself as a statesman offering advice to Barak rather than the divisive politician he'd been as prime minister. If reelected, Netanyahu will almost certainly resume his tough and effective policy of "reciprocity," demanding concrete Palestinian steps to control terrorism in exchange for Israeli territorial concessions.
     If Sharon, who is perceived internationally as an Israeli Slobodan Milosevic, manages to maintain control of the Likud and beat Barak, Israel could face unprecedented diplomatic isolation.
     In fact, Sharon is far more complex than his image abroad allows. It was, after all, Sharon who presided over the uprooting of Israeli settlements in the Sinai following the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement in the early 1980s. And Sharon helped convince a reluctant Netanyahu to sign the Wye agreement with Yasser Arafat. Sharon, who believes a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians is impossible, instead advocates interim agreements, including limited territorial concessions--a position that Barak himself appears to be adopting.

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Yossi Klein Halevi Is a Contributing Editor of the New Republic and a Senior Writer for the Jerusalem Report

 

International force fantasies for Mideast

Amos Perlmutter – November 27, 2000 – The Washington Times

     An official Israeli communique says it opposes an international or United Nations force to observe the peace.
     But Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has already amended the government statement. He said recently in Paris that, "Israel never rejected an international force," and "Israel will agree to the sending of international observers to the territories as long as it is done in the context of new 'planned stages' for a permanent arrangement between the parties." This is a total surrender to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
     The idea of an international force is an effort to increase the role of the United Nations and to de-Americanize the mediator's role. If Israel agrees to this plan, Mr. Arafat has won by upstaging the conflict, which will legitimize his violence, the purpose of which was to secure outside intervention.
     The most recent experiences with U.N. observers demonstrate the ineffectiveness and futility of such an approach. In 1994, a temporary international observer force was established to protect the Palestinians of Hebron after the Mosque massacre by a Jewish settler. If their purpose was to give Palestinians and Israelis a sense of security, their success has been negligible. Israelis and Palestinians continue to shoot at each other in Hebron.
     Israel withdrew its forces from Lebanon recently, and a U.N. force was placed at the border to protect the Israelis from the Hezbollah efforts to warm up the border with Israel. The impotent U.N. force has not even lifted a finger to protect Israel, and in fact the most recent alliance between Sheik Nassaralah and Bashar Assad, where the junior Syrian dictator has given Hezbollah a free hand to Lebanon, could mean a serious conflagration between Israel and Syria if Hezbollah continues its pernicious activities.
     The readers must be reminded of the famous 1982 massacre in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla where an international peacekeeping force was established, except that it did not protect the U.S. Marines from being blown up by Hezbollah.
     Why is this type of peacekeeping so ineffective in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Peacekeeping forces are of no value when the parties have not resolved their major issues. In the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, peacekeeping has been successful so far in the Sinai and in the Golan Heights. This is because the Egyptians signed a peace treaty with Israel, and the Syrians accepted joint troop withdrawal. In other words, the two parties, calling for an end to violence, jointly accepted the role of an international peacekeeping force. This is why in the last 20 years there have been no violations of the agreements.
     When it comes to the Palestine issue, Mr. Arafat's efforts to involve outside observers and peacekeepers are designed to advance his political agenda. Therefore, the observers will serve either as surrogates of Mr. Arafat, victims of the two parties, or most likely will be irrelevant. U.N. observers in this case would not be peace-enhancing forces, but rather would further the violence. The Palestinians continue to violate the agreement and will hide behind outside observers to continue their low-intensity war against Israel. The U.N. force will become an instrument of Mr. Arafat's political and military ambitions to establish a Palestine state by blood and fire.
     The highly respected liberal defense analyst in the liberal Ha'aretz newspaper, Ze'ev Schiff, wrote on Nov. 14 that Mr. Arafat seeks a Kosovo solution for the Palestine issue. Mr. Arafat hopes U.N. or international observers will play a role as NATO did in Kosovo, i.e. taking the side of the so-called "oppressed." Every intelligent observer knows Mr. Arafat is closer to Slobodan Milosevich than to the Albanian rebels. There is no way in the world a Western-oriented or U.N.-organized international force will play his game. The analogy with Kosovo is pernicious and false.
     We must remember there are essentially two major types of peace observers. Peacemaking means intervention in the conflict, as was the case in Kosovo when the United States and NATO forcefully evicted the Serbs. Peacekeeping is meant to retain a peaceful status quo, and is no solution for an open and raging conflict. It will only exacerbate it.
     In 50 years of Arab-Israeli conflict, the United Nations has not only demonstrated its pro-Arab orientation, but also its impotence in peacekeeping. After the 1949 Israeli-Egyptian, Israel-Jordanian and Israeli-Syrian armistice, the U.N. peacekeeping operations continuously recommended that Israel be reprimanded and charged with aggression. The then Security Council patron of the Arabs, the Soviet Union, consistently supported the Arab side in the conflict. The United States seldom supported the Israel case with the Security Council. Only since the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty has the United States vetoed anti-Israeli resolutions in the Security Council.
     The U.N. General Assembly has been dominated by the Afro-Asian-Arab bloc, which predictably votes for a torrent of anti-Israeli resolutions, ever since the establishment of Israel. The European Union's most anti-Israel member, France, has taken the side of the Arabs and Palestinians shamelessly. Oil and greed, not humanitarianism, is the source of French foreign policy. It is the French who are behind and supporting Mr. Arafat's effort to establish an international observer force between him and the Israelis. No responsible government will survive such an act, and this could effect the real demise of the confused, left-leaning Barak government.

Amos Perlmutter is a professor of political science and sociology at American University and editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies.

How to Return to the Path to Peace

HENRY A. KISSINGER – The Los Angeles Time – November 26, 2000

NEW YORK--In fewer than four months, a seemingly imminent conclusion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict turned, first, into stalemate, then into an intifada that appears to have placed final peace out of reach.
     What went wrong? What should be done in the future?
     Any analysis must start from two realities that produced the peace process in the first place and have not changed. Neither side can defeat the other. The Palestinians cannot win because Israel is too strong militarily, and Israel cannot win because the Palestinians are too strong politically. Both sides are condemned to coexistence. The issue is whether this comes about as a military stalemate or from an agreement.
     Failure to keep these fundamental realities in mind was a principal cause of the negotiations debacle. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had convinced themselves that the peace process resulted from nothing less than a Palestinian conversion to peace in the abstract, rather than from the pursuit of historic Palestinian objectives by less violent means. This is why both Clinton and Barak ignored Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's repeated warning that the time was not yet ripe for a summit. Whatever one's judgment of Arafat's motives, it is important to understand the deep philosophical gulf between the way Israel and the United States define peace, and the way the Palestinians do.
     Israel regards peace as a culmination of the struggle for a homeland, defining it as normalcy that ends claims and determines a permanent legal status. To Palestinians--and to many Arabs--Israel is an intrusion in "holy" Arab territory. The territorial compromises proposed by Israeli and U.S. mediators are viewed as amputations of their cultural and theological patrimony.
     When Barak opened the Camp David summit by offering Arafat something like 92% of the pre-1967 West Bank territory, he was going far beyond any previous Israeli prime minister. But to the Palestinians, the 1967 borders represent a concession in themselves, fully acceptable, if at all, only to the most dovish among them. The majority of Palestinians treat territorial compromise the way France accepted Germany's annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871: as an imposition to be reversed at the first opportunity.
     Thus, what Barak considered a huge concession was, to Arafat, a minimum offering he would not be able to present to his constituency as a significant achievement. If he risked accepting it at all, he was bound to treat it as a stage in the ultimate fulfillment of Palestinian demands that he has been careful not to make explicit.
     It is also why the Israeli demand at Camp David that the quid pro quo be a formal renunciation of all future claims-- the essence of reasonableness to Americans and Israelis--proved impossible for Arafat. In the face of 3 million Palestinian refugees, he could give no such assurance without losing the support of a significant segment of his constituency.
     Arafat was no doubt reinforced in his stonewalling by the precipitate Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, which he probably interpreted as weakness rather than generosity, and by Clinton's eagerness for an agreement, which may have made him believe that, if he hung tough, the Americans would wring more concessions from Israel. In any event, when Israeli territorial concessions were made conditional on Palestinian "compromises" regarding holy places, the looming stalemate headed for a blowup.
     Paradoxically, the focus on finality proved the principal obstacle to agreement. The linkage of holy places to territorial disputes expanded the negotiation from a Palestinian to a pan-Arab, even a pan-Islamic, issue, simultaneously extending Arafat's influence and limiting his flexibility. So long as the controversy concerned territory, moderate Arab leaders could treat it as a Palestinian problem and even urge some compromises. But once that religious issue was on the table, no Arab leader could ignore the looming fundamentalist threat to his own rule.
     But the emergence of a Palestinian state is no longer an Israeli bargaining card. Statehood had been inherent in Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's offer of Palestinian autonomy at the first Camp David summit in 1978. It was implicit in the Oslo accords. Even today, Arafat is treated as a head of state when he travels. Within a measurable time, a Palestinian state will be recognized by most nations, including Europe, even if America holds back for a while. Israeli ambivalence on this subject gives Arafat a permanent means of pressure. Once the state has been declared, the challenge will be coexistence with Israel -- which, intifada or not, remains the option neither party will be able to avoid indefinitely.
     It's crucial to draw the right lessons from the experience. These are:
     * The parties are not ready for a final settlement, at least not on terms both sides can accept. Paradoxically, a rush to finality is likely to lead to another explosion. At this stage, rather than a peace agreement, the formula of the second Sinai accord of 1975--that the agreement stands until superseded by another agreement--will serve the purpose.
     * The challenge of coexistence remains. Any new negotiation should seek to achieve a definition of coexistence between two societies sharing a territory only 50 miles wide. It should attempt to reduce friction between the two societies by separating them to the greatest extent possible.
     * The territorial issue should be settled separately from other issues. But the resolution can no longer be--indeed, should never have been--the 1967 borders, in which Israel's major cities are linked by a corridor only nine miles wide. This does not provide an adequate buffer against the sort of guerrilla war that has characterized the conflict.
     * In defining these borders, major consideration should be given to Palestinian concerns for their ability to lead a life of dignity within an economically viable entity. Palestinian territory should be made more contiguous and Israeli checkpoints significantly reduced. It is also time for Israel to review its settlement policy, especially with respect to those settlements that are most exposed and a constant invitation to new outbursts of violence. They should be consolidated now, with or without an agreement.
     * The U.S. role will have to be one of the first subjects to be reviewed by a new administration. That administration should not start where the previous policy left off. It should seek to redefine the purpose and direction of a new "coexistence approach" before launching its own diplomacy. It should not bow to international pressures to plunge in immediately and "do something." In recent years, the United States has been too involved in the minutiae of the negotiations and not sufficiently attentive to overall purposes. It has used up credibility by involving itself in detail and personalities or in seeking to shape outcomes by influencing Israel's domestic politics.
     * Thoughtfulness will be more important than speed.

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Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger Frequently Writes for The Times

 

Two paths Middle East mustn't take

Trudy Rubin – November 26, 2000 – The Philadelphia Inquirer

As bad as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks now, it will get much worse if it heads in either of two dangerous directions.

The first is the drift towards Lebanonization, a reference to the guerrilla war that Israel endured for years before pulling out of southern Lebanon.

Lebanese Hezbollah guerillas carried out endless roadside attacks and suicide bombings against Israeli troops. Now Israelis fear that armed Palestinians will do the same to Israeli troops on the West Bank and Gaza, and to the Jewish settlers there whom the troops are protecting. Last week's roadside attack by Palestinian gunmen on a settler schoolbus in Gaza showed just how vulnerable the 180,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza are.

The second danger is Islamicization - meaning the transformation of a Palestinian nationalist uprising into an Islamic holy war. Palestinians - and the Arab world, which watches the conflict daily on a score of Arab cable TV channels - are agitated by inflamatory charges that Israel is threatening Islam's third holiest mosque, the Al-Aqsa, in Jerusalem's Old City. Already, Arabs refer to the current violence as the Al-Aqsa intifada (uprising). The Camp David talks foundered over who should be sovereign over the site of the Al-Aqsa, which sits on land also holy to religious Jews.

Today is the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, during which tens of thousands of Palestinians normally pray in Jerusalem's Old City. If Israel prevents them from entering for fear of political riots, this will intensify Muslim religious anger. "Islamicization, not Lebanonization, is the biggest danger," says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, head of the independent Palestinian think tank, Passia, "because it creates a situation where any Jew, anyplace, can be a target."

How to counter these two threats?

The only way to prevent Lebanonization of the conflict is to negotiate a secure border between Israel and Palestine, with Israelis on one side and Palestinians on the other. This was one goal of the failed Camp David negotiations, in which Israel proposed to withdraw from most of the West Bank, annexing some settlements near to its 1967 borders and swapping Israeli land for what was annexed. (Any settlers who wanted to remain on the Palestinian side would have had to live under Palestinian law).

That is still the only solution. The claim that dismantling settlements would put Israel proper at risk has got it backward. As 20 leading Israeli intellectuals wrote in the newspaper Ha'aretz recently, "Leaving the settlements in position and expanding them prevents any possibility of drawing a sensible border between Israel and Palestine. In fact, it means that the conflict will go on forever."

The settlements' existence also rules out another option that many have proposed for Israel in case the fighting continues. That option is "separation," meaning Israel would draw its own line, unilaterally, somewhere on the West Bank, separating it from the Palestinians. But top Israeli officials say separation won't work precisely because Jewish settlements are scattered throughout the West Bank - and Gaza - making it impossible to draw the line.

What to do? Even Israeli doves believe it would be too dangerous to dismantle settlements unilaterally; it must be part of a negotiated package. That means any slim chance of restarting talks with the Palestinians before Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton leave office must be examined. The 20 Israeli intellectuals have proposed that the Israeli government announce a freeze on settlement expansion as part of a quid pro quo for a Palestinian halt to violence and a renewal of talks.

As for avoiding further Islamicization of the conflict, that too requires Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, which won't be easy after the past seven weeks.

One imperative: the Israeli government should ignore right-wing pressure to assassinate Arafat's top aides, or it will leave the Palestinian leadership field open to Islamist zealots. Also, Israel would be wise to permit all worshipers to pray inside Jerusalem's Old City during Ramadan and to work behind the scenes to ensure that Palestinian leaders prevent political explosions. At least that may avoid a new round of violence over Al-Aqsa for the time being.

Thin reeds? Yes. But the alternative is to do nothing and watch the two "izations" proceed.

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Trudy Rubin's column usually appears on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com

Loyalty to Israel Shouldn't Require Blind Acceptance

JONATHAN D. TEPPERMAN – The Los Angeles Times – November 24, 2000

     This Monday, after a Palestinian bomb killed two Jewish settlers and dismembered several children on a school bus, the Israeli military responded ferociously. Helicopter gunships rained fire onto the Gaza Strip, plunging it into darkness and chaos.
     The resulting news coverage focused mainly on the Palestinian victims. Arab nations, the European Union and even the United States--Israel's most stalwart ally--responded with outrage.
     Such events have put many North American Jews--historically one of the most progressive demographics--in an exquisitely awkward position. What are we to say when a country with which we have a primal connection, a nation founded in our name by the historically oppressed members of our religion, acts in such a problematic fashion? Liberal ideology pulls us in one direction; tribalism in the other.
     Since the conflict began, many pundits have pilloried Israel as the new South Africa, a colonial power oppressing a helpless subject people. Less frequently do they comment on Yasser Arafat's corrupt and ineffective leadership, or his refusal to stop terrorism.
     Still, despite the sometimes one-sided coverage, much of the criticism of Israel strikes a chord. The condemnations, though extreme, resonate and cannot be disregarded.
     This makes things extremely uncomfortable for Jewish liberals. How can we, who spent so long protesting apartheid-era South Africa, simply ignore the parallels to the current situation? Like it or not, there are striking similarities between the plight of the Palestinians--crammed into miserable refugee camps--and those of black South Africans in the days of the Bantustans.
     Of course, a direct comparison between the two countries is inappropriate. Israel is a democratic and enlightened nation, profoundly unlike the old South African regime. Still, the dirty truth is that similarities exist.
     Moreover, the basic Palestinian demand for self-determination is one that liberals like myself support as a matter of course. As good lefties, we're used to sticking up for the little guy. How can we simply abandon him when we happen to identify with the more powerful side?
     The answer, I think, is to somehow reconcile principle with blood loyalty. This isn't easy, or very satisfying, but it's an exercise North American Jews have practice with. Ever since 1967, when Israel went from being a perennial victim to the dominant power in the Middle East and the occupier of the West Bank and Gaza, liberal Jews have had to perform a delicate dance, explaining to erstwhile allies on the left why, when it comes to this one issue, we must part company.
     By the same token, Western Jews can now retain their principles while continuing to support Israel. The way to do it is by being a critical friend, not a blind supporter, of the Jewish state.
     There is an old tradition inside Israel that when the country is threatened, internal divisions are forgotten and the population unites to ward off the enemy. This is an understandable, indeed an important, defense mechanism. But it need not be adopted by Jews in the Diaspora. While deploring the many missteps of the Palestinian leadership, we must also deplore Israel's disproportionate responses (when they are in fact disproportionate) and the foolishness of its keeping belligerent settlers in the territories. We need not, and should not, side with those who whitewash the Palestinians, as though the oppressed become morally pure due to the mere fact of their oppression. But neither should we endorse all of Israel's actions simply because we are Jews.
     During the U.S. civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, many Americans felt obligated to protest their government's policies. These individuals were attacked as disloyal for daring to criticize their country. What they recognized, however, is that true patriotism sometimes means criticizing one's own country, not blindly supporting it.
     In this spirit, we should remember that, just as Judaism is more than simply a bloodline or a religion, Israel, unlike other ethnically based nations, was founded on an ideology--not just a language or a common genetic stamp. The country was and is inextricable from the liberal, enlightened notions that it was created to represent and preserve. As such, the best way to support Israel is by supporting those liberal ideals, unflinchingly. That means that when Israel seems to forget them, we must point that out. This is not disloyalty. It is the highest form of loyalty.
     If this stance feels awkward, so be it. The situation in the Middle East is tragic and extremely complex. So too must be the response of Israel's friends in North America, as we anxiously await a resolution of the crisis.

Jonathan D. Tepperman Is an Associate Editor at Foreign Affairs Magazine

Take the chance

Editorial – The Philadelphia Inquirer – November 24, 2000

If U.S. can help cease Mideast violence, all sides, in good faith, should meet.

There is only the slimmest of chances that the downward spiral of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians can be halted before it degenerates into full-fledged guerrilla warfare.

In the last week, an Israeli school bus was bombed in Gaza and another bus blown up in the Israeli town of Hadera, while retaliatory