Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2002, pages 8-10

Three Views

The Saudi Peace Initiative

Will Israel Turn Down Yet Another Arab Peace Proposal?

By Rachelle Marshall

The peace proposal outlined by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in late February received a warm welcome in Europe and the United States, was cheered by liberal Israelis, and even forced Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to make a show of interest. Prince Abdullah’s offer, backed by several other Arab leaders, to normalize relations with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza, and most of East Jerusalem was hailed in the West as a major breakthrough. The impression given by most news reports was that after 54 years of hostility to the Jewish state, Arab leaders finally were willing to make peace with Israel.

One of the many myths surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Israel has yearned for peace with its neighbors only to face repeated rejection from the Arabs and Palestinians. “It is doubtful that another case can be found in recent history of a nation that has been willing to take greater risks for peace than Israel,” wrote Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.N., in a Feb. 27 op-ed for The New York Times.

In fact the opposite is true. Since the mid-1970s the Arab states and Palestinian leaders repeatedly have proposed peace settlements based on the exchange of land for peace, only to have these proposals go nowhere. In January 1976, for instance, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the PLO brought a resolution to the U.N. Security Council calling for a settlement based on Israel’s return to its pre-June 1967 borders, “with appropriate arrangements to guarantee the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of all states in the region and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” There was no doubt the reference to “all states in the region” was meant to include Israel and a Palestinian state.

In February 1976 Sen. Adlai Stevenson (D-IL) reported after a trip to the Middle East that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and Iran had told him they were willing to recognize Israel’s right to exist if Israel complied with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 by withdrawing from the occupied territories. “Those preconditions are unacceptable to Israel, “ Stevenson said in an interview published by the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 2.

Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace proposal is especially welcome. But it is not new.

On Dec. 16, 1976 The New York Times published an op-ed column by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a fellow of the Insititute for Policy Studies, who had joined four other American Jewish leaders in a meeting with members of the PLO. “The Palestinians began the conversation,” Waskow wrote, “by stating that the PLO is prepared to accept the existence of two sovereign states on the territory of Palestine, a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.”

A year later, in November 1978, Congressman Paul Findley (R-IL) met with Arafat in Damascus and afterward told reporters that the PLO leader had accepted the principles of Resolution 242 and was ready to accept a U.N. peacekeeping force after the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Findley said he offered to brief the Carter administration on Arafat’s statements but had received no response from either the White House or the State Department.

On May 2 of the same year, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis reported that Arafat had told him in an interview that “the only possible solution” to the Middle East problem is for the United States and the Soviet Union to provide guarantees for both Israel and a Palestinian state. Arafat said he favored a U.S.-Soviet declaration of October 1977 that had proposed recognizing “the legitimate rights of the Palestinians” and ensuring Israel’s security. Israel strongly opposed the joint declaration and it was abandoned.

On Dec. 19, 1978, Ibrahim Souss, the PLO’s representative in France, said in a speech to the American Club in Paris, “If a Palestinian state existed, the PLO would stop violent attacks against Israel and give it de facto recognition.”

The Palestinians made many such statements during those years. As Edward Said wrote in an op-ed column for the Times on Jan. 8, 1988, “For at least 10 years the Palestinian community and its leadership have proposed a political settlement and reconciliation based on an exchange of land for peace, only to be ignored and vilified in the most shameful terms.” Israeli leaders refused even to meet with the PLO until the early 1990s, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin finally shook hands with Arafat and the two men signed the Declaration of Principles that was the basis for the Oslo accords.

Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace proposal is especially welcome because it comes at a time when neither Israel nor the Palestinians seem able to stop the violence. But it is not new. In June 1979 the present King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, then Crown Prince, urged the United States to start an immediate dialogue with the PLO aimed at securing the Palestinians’ formal recognition of Israel’s right to exist. “If Israel withdrew to the borders that existed before the 1967 war,” The New York Times reported, “Saudi Arabia would be ready to make peace and help assure the security of the borders.”

In August 1981 Prince Fahd offered a formal proposal “affirming the right of all countries of the region to live in peace.” The plan called for Israel’s withdrawal from all of the territory captured in 1967, and for a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.

A State Department spokesman said the proposal amounted to acceptance of U.N. Resolution 242, which recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and the United States seemed prepared to back it. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, however, declared that Israel would never accept the Saudi plan. According to the San Francisco Chronicle of Oct. 31, 1981, “Shamir added, without elaborating, ‘There is reason to believe that the policy of accepting the Saudi plan won’t come to pass.’”

Shamir was obviously confident there would be no U.S. pressure on him to support it. Now, more than a decade later, and after the loss of tens of thousands of lives, the choice is again up to Washington: either to throw its weight behind a just and reasonable offer from the Arabs, or to stand by as Israel passes up yet another a chance to make peace with its neighbors.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

How to Torpedo the Saudis

By Uri Avnery

If, in May 1967, an Arab prince had proposed that the whole Arab world would recognize Israel and establish normal relations with it, in return for Israel’s recognition of the Green Line border, we would have believed that the days of the Messiah had arrived. Masses of people would have run into the street, singing and dancing, as they did on Nov. 29, 1947, when the United Nations called for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.

But then disaster struck: we conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Labor and Likud governments filled them up with settlements, and today this offer sounds to many like a malicious anti-Semitic plot.

The leaders of Israel tell us: Don’t worry. Just as we survived Pharaoh, so we shall survive Emir Abdallah [an allusion to a famous Israeli song].

So what will happen?

In Israel, every international initiative designed to put an end to the conflict passes through three stages: (a) denial, (b) misrepresentation, (c) liquidation. That’s how the Sharon-Peres government will deal with this one, too. It can draw on 53 years of experience, during which both Labor and Likud governments have succeeded in scuttling every peace plan put forward.

(We must not suspect, God forbid, that the successive Israeli governments were opposed to peace. Not at all. Every one of them wanted peace. They all longed for peace. “Provided peace gives us the whole country, at least up to the Jordan River, and lets us cover all of it with Jewish settlements.” Until now, all peace plans have fallen short of that.)

PHASE A is designed to belittle the offer. “There is nothing new there,” the Political Sources would assert. “It is offered solely for tactical purposes. It is a political gimmick.” If the offer comes from an Arab: “He says it to the international community, but not to his own people.” In short, “It’s not serious.”

One proven method is to concentrate on one word and argue that it shows the dishonesty of the whole offer. For example, before the October 1973 war, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made a far-reaching peace offer. Golda Meir rejected it out of hand. Her Arabists (there are always intellectual whores around to do the dirty job) discovered that Sadat spoke of “salaam” but not of “sulh,” which “proves” that he does not mean real peace. More than 2,000 Israeli soldiers and tens of thousand Egyptians paid with their lives for this word. After that, a salaam treaty was signed.

Israeli governments use two deadly torpedoes in their arsenal: the U.S Congress and the American media.

Such methods are already being applied now to the Saudi offer. First it was said that Crown Prince Abdullah had spoken about his initiative only with an American journalist, but not addressed his own people. When it transpired that it was widely published in all Saudi papers, both at home and in London, another argument was put forward: the prince has made his offer only because Saudis had become unpopular in the United States after the Twin Towers outrage. (As if this matters.) In short, Abdullah has not become a real Zionist.

This point was widely discussed in the Israeli media. Commentators commentated, scholars showed their scholarly prowess. But not one (not one!) of them discussed the actual content of the offer.

PHASE B is designed to outsmart the offer. We do not reject the offer. Of course not! We are longing for peace! So we welcome the “positive trend” of the offer and kick the ball out of the field.

The best method is to ask for a meeting with the Arab leader who proposed the offer, “to clarify the issues.” That sounds logical. Americans think that, if two people have a quarrel, they should meet and discuss the matter, in order to end it. What can be more reasonable than that?

But a conflict between nations does not resemble a quarrel between two people. Every Arab peace offer rests on a two-part premise: You give back the occupied territories, and you get recognition and “normalization.” Normalization includes, of course, meetings of the leaders. When the Israeli government demands a meeting with Arab leaders “to clarify details,” it actually tries to get the reward (normalization) without delivering the goods (withdrawal from the occupied territories). A beautiful trick, indeed. If the Arab leaders refuse to meet, well, it only shows that their peace offer is a sham, doesn’t it?

Many peace offers have fallen into this trap. Ben-Gurion offered to meet with Muhammad Naguib, the Egyptian ruler after the 1952 revolution. Several prime ministers asked to meet Hafez al-Assad. Only Sadat outsmarted the smart ones and turned the tables on them. He came to Jerusalem on his own initiative.

When the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted Resolution 242, the Israeli government did not accept it. Only much later, when there was no way out, it accepted it “according to the Israeli interpretation.” This concentrated on the article “the” that is missing in the English version (which demands withdrawal from “occupied territories” instead of from “the occupied territories”), contrary to the French version, in which the article duly appears. (The Soviets were caught napping, because there is no article in the Russian language.)

The preferred method is to kill the spirit of the offer slowly, to talk about it endlessly, to interpret it this way and that way, to drag negotiations on and on, to put forward conditions which the other side cannot accept, until the initiative yields in silence. That’s what happened to the Conciliation Committee in Lausanne, that is what happened to most of the European and American peace plans.

PHASE C: If phases A and B have not worked, the liquidation stage arrives. Nowadays it is called “targeted prevention” or, simply, “ascertained killing” by the army.

Against the original U.N. mediator, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, “targeted prevention” was applied literally: he was shot and killed. The killers were “dissidents”, but Ben-Gurion did not shed any tears.

Usually, Israeli governments use two deadly torpedoes in their arsenal: the U.S Congress and the American media. William Rogers, President Nixon’s secretary of state, for example, proposed a peace plan that included the withdrawal of Israel to the pre-1967 border, with “insubstantial changes.” Israel released its torpedoes and sank Rogers together with his plan. His job was taken over by the Jewish megalomaniac, Henry Kissinger, and that was the end of peace plans.

Can the Saudi initiative be scuttled in the same way? If the Saudis stay their course, it will not be easy to intercept it. This time the target is not a small frigate, not even a destroyer, but a mighty aircraft carrier. A great effort will be needed to torpedo it.

But Shimon Peres and his foreign office are experts at this kind of job; they have been at it for decades. Ariel Sharon will push them. The pitiful Labor Party, under the leadership of a small-time copy of Sharon, will join the chorus. Faced with the terrible threat of having to end the occupation, the Israeli media will rally behind the government.

Nobody revolts, nobody cries out. In Israel, real public discourse has died long ago. The national instinct of survival has become blunted. Thirty five years of occupation and settlement have eroded the nation’s abilty to reason, leaving instead a mixture of arrogance and folly.

A great, perhaps unique opportunity may be missed. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands may pay for it with their lives. They will not dance in the streets any more.

Uri Avnery is the founder of the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom and recipient, along with Rachel Avnery, of the 2001 Alternative Nobel Prize.

The Abdullah Plan And the Arab States

By Murhaf Jouejati

In mid-February, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah floated the idea that Arab states offer Israel full normalization of relations in return for an Israeli withdrawal from all territory occupied in the 1967 war.

Although Abdullah’s land-for-peace formula is not new, the Saudi approach’s novelty is in the fact that, rather than reiterating Arab grievances, it focuses up-front on the prize that awaits Israel if it trades land for peace. The Saudi peace plan is also significant because of its source: the de facto ruler of one of the wealthiest and most influential Arab states.

Although not a blueprint for Middle East peace, the Saudi plan provides a sound conceptual framework and, more importantly, promises a comprehensive and final settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Saudi plan gained momentum rapidly as a result of the combination of escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians and the lack of any other viable diplomatic initiative.

The prospects for real progress based on the Abdullah plan depend on whether it can achieve unified backing from the other Arab states. If the Saudi prince is confident of its warm acceptance, he will table the plan at the upcoming Arab League summit in Beirut. The biggest question mark in this regard is Syria. Of the Arab “frontline” states, Egypt and Jordan have already made their peace with Israel, and the Palestinian Authority has announced its support for the plan. Syrian President Bashar al-Assadexpressed support for the proposal with some reservations, saying there must be a full Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

What Will Determine Syria’s Stance

Syria’s attitude toward the Abdullah plan iscritical to the plan’s future. On the one hand, the young Syrian leader believes that talk of normalization is a premature reward for Israel. Assad has strongly supported the intifada as a means of pressuring the Jewish state, and sees no reason to let up the pressure now. In that regard, Assad may have beenconcerned that the Saudi plan could become a lifeline for Sharon, now under fire at home for failing to end the uprising, ensure security for Israel or bring peace.

Moreover, Prince Abdullah’s plan in its current form makes no mention of the Palestinian refugees, an issue of critical political and demographic importance to both Syria and Lebanon. In a visit to Lebanon over the first weekend of March, Assad issued a joint statement with Lebanese President Emile Lahoud declaring that “there could be no compromise” on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The Abdullah plan will have to grapple with this difficult issue to be viable; yet an inadequate Saudi response to the refugee issue will likely torpedo any chances for unified Arab support for the plan at the Beirut summit.

On the other hand, Assad’s real concern with any peace initiative is to protect Syria’s own interests, especially on the Golan Heights. Bashar’s father, the late Hafez al-Assad, supported the land-for-peace equation of the Madrid peace process, and later (at the Shepherdstown talks) accepted the principle of normalizing relations with Israel as part of an overall settlement of the Syrian-Israeli dispute. In that vein, if Bashar al-Assad gains assurances from the Saudi leadership that the plan entails Israel’s full withdrawal from the Golan Heights to the June 4 lines of 1967, Assad will back the proposal. In this case, Saudi Arabia will submit the idea for discussion during the Arab summit.

If the Abdullah Plan Succeeds: The Spotlight Turns to Israel Should the Arab states join forces behind Prince Abdullah’s proposal, the pressure on Israel for a positive response to the plan will be immense. Confronting unrelenting violence in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, the United States has seized on the plan as a way of creating momentum for a cease-fire.

The success of the Saudi plan is not wholly dependent on Sharon.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sees a total Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines as counter to Israel’s interest, arguing that Israel’s borders would not be defensible without designating parts of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip as security zones. While withholding a final rejection, the Israeli government has already cited two reservations regarding the proposal. First, the 17-month-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation must come to an end before the proposal could be considered. Second, the Saudi plan would not be acceptable to Israel if it omitted recognizing Israel’s right to live within “secure and recognized” borders, a key element of earlier U.N. resolutions on peacemaking.

But indeed, unified Arab support for the plan could create a new sense among Israelis that there is “someone to talk to” on the Arab side. This might give the Israeli body politic, reeling from the escalating violence that was prompted by Sharon’s get-tough policy, the incentive to bring down the Sharon government and elect a government more inclined to negotiations.

In the final analysis, then, the ball is in the Arab court: If Arab leaders demonstrate a unity of purpose and support the Saudi plan, it will have seized the initiative in the Arab-Israeli conflict for the first time in decades, and placed the burden for reciprocal gestures squarely on Israel. With no other viable plan on the table, Washington is likely to pursue this avenue and pressure Israel to resume negotiations with its Arab neighbors (including the PA) based on its total withdrawal from occupied territories. On the other hand, if the leaders of major Arab countries turn down or amend the Saudi plan in ways that provide Israel with an opening to reject it, the plan will be doomed. In sum, Arab disunity at the summit will let Israel off the hook.

This article first appeared in The Middle East Institute’s Perspective, March 4, 2002 .The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views of the Middle East Institute, which does not take positions on policy issues.