An Autopsy Report on the Death of The Middle East Peace Process

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Nineteen months after they began so promisingly in Madrid, the Mideast peace talks risk turning into an empty ritual... Before the more pragmatic forces on both sides of the table are swept away, Washington needs to renew the sense of urgency and momentum by directly interceding with the parties. A comprehensive Middle East peace settlement would do American interests and Bill Clinton's international standing a world of good. This historic opportunity, largely created by American policies, should not be allowed to slip away. —New York Times editorial, May 16, 1993

If history records that the Middle East peace talks died on the May 14 last day of their "ninth round," it will mean only that that was the day the life-support system was unplugged. In fact, the "peace process" from which they had emerged died at least three months earlier.

Historians may quibble over whether the death certificate should read Nov. 3, 1992, the day Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States, or Feb. 1, 1993, the day Secretary of State Warren Christopher threatened to use a U.S. veto to stop the United Nations Security Council from imposing sanctions on Israel for its illegal expulsions of Palestinians. Both events inflicted grievous wounds on the process which had become the major foreign policy concern of the Bush administration.

Bush's stubborn pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement right into an election year was precedent-shattering. The resulting media opposition orchestrated by Israel's implacable domestic lobby arguably cost Bush his re-election. Now, with the peace process upon which most friendly Arab rulers staked much of their own political capital probably beyond resuscitation, the long-range consequences for them, and for the U.S., are just as grim.

It is the first major foreign policy disaster of the Clinton administration, and the spadework all was accomplished well within that administration's first 100 days. As the dimensions of the disaster—and the ultimate negative consequences even for Israel—become apparent, many of America's most consistently pro-Israel columnists and editors will be the first to call for an autopsy to determine who is to blame for the death of the peace process, and for the setbacks to moderates in Israel and the Arab world that are certain to follow. Since, as was the case with Irangate ' Israel's media supporters won't like what they turn up, you won't read about their findings in the mainstream press. Nevertheless, before clouds of obfuscation blur the outlines of the tragedy, here's what an objective autopsy report might disclose:

In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter was on the right path toward a comprehensive Middle East settlement. His problem was that after successfully putting economic pressure on Egypt's President Anwar Sadat to sign the first of two projected land-for-peace agreements, Carter's nerve failed when it came time to apply similar pressure to Israel's Menachem Begin to sign a land-for-peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Indefinitely Postponed

Because the Israel lobby was raising a storm of U.S. media opposition to his 1980 re-election campaign, Carter postponed further good works in the Middle East until his second term. But, not coincidentally, there was no second term.

Instead, emboldened by the separate peace that had taken the Egyptian army out of the Middle East equation, and the friendlier presence in the White House of Ronald Reagan, Begin launched his invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, supposedly with a "green light" from Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig.

The disastrous consequences of Israel's "incursion" into Lebanon cost Haig his job. Virtually the first act by Haig's successor, George Shultz, was to propose, in September 1982, the "Reagan plan for Middle East peace." Like the Nixon-era "Rogers plan" and Jimmy Carter's Camp David efforts, it was based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula, whereby Israel would withdraw from lands occupied in the 1967 war in exchange for Arab acknowledgement of Israel's right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.

The only trouble with the "Reagan Plan," which ultimately was acceptable to the concerned Arab states, was that Menachem Begin had rejected it on the day it was announced, and within 24 hours had opened 10 more of the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories that every U.S. president has called "obstacles to peace." The U.S. did not cut its aid to Israel. Instead, perhaps because Shultz concluded that, in the crunch, Reagan always would come down on the side of Israel, the U.S. secretary of state abandoned his own plan.

Thereafter he let Israel's supporters within the Reagan administration dictate an ill-conceived fix that circumvented the Israeli-Palestinian impasse altogether, while trying to secure a mutual Israeli and Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Predictably, the Shultz plan came to naught, and American Marines and diplomats paid with their lives for Washington's refusal to defy Israel's U.S. lobby and address the core of U.S. problems in the Middle East.

As a man continuously engaged in foreign affairs since 1972, by the time George Bush was elected president in 1988 he knew exactly what he wanted to do to cauterize the bleeding wound in U.S. policy represented by the unsolved Palestinian-Israeli dispute. He set out to cultivate the Arabs, reassure the Israeli public that his quarrel was with their government, not their security needs, and breathe some life into a "peace process" that had been on hold since the "Reagan Plan" was stillborn in 1982.

Although the blueprint of the revived 'peace process" was in George's Bush's mind, he entrusted his close personal friend and former campaign manager, Secretary of State James Baker, to carry it out. Baker's qualifications for the job were Bush's total confidence in him, the political insight that prompted him to approach the peace process as a U.S. domestic political problem rather than a foreign policy matter, and the fact that he brought to it no preconceived religious or political prejudices of his own. He listened to the experts on both Israeli and Arab affairs, and put some of both on his tight-knit, close-mouthed team.

Bush and Baker gave Middle East peace a high priority, even after the Soviet empire began collapsing around them. They wanted the resulting Arab-Israeli peace agreement to be signed a full year before the 1992 elections, which otherwise would tempt the Israelis to drag their feet while their U.S. lobbyists worked for a friendlier administration, as had happened during Carter's term.

Bush and Baker reasoned that Israel's U.S. media supporters would oppose any U.S. pressure they might interpret as endangering Israeli security, but could be turned around completely once an agreement had been signed that promised Israel the much greater security of a U.S-guaranteed peace with all of its Arab neighbors.

Given the clarity of their goal, and the single-mindedness of their pursuit, the plan might have worked if it had not been for the unanticipated invasion of Kuwait by Saddain Hussain's Iraq. Whatever prompted the Iraqi strongman to think he would be allowed to move, unscathed, into position to exercise control over more than 60 percent of the world's oil reserves, it is indisputable that Desert Shield, which began with the Iraqi invasion on Aug. 2, 1990, and Desert Storm, which ended with a midnight cease-fire on Feb. 27, 1991, together set back the Bush-Baker timetable for Middle East peace by one year.

Bush signaled his determination to resume the Middle East peace process unmistakably when, in a Sept. 3, 1991 press conference, he complained about " 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill" seeking to pressure "one lonely little guy down here" to grant $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Israel before assessing Israel's performance at the forthcoming peace talks in Madrid. A poll immediately afterward indicated that 86 percent of the American people supported Bush. So did moderate Arab governments, all of which also supported the first direct, face-to-face talks between Israel and all of its Arab neighbors in more than 40 years.

Although Saudi Arabia was not a "confrontation state," Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, personally attended the Madrid conference that began in October 1991. Just as the U.S. held the unapproved loan guarantees like a club over Israel, the Saudi emissary alternately threatened to withhold or promised to increase his Kingdom's subsidies to the Arab "confrontation" states and the Palestinians to cajole them into negotiating.

After face-to-face talks began, largely on Israeli terms but with heavy prodding from the United States, the Israelis broke first. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, whose entire political career had been based upon his pledge never to give up "one inch of the land of Israel," not even for peace, dissolved his government and called for new elections. In the ensuing June 1992 elections, Yitzhak Rabin, a hawk heading the relatively moderate Labor Party, won. In fact, however, his mandate from Israeli voters was not to negotiate land for peace, but to do whatever he had to to restore Israel's frayed financial lifeline from the United States—and nothing more.

The peace talks resumed, with a pledge by Bush to give Congress a "green light" to provide Israel with the first $2 billion installment of U.S. loan guarantees. Exactly as happened in 1980, however, as Israel's media supporters went all out to defeat a president they perceived as tough on Israel, progress toward a settlement slowed as Israelis and Palestinians alike began to contemplate the possibility of a change of administrations.

A Change in U.S. Administrations

Bush lost the election and the peace talks slipped off the fast track that, prior to Nov. 3, had taken them so close to an agreement granting Palestinians five years of autonomy, during which the ultimate status of the occupied territories would be determined. But, with all parties sensing a vacuum in Washington, violence in the occupied territories spiraled out of control and death tolls soared on both sides.

It was the Rabin government, however, that finally kicked over the peace table. On Dec. 17, 1992, Israeli forces seized in their homes, shops and on the streets 415 Muslims they said were Islamic extremists, bused them all to the Lebanese border, and dumped them onto a desolate mountainside between Israel's "security zone" on Lebanese territory and the first Lebanese outposts a few miles to the north. There the expellees, none of whom had been charged with any specific crime, set up camp while the United Nations Security Council, joined by the United States, passed a resolution demanding that Israel immediately repatriate the expellees. While the world waited for Israel to comply with the U.N.'s binding resolution, the peace talks went on hold.

The Bush administration's last two acts in the Middle East were its vote to support the U.N. Security Council's condemnation of Israel, and its signature on the first $2 billion in loan guarantees to Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took the money, but did not repatriate the expellees.

Pressure then began to build within the U.N. Security Council to apply sanctions to Israel along the lines of sanctions imposed on such other violators of Security Council resolutions as Iraq or Libya.

It was newly appointed Secretary of State Warren Christopher's intervention to keep the sanctions resolution from coming to a vote that signaled the Rabin government that the Bush administration policies of economic and political pressure were a thing of the past. Freed of the threat of U.N. sanctions or a reduction of U.S. aid, Rabin began an elaborate public relations buildup to indicate that he was, nevertheless, on the verge of making a separate peace with Syria, based upon demilitarization and total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which Israel had seized from Syria in 1967.

It was the kind of deal that only extremely pro-Israel advisers in the U.S. government would argue was possible. But Clinton had installed, in return for election support from Israel's lobby, former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) official Martin Indyk as White House Middle East adviser, and long-time U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis as State Department Director of Policy Planning. It is not yet clear whether Christopher really believed that a separate Syrian-Israeli peace that would isolate the Palestinians was possible, or whether he hoped that giving the idea a chance to fail would discredit the open advocates for Israeli policies before they became too deeply rooted in the Clinton administration.

To demonstrate that he was not about to make a separate peace, Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad even met with his longtime enemy, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and reiterated a pledge that Syria would sign no peace agreement with Israel based upon return of Syrian lands until all Palestinian, Jordanian and Lebanese territorial claims also had been dealt with.

Sensing, correctly, that the ninth round of peace talks in Washington would be devoted solely to Israeli attempts to engage Syria in a separate peace, the Palestinian delegation at first declined to attend. In order to spare the Arabs the onus for breaking off the talks in which they all had invested so much political capital, however, Saudi Arabia and the oil-producing Gulf states promised to resume subsidies to Palestinian institutions broken off during the Gulf war, if the Palestinians would attend. Meanwhile Israel, at U.S. urging, also announced "concessions" to the Palestinians.

These included allowing the de facto head of the Palestinian delegation, East Jerusalem leader and PLO loyalist Faisal Husseini, to head the Palestinian delegation in name as well as fact, and permitting the first 30 of more than 1,700 Palestinians previously expelled from the occupied areas to return. The U.S. assured the Palestinians that other Israeli concessions also would be revealed to the Palestinians when they showed up for the ninth round of talks in Washington. The only significant additional concession, however, turned out to be an Israeli pledge to regularize the status of some 5,000 Palestinians presently living in the occupied territories without residence permits.

Bowing to inter-Arab pressure, the Palestinians did show up along with the delegations of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, and, under Husseini's direction, went for the first time into three working groups with the Israelis to deal with the separate problems of land and water resources, human rights during the remainder of the occupation, and the nature of the political structure that would replace the occupation.

When it became clear to the Israelis and their American backers that there really would be no separate Syrian-Israeli treaty, however, the enthusiasm of all of the Israeli negotiators cooled perceptibly. Just prior to the opening of the talks, in a speech before the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Christopher had promised not just to "appear to be even-handed, but to be even-handed." Subsequently, as the talks petered out, he promised that the U.S. would break with precedent and actively intervene.

When Baker had threatened to do this some months earlier, the Israelis had objected that they had come to the talks on the firm understanding that the U.S. would take an active role only if invited to by both sides. This time, however, no such objections were raised because the Israelis had no fear that Clinton's Secretary of State would exert pressure on them. On the next to-last day of the talks, the U.S. submitted to both the Palestinian and the Israeli delegations a U. S. -prepared summary of "agreed points" and suggestions for dealing with points still outstanding.

The U.S. paper did not address the question of Jerusalem, however, or other points of major concern to the Palestinians. These are regaining control of their own land and water, so that they can continue to exist and make a living during the five-year autonomy period by deepening wells where necessary, and building places in which to live and do business. Nor did the paper address the Palestinian insistence that all parties agree in advance that the outcome of the five-year autonomy will be Palestinian independence, and not just a further prolongation of the occupation. In the absence of assurances on these key points, the Palestinians, who already had reduced the size of their delegation, declined even to attend the final session. Plans for a photo session with Clinton were shelved.

As delegates fanned out for speaking engagements across the United States before returning to the Middle East, a State Department spokesman announced that the U.S. hoped to host a 10th session of the talks in June. In the absence of any sign of U.S. pressure on Israel, however, it is unlikely that the Arab states will continue pressuring the Palestinians to participate, and that anything other than pro-forma sessions between Israel and any of the other delegations will take place.

Assuming the talks now are frozen, possibly to be resuscitated by a Clinton administration chastened at the instant failure of its first excursion into Middle East diplomacy, or more likely to be resuscitated by a Clinton successor, what accomplishments can be attributed to the just concluded ninth round?

Ninth-Round Accomplishments

First, they deprived the Israelis of the opportunity to reiterate their ancient and patently false charge that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." The Palestinians showed up. They did so even though they knew the Israelis had nothing new to offer them, and will have nothing to offer them until another U.S. president resumes the Bush carrot-and-stick method of dealing with Israel, insisting that it comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions as a condition for further U.S. aid.

Also, despite all Israeli efforts to split the Palestinians in the occupied territories, first by strengthening and favoring the Islamists of Hamas and then by expelling and persecuting them, the Palestinians emerged relatively united. Polls showed majorities of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and even in Gaza, the cradle of Hamas, approved of Palestinian participation in the Mideast peace talks.

The ninth round also showed the sometimes divided Arab states that, when it comes to Palestine, they can work together and, no matter how tempting the terms, it would be politically impossible for the leader of any Arab "confrontation state" to break ranks and make a separate peace with Israel. This was by no means as clear, even to the Arabs themselves, before Round 9.

What the ninth round showed Israelis, unfortunately, was something totally different. The Israeli electorate will conclude that since the Clinton administration seems more interested in keeping the domestic political support of Israel's lobby than settling Middle Eastern problems, no further concessions to the Arabs are necessary to keep U.S. aid flowing to their country.

While the Rabin government seeks to prove through its closure of the occupied areas that Israel can do without them, Israeli voters may conclude instead that since it no longer takes a Labor government to get U.S. aid, they can safely bring back a Likud government. Such a government would deal even more harshly with the Palestinians, perhaps even bringing about another "miraculous cleansing of the land" like the one accomplished by Likud's founders in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes in terror or at gunpoint.

If Israelis come away with such a conclusion, however, it will be the wrong one. Informed U.S. public opinion on the Arab-Israeli dispute has changed dramatically, as demonstrated by the polls immediately after Bush's defiance of the Israel lobby. Despite the Israel lobby's lock on Congress and the press, Israel's open-ended lien on the U.S. treasury is no longer accepted by most Americans. A determined assault led by such senatorial heavyweights as former Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd (DWV) and present Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole (R-KS), both of whom have expressed disgust with Israeli foreign aid "entitlements, " could reduce aid to Israel drastically.

Meanwhile, time may turn out to be on the side of the Palestinians, not the Israelis. Closing off the West Bank makes it a far more dangerous and less desirable place to live for Jewish "settlers." Few but religious fanatics or single-minded bargain hunters will choose to live there in the future. And, although the Palestinians desperately need outside financial aid to replace the wages they earned from construction and agricultural jobs in Israel proper, such resources exist if the Arab states work as effectively together in this regard as they did during the peace talks.

Instead of the Arab world erupting in an orgy of religious violence, providing the cover under which a Likud government would "transfer" the Palestinians once and for all from the land of their birth, things may work out quite differently. It may instead be Likud's new charismatic-and rabble-rousing-leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, who unleashes the fundamentalist violence. He can hardly contain his impatience to turn the fear of withdrawals from the occupied territories by Israeli settlers and their sympathizers into a victory over Rabin at the polls. Such a victory, perhaps within a year, may have unlooked-for effects: the flight of skilled and educated European Jews from Israel, and a decisive downturn in U.S. aid for Israel.

In that case, the odds two or three years from now might look very different. On the one side are 2.1 million Palestinians under occupation seeking sovereignty over only 22 per cent of their land and backed not only by a Palestinian diaspora of at least another 2 million, but also by 170 million other Arabs-including some of the richest oil-producers in the world-and another 800 million non-Arab Muslims, many of them in the U.S.

On the other side is an indigent, quarrelsome, polarized, and increasingly violent Israel. Its 5 million inhabitants, only 4.1 million of whom are Jewish, can look for backing only to a Jewish diaspora now concentrated almost solely in the United States, which has its hands full keeping the foreign aid flowing from increasingly reluctant American taxpayers. Except for its American tie, Israel has become a pariah nation, permanently in a state of non-compliance with U.N. resolutions, and without another friend or ally in the world.

The Clinton administration, by permitting Israel to kick over the peace table, has let down America's wealthy and strategically placed Arab allies, and has placed all of America's chips on Israel. That, perhaps in the short run and certainly over an extended period, will prove to be still another foreign policy disaster for an administration remarkably adept at creating them.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.