The United States and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
in Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of World Order
Ken Booth and Tim
Dunne, eds. (pp.183-192)
Introduction
Major
wars have a habit of generating a peace agenda which goes beyond the immediate
security objectives of the campaign to outline a vision of a better world, of
international order based on universal values such as justice and morality.
This is particularly true of wars that are fought not by one country but by a
coalition of countries. The broader peace agenda is needed to keep the
coalition together and to justify the sacrifices that have to be made in the
course of fighting the war against the adversary.
Thus,
World War I was the war to end all wars. World War II was fought to free the
world from the scourge of fascism and to make it safe for democracy. On 16 January 1991,
George Bush Sr. stated that military action against Iraq would make
possible a ‘New World Order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the
jungle, governs the conduct of nations.’ Similarly, George Bush Jr. embarked on
the war against the al-Qaeda organisation and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan with the
broader agenda of freeing the world from the scourge of international terrorism.
Linkage Politics
There
are other striking parallels between the Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan. In the
first place, on the American side, some of the key positions today are held by
veterans of the Gulf War, including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin
Powell. Second, in both conflicts the incumbent American president sought to
build a broad international coalition to confront the aggressor. Third, in both
wars Israel
was kept at arms’ length in order to preserve the coalition. Fourth, in both cases
a link was quickly establishes between the conflict at hand and the Palestine problem.
In
1990 Saddam Hussein pioneered the concept of ‘linkage’ by making Iraq’s
withdrawal from Kuwait
conditional on Israel’s
withdrawal from all the Arab lands that it occupied in 1967.[1]
Thus, before threatening the mother of all battles if Iraq was
attacked, Saddam Hussein unleashed the mother of all linkages. President Bush
rejected the proposed linkage so as not to appear to reward Saddam’s
aggression, and in order to deflate his claim to be the champion of the
Palestinians. But Bush could not, without exposing himself to the charge of
double standards, insist that Iraq should
comply immediately and unconditionally with UN orders to withdraw from Kuwait without
accepting that Israel
should be made to comply with strikingly similar UN resolutions that had been
on the table since 1967. Bush’s way round this problem was to intimate that
America would address the Arab-Israeli conflict as soon as Iraq pulled out of
or was booted out of Kuwait. In other words, while rejecting simultaneous
linkage, Bush implicitly accepted deferred linkage.
After
the guns fell silent in the Gulf, the Bush administration came up with a
five-point plan for the future of the Middle
East. The elements of this plan, the ‘five pillars of
wisdom’ as one observer dubbed them, were democracy, economic development, arms
control, Gulf security, and a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was a
sound and well thought-out plan but it simply fell by the wayside. The
much-vaunted New World Order turned out to be the old world order minus the Soviet
Union. In the aftermath of victory, America, the sole
surviving superpower, and its Arab allies reverted to their bad old ways. No
serious attempt was made to introduce democracy to the Arab world, to promote
greater economic equality, to curb arms sales to the region, or to lay the
foundations for an independent system of Gulf security.
The
one element of the programme for post-war reconstruction that did receive
sustained attention was the Arab-Israeli conflict. The American-sponsored peace
process was launched with the conference in Madrid towards the end of October
1991. The basis of the conference was UN resolutions 242 and 338 and the
principle of land for peace that they incorporated. All the parties to the
conflict were there, including the Palestinians who presented their own case
for the first time at a major international gathering. In his opening speech,
President Bush was faultlessly even-handed: he gave a pledge to work for a
settlement based on security for Israel and
justice for the Palestinians. [2]
Two
tracks for bilateral negotiations were established at Madrid, an Israeli-Arab track and
an Israeli-Palestinian track. But as long as Itzhak Shamir, the leader of the
right-wing Likud party, remained in power, no real progress could be achieved
on either track. For Shamir, in line with the ideological position of the party
that he headed, was adamant that the West Bank
was an integral part of the Land
of Israel.
Bush was equally insistent that the project of Greater Israel had to be
abandoned and that the building of new Jewish settlements on the West
Bank had to stop. A battle of wills ensued. By forcing
Israelis to choose between US aid and
continuing colonisation of the West Bank,
Bush contributed to Shamir’s electoral defeat in June 1992 and to his
replacement by a Labour government headed by Itzhak Rabin. But the bruising
battle was also a factor in George Bush’s own defeat in the presidential elections
later that year. Deferred linkage did not materialise due to Israeli
intransigence. Two years after the liberation of Kuwait, the
Palestinian problem remained unresolved. George Bush failed to deliver on his
pledge ‘to push the Israelis into a solution.’
Bill Clinton’s ‘Israel
First’ Approach
On
becoming President, Bill Clinton gave free rein to his pro-Israeli sympathies.
He abruptly reversed the even-handed policy of his predecessor and replaced it
with an ‘Israel-first’ policy reminiscent of the Reagan years. The new approach
was laid out by Martin Indyk, a senior official on the National Security
Council, in a speech he gave to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
on 18 May
1993. Two elements were listed by Indyk as central: Israel had to be
kept strong while the peace process continued, and Iraq and Iran had to be
kept weak. The second element was called ‘dual containment’ and one of its aims
was to protect Israel
on the Eastern front.
Regarding
the Middle East peace
process, said Indyk, ‘our approach to the negotiations will involve working
with Israel,
not against it. We are committed to deepening our strategic partnership with Israel in the
pursuit of peace and security.’ Withdrawing from territory, Indyk argued,
involved risks to Israel’s
security, and Israel
would only take these risks if it knew that the United States stood
behind it. Real progress in the talks could only come with this kind of special
relationship between America
and Israel.
No similar pledge was made to work with the Arabs or the Palestinians. As a
result, America
in effect abdicated its independent role as the manager of the peace process
and took the side of one of the protagonists. After ten rounds, the bilateral
negotiations in Washington
reached a dead end.[3]
The
breakthrough announced in September 1993 on the Palestinian track was made in Oslo not in Washington. The
Declaration of Principles on Palestinian self-government in Gaza and Jericho was negotiated directly
between Israel
and the PLO in the Norwegian capital without American help or even knowledge. Israel recognised
that the Palestinians have national rights while the PLO renounced terrorism.
Bill Clinton served essentially as the master of ceremonies when the Oslo accord was signed on the
White House lawn and clinched with the hesitant hand-shake between Yitzhak
Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Clinton
did recognise, however, the need for an active American role in supporting the
experiment in Palestinian self-government. But while Israel continued
to receive $3 billion a year, as well as extra funds to finance its withdrawal
from Gaza
and Jericho,
only modest ‘seed money’ was advanced to the Palestinian Authority.
The
rise to power in May 1996 of a Likud government headed by Binyamin Netanyahu
dealt a heavy blow to the Oslo
peace process. Netanyahu was a bitter opponent of the Oslo accord, viewing it as
incompatible both with Israel’s
security and with its historic right to the Biblical homeland.[4]
He spent his three years as prime minister in an attempt to arrest the exchange
of land for peace that lay at the heart of the Oslo accord. This Israeli
retreat from the historic compromise struck at Oslo called for a reassessment
of the American role but no real reassessment took place. President Clinton
maintained an active personal involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace
talks but he only achieved very modest results in the shape of the Hebron
Protocol of 15 January
1997 and the Wye River Memorandum of 23 October 1998.
Israeli foot-dragging was the primary cause of the loss of momentum on the road
to peace. But the redefinition of the American role, following Clinton’s entry into the White
House, inadvertently facilitated this foot-dragging. It left the Palestinians
largely to the tender mercies of a right-wing government which remained
committed to the old vision of Greater Israel.
The
electoral victory of Ehud Barak in May 1999 promised a fresh start in the
struggle towards comprehensive peace in the Middle
East. It also provided an opening for Bill Clinton to
resume the role he had always wanted to play, that of helping Israel to assume
the risks involved in exchanging territory for peace. Like his mentor Itzhak
Rabin, Barak was a soldier who late in life turned to peace-making. Israel’s most
decorated soldier, however, turned out to be a hopelessly incompetent domestic
politician and maladroit diplomat. He approached diplomacy as the extension of
war by other means. He was much more interested in an agreement with Syria than with
the Palestinians because Syria is a
military power to be reckoned with whereas the Palestinians are not.
Accordingly, Barak concentrated almost exclusively on the Syrian track during
the first eight months of his premiership but his efforts ended in failure. It
was only after his policy of ‘Syria-first’ failed that Barak reluctantly turned
to the Palestinian track. Throughout this period, Clinton remained solidly behind
Barak and made no attempt to play an independent role in the management of the Middle
East peace process.
The
critical point in the Israeli-Palestinian final status negotiations was reached
at the Camp David summit in
July 2000. On the causes of failure there are two radically different versions.
The Israeli version is that Barak presented a most generous package at Camp
David but Arafat rejected this out of hand and chose to
revert to violence. The Palestinian version is that Barak laid a trap for
Arafat and sought to impose on him, with the help of the American ‘peace
processors’, a fundamentally unfair and unsound final status agreement.
A
most revealing first-hand account of Camp David
was published by Robert Malley, Special Assistant on Arab-Israeli Affairs, and
Hussein Agha, a Palestinian expert. Three main points emerge from their
account. One, the idea of setting aside Israel’s interim
obligations and tackling all the issues together at a summit meeting was
proposed by Barak to Clinton.
Two, Arafat pleaded for additional time to prepare the ground and warned Clinton of the danger that the
summit would explode in his face unless progress was made in narrowing the gap
between the two sides. Indeed, both the concept and the timing of the proposed
summit reinforced in Arafat’s mind the sense of an Israeli-American conspiracy.
Three, Clinton assured Arafat that he would not be blamed if the summit did not
succeed. ‘There will be no finger-pointing’, he promised. What is not clear is
why Clinton
put all the blame on Arafat after the failure of the summit. The answer
suggested by Malley and Agha is that Camp David
exemplified for Clinton
the contrast between Barak’s political courage and Arafat’s political
passivity, between risk-taking on one side and risk-aversion on the other side.
But they also point to the complex and often contradictory roles that the United States played at
the summit: as principal broker of the putative peace deal; as guardian of the
peace process; as Israel’s
strategic ally; and as its cultural and political partner.[5]
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Clinton’s strong commitment to Israel undermined
his credibility as an honest broker and was therefore one of the factors that
contributed to the collapse of the Camp David
summit.
Clinton
himself seems to have drawn the right lessons from the failure at Camp
David. On 23
December 2000, five months after the meeting in Maryland and two
months after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, he presented a
detailed plan for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The plan
reflected the long distance that Clinton had travelled towards meeting
Palestinian expectations since the American ‘bridging proposals’ tabled at Camp
David. His plan envisaged an independent Palestinian state over the whole of
Gaza and 94-96 per cent of the West Bank; Palestinian sovereignty over all the
Arab parts of Jerusalem except for the Jewish Quarter in the Old City and the
Western Wall; and the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their
homeland in historic Palestine, subject to Israel’s sovereign decision to
absorb them in its own territory.[6]
Considerable progress towards a final status agreement was made by Israeli and
Palestinian negotiators at Taba,
Egypt,
in January 2001, on the basis of these proposals or ‘parameters’. They
basically accepted the parameters, although each side had many outstanding
doubts and reservations.[7]
But time ran out on two of the main actors. On 20 January, Clinton was succeeded as President
by George W. Bush, and, on 6 February, Ehud Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon
in the direct election of the prime minister.
The
new Republican President departed from the approach of his Democratic
predecessor in two respects. First, whereas Clinton was prepared to devote as
much of his presidency as it took to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,
Bush Jr. adopted a ‘hands-off’ attitude of leaving it to the two sides to sort
out their own differences. Second, whereas Clinton had a special bond with the
leaders of the Labour Party in Israel as well as
with Yasser Arafat, Bush cold-shouldered the Palestinian leader and established
surprisingly warm relations with the right-wing Israeli leader. After their
first meeting at the White House, Bush commented on Sharon’s ‘marvellous sense of
history.’ More importantly, the Bush administration seemed receptive to the Sharon line that Yasser Arafat is
a terrorist, that the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist entity, and that
they should be treated as such. Sharon’s
refusal to resume the political dialogue with the PA, until there is a complete
cessation of violence, struck a sympathetic chord in Washington.
Vice-President Dick Cheney went as far as to justify in public Israel’s policy
of assassinating Palestinian activists suspected of orchestrating the violence.
11th September and the
War against Terrorism
The
terrorist attack of 11 September on America violently
shook the kaleidoscope of world politics. It had far-reaching consequences for
almost all aspects of US
foreign policy, including the relations with Israel and the
Palestinians. Many Israelis hoped that the events of 11 September would
engender greater sympathy and support in America for their
own war against Palestinian militants. Ariel Sharon reportedly said to Colin
Powell, ‘Everyone has his own Bin Laden and Arafat is ours.’ Sharon also hoped to make common
cause with America
in the war against international terrorism. All these hopes, however, were
quickly dashed. Colin Powell made it clear that ‘Israel will not
be part of any anti-terror military action.’ The attempt to demonise Yasser
Arafat backfired. While Israel
was firmly excluded from the emergent anti-terror coalition, some of its
enemies, such as Syria
and Iran,
were being considered for membership. Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad were
conspicuous in their absence from the list of 27 terrorist organisations that
had their assets frozen by Congress. They were treated on this occasion as
local movements fighting against occupation, not as global terrorist networks
like the one headed by Osama Bin Laden. Far from gaining respectability, Israel felt that
it was being treated almost as a pariah and as an impediment to the American
effort to build an anti-terror coalition.
Worse
was to come. Two weeks after the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon,
President Bush issued the strongest statement yet endorsing an independent
Palestinian state with East Jerusalem
as its capital. The Bush administration’s plan, which was said to have been in
preparation prior to 11 September, envisages the handing back of nearly all the
West Bank to
Palestinian control. Departing from its standard operating procedures, the
State Department prepared its own plan rather than forwarding Israeli proposals
with minor modifications. The plan itself was anathema to Mr Sharon. For he was
committed to keeping the whole of Jerusalem under Israeli control; he seemed
reluctant to yield to the Palestinian Authority more than the 42 per cent of
the West Bank that it currently controls; and he envisaged a weak Palestinian
entity made up of isolated enclaves with no territorial contiguity.
Sharon reacted to America’s peace
plan with an astonishing outburst of anger which reflected his deep fear that America might
abandon the strategic alliance with Israel in favour
of an alliance of convenience with the Arab states and the Palestinians. He warned
President Bush not to repeat the mistake of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 of
trying to appease Nazi Germany by offering Hitler part of Czechoslovakia. ‘Do not
try to appease the Arabs at our expense,’ said Mr Sharon. ‘Israel will not
be Czechoslovakia.
Israel
will fight terrorism.’ The analogy with Munich is preposterous: Israel is not Czechoslovakia but an
occupying power; the Palestinian Authority is not Nazi Germany; and Yasser
Arafat is no Adolf Hitler. After being compared to Neville Chamberlain of all
people, Bush must have regretted his remark about Sharon’s marvellous sense of
History. In any case, the official American response reflected extreme
displeasure. ‘The prime minister’s comments are unacceptable,’ said Ari
Fleischer, the White House spokesman. ‘Israel has no
stronger friend and ally in the world than the United States. President
Bush has been an especially close friend of Israel. The
Unites States has been working for months to press the parties to end the
violence and return to political dialogue. The United States will
continue to press both Israel
and the Palestinians to move forward.’ Although Mr Sharon expressed regret for
provoking this public row, his allegation of appeasement and of treachery
continued to rankle.
Israel’s reaction
to the assassination of tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi by the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, in Jerusalem on 17
October, deepened the crisis in the relations with America. The
radical right and racist former general, who advocated the ‘transfer’ of
Palestinians from Palestine,
was a personal friend of Ariel Sharon. The assassination was a straightforward
retaliation for Israel’s
‘targeted killing’ of the PFLP leader, Abu Ali Mustapha in August. Sharon warned Arafat of ‘all- out
war’ unless he handed over the assassins. Without waiting for a reply, he
ordered the IDF to reoccupy six cities in area A on the West
Bank in the most drastic assault on Yasser Arafat’s
authority since limited self-rule began seven years ago. The scale and ferocity
of the incursion shocked many Israelis, including Shimon Peres, the foreign
minister and leading advocate of the policy of negotiation as opposed to the
policy of retaliation. It appeared to serve the not-so-secret agenda of the
hardliners in the government and in the army of destroying the peace process by
banishing Arafat and bringing about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.
The
aggressive move against the PA placed Israel on a
collision course with America.
America
denounced the move in uncharacteristically blunt terms and called on Israel to quit
the West Bank cities
immediately and without conditions. It also warned Sharon that the war against the
Palestinians threatens the fragile coalition against the Taliban regime and
Osama Bin Laden. Sharon
flatly rejected the American demand in a remarkable display of defiance towards
an ally that gives his country $3 billion in aid every year. But he was forced
to recognise his error in thinking that the terrorist attack on America provided Israel with an
opportunity to redefine the rules of the game in the local conflict with the
Palestinians. Having declared that Israel will act
unilaterally in defence of its own interests, he was compelled to take American
interests into account. A gradual withdrawal from the West
Bank cities was set in motion.
The
pro-American Arab regimes, led by Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, viewed
the escalation of violence in Palestine
with mounting anguish and anxiety. They had been shamed and discredited in the
eyes of their own people by their inability to help the Palestinians or to
modify America’s
blatant partiality towards Israel. Osama Bin
Laden was quick to seize the plight of the Palestinians as an additional stick
with which to beat these Arab regimes following the Anglo-American assault on
Afghanistan: ‘Israeli tanks are wreaking havoc in Palestine - in Jenin,
Ramallah, Rafah and Beit Jala and other parts of the land of Islam, but no one
raises his voice or bats an eyelid.’ Like the Iraqi dictator, Bin Laden exploited
the plight of the Palestinians for his own ends. But his motives did not
detract from the centrality of the Palestine question.
His plea struck a sympathetic chord in much of the Arab and Islamic world. And
by swearing that America
will have no peace until Palestine
is free, the besieged Bin Laden succeeded in setting the agenda for Arab
demands on Palestine.
Yasser
Arafat was the first Arab leader to denounce the horrific crime of 11
September. He had paid a heavy price for his support of Saddam Hussein
following the invasion of Kuwait, and he
was not about to commit the same mistake again. Arafat and his colleagues, and
all thoughtful Palestinians, sought to distance themselves from Bin Laden, the
Lucifer of international terrorism. His war against the West was a religious
war whereas their struggle against Israel is
essentially a political and national struggle although there is an undeniable
religious dimension to it. Palestinians also draw a firm distinction between
the kind of unbridled terrorism practised by Bin Laden and their own resort to
violence in self-defence. A further distinction they make is between Israeli
violence which they regard as illegitimate because its purpose is to perpetuate
the occupation of their land and their own resistance to Israeli occupation. America stands
accused of double standards, of subscribing to a definition of terrorism that,
until very recently, suited only Israel. Arab and
Muslim groups have been pressing for some time for a new definition of
terrorism that excludes movements resisting occupation. The lack of one helps
to explain their lukewarm response to the American-led coalition against it.
Clearly,
a link existed between the war in Afghanistan and the
conflict in Palestine.
For the majority of Arabs and Muslims, Palestine is a
central issue. Their attitude towards America’s war in Afghanistan was
determined to a large extent by its stand on the Palestine question.
And the dominant perception was one of American double standards, of one
standard applied to Israel
and another standard to the Palestinians. Consequently, America did not
receive unambiguous Arab support in its war against international terrorism
because it did not satisfy the moderate Arab demands on Palestine. This
meant the Clinton
parameters: a deal that would establish the borders for an independent and
sovereign Palestinian state, allow for the return of some refugees, and divide Jerusalem between Israel and the
Palestinians. Mr Bush took a critical step forward in invoking international
justice to justify the war in Afghanistan. To be
consistent, he had to uphold the same standard of justice for the Palestinians.
Verbal commitments no longer carry much credibility. His father promised
justice for the Palestinians after the Gulf War and failed to deliver. He
himself will be judged not by words but by actions.
Conclusion
From
this brief review of American policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
during the last decade, a number of conclusions emerge. First, on their own the
two sides are incapable of reaching a resolution of their 100 years-old
conflict. They came tantalisingly close at Taba in January 2001, but they did
not get there. Second, the policy of using US moral,
material, and military support to give Israel the
confidence to go forward in the peace process, has not achieved the desired
results. The best proof is Bill Clinton. He was, in the words of one Israeli
newspaper, the last Zionist. Yet, even he could not sweet talk Israel into a
final settlement. If Clinton
could not do it, nobody can. That leaves only one possible path to progress: an
externally-imposed solution.
An
externally-imposed solution sounds rather coercive and brutal towards Israel but it
need not be. Indeed, if it is brutal, it will backfire. The key to progress is
to bring about a change in Israeli public opinion in favour of ending the
occupation and conceding to the Palestinians the right to genuine national
self-determination. Improbable as it may look today, such a change is not
inconceivable. The Israeli public has never been as resistant to the idea of
Palestinian statehood as the politicians of the Right. At the last elections,
Ariel Sharon promised peace with security and has decidedly failed to deliver
either. Today, Sharon
does not have a plan with the remotest chance of being acceptable to the other
side and he knows it. Hence his stubborn opposition to the resumption of the
final status negotiations. At the same time, he is being subjected to the most
intense pressure by his coalition partners. The left is pressing him to quit
the West Bank; the right
is pressing him to reoccupy it. His main aim is survival and that precludes the
option of voluntary withdrawal from the West Bank.
So once again, as so often in the past, the peace process is held hostage to
domestic Israeli politics.
Only
America
can break the deadlock in Israeli politics. If America does not,
no one else will. America’s
credentials as a friend are impeccable. Since 1967 America has given Israel more than
$92 billion in aid and this aid continues to the tune of $3 billion a year. America should
involve the United Nations, European
Union, Russia,
and its Arab allies in a concerted effort to generate internal pressure on Sharon to move forward on the
political front, but its own leadership role is crucial. The key point to drive
home in this educational campaign is that America remains committed to Israel’s
security and welfare, and that the country’s security will be enhanced rather
than put at risk by ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Arguably, America would be
doing Sharon
a favour by walking him into a peace deal against which, given his ideological
provenance, he is bound to protest loudly in public. Moreover, a fair number of
sensible, level-headed Israelis would be grateful to America for
liberating them from the 35 years-old colonial venture which has so
disastrously distorted the Zionist political project. In the end, it might be a
question, as George Ball once put it in an article in Foreign Affairs, of how to save Israel against
itself.
[1] Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The
Gulf Conflict, 1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), pp. 101-2.
[2] Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
[3] Avi Shlaim, War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 120-2
[4] Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting
Terrorism (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1995) pp. 102-5.
[5] Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, ‘Camp David: The Tragedy of
Errors’, New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001.
[6] Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (London: Profile Books, 2001), pp. 347-9.
[7] Akiva Eldar, ‘The Peace that Nearly Was at Taba’, Ha’aretz 15 February 2002.
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