When Bush Comes to Shove: America and the Arab-Israeli Peace
Process
Avi Shlaim
The Oxford International
Review, 3:2,
1992, 2-6.
The Pope, according to a
no doubt apocryphal story, maintains that there are two possible
solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict -the realistic and the
miraculous. The realistic solution involves divine intervention;
the miraculous solution involves a voluntary agreement between the
parties themselves. A third possible solution, not foreseen by
the Pope, is one that involves American intervention. The Middle
East peace conference which convened in Madrid at the end of October
1991 represented the most serious attempt to date on the part of the
United States to promote a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Two events of cosmic significance enabled America to revive what had
euphemistically come to be called the Middle East peace process: the
end of the Cold War and the end of the hot war in the Gulf. The
collapse of the Soviet Union as a superpower orphaned Moscow's former
military clients - Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and the radical
Palestinian factions - and pulled the rug from underneath the Arab
rejection front that always opposed any peace settlement with
Israel. Without Soviet arms supplies and diplomatic backing,
there was little the Arab radicals could do except sulk in their
tents. The collapse of the Soviet empire also meant that America
no longer had to contend with a credible rival in the Middle
East. Soviet-American competition was replaced by Soviet-American
cooperation, with America as the dominant power and the Soviet Union
reduced almost to the level of an assistant. Once the Cold War
ended, the Middle East naturally ceased to be an arena for waging the
Cold War. The ending of the global contest between the two
principal protagonists thus made possible, or at least conceivable, the
ending of the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis.
The Gulf War showed the extent to which the ground rules had changed
following the end of the Cold War. The scenario that actually
unfolded following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait would have been utterly
inconceivable under conditions of intense Soviet-American
competitiveness. Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War re-cast inter-Arab
relations, dealing a further blow to the rejection front. Syria,
once the standard-bearer of Arab rejectionism and Moscow's closest Arab
ally, joined in the American-led coalition against Iraq. The
moderate, pro-American Saudi-Egyptian axis became more powerful within
the Arab world and more assertive in pushing for a strong American
role. For all the Arab members, the hastily assembled alliance
with America against the Iraqi dictator now held longer-term
attractions. The war-time alliance laid the foundations for a
peace-time alliance. Having followed America's lead in war, the
Arabs were more willing than ever before to follow her lead in peace.
The decline of Soviet power and Saddam's adventure also had a profound
impact on US-Israeli relations. Together they called into
question the notion that Israel was a strategic asset for
America. The huge levels of US aid to Israel had been justified
on the grounds that Israel helped to protect American interests in this
vital part of the world against the twin threats of communism and
pan-Arab nationalism. But the communist threat had vanished and
when the crucial test came in the war with Iraq, America's much-vaunted
strategic asset proved to be an embarrassment and a liability. By
attacking Israel Saddam tried, but ultimately failed, to achieve two
objectives: to turn an Arab-Arab conflict into an Arab-Israeli one and
to drive a wedge between the Arabs and America by highlighting
America's commitment to Israel. Under the circumstances, the best
service Israel could render to her ally was to do nothing, to sit back
and take punches on the chin. Once Iraqi Scud missiles started
falling on Tel-Aviv, the Americans were obliged to assume an additional
defence burden by rushing in anti-Scud Patriot missile batteries with
their crews. Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger who
had the unenviable task of keeping the Israelis under leash ended up as
a virtual hostage in Jerusalem. The most polite expression
American officials could think of to describe Israel's role during the
war was irrelevant. Most of them thought that Israel was a
nuisance and an expensive nuisance.
Having done their duty by their ally, it was inevitable that American
policy-makers would start asking themselves whether they really needed
Israel. What could Israel offer that could not be provided by
their Arab friends? For the strategist looking for an unsinkable
aircraft carrier, the USS Fahd offered a bigger flight deck than the
USS Shamir. The Gulf states were also infinitely more valuable to
America as a market for goods and services and as a source of
oil. Bush and Baker, two former Texas oil men with no sentimental
attachment to Israel, had little difficulty in reaching the conclusion
that their country's vital interests lay where the black gold was.
The end of the Gulf War gave the Bush Administration both an
opportunity and an impetus to re-engage in the Arab-Israeli peace
process. Saddam Hussein, in one of those curious paradoxes that
punctuate the history of the Middle East, could claim some of the
credit for the convening of the peace conference in Madrid. For
it was he who, in the famous linkage proposal of 12 August 1990,
suggested an Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories as
the price for a possible Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. Before
threatening the mother of all battles, Saddam had thus 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 Saddam
should comply instantly with UN orders to withdraw from Kuwait without
accepting that Israel should eventually be made to comply with the
strikingly similar demands of Security Council resolution 242 which had
been on the table since 1967. Bush's way round this problem was
to intimate that he would seek a settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute
once Iraq had been booted out of Kuwait. Eight trips by his
Secretary of State to the Middle East, culminating in the mother of all
peace conferences in Madrid, showed that the Texas oil men were as good
as their word.
There was another reason behind President Bush's determination to bring
the Arabs and Israelis to the negotiating table: he needed a diplomatic
victory to obscure the inconclusive result of the war he had
waged. He needed to demonstrate that the crusade he had led
against Iraq had been worthwhile despite the casualties, the
destruction, the environmental damage, the suffering inflicted on the
Iraqi people and the failure to topple Saddam Hussein. The Gulf
War was the jewel in Bush's crown, but with the passage of time it
began to lose its gleam. Bush's critics at home started using
Saddam's continued hold on power, and the fact that Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia remained as undemocratic as ever, to tarnish the glow of the
Gulf victory. To answer his critics, Bush wanted a political
achievement of cosmic significance and such an achievement could not be
found in the Gulf; it could only be sought in the eastern
Mediterranean. Implicitly, Bush was now positing another kind of
linkage - that victory in the Gulf paved the way to peace in the Middle
East.
Getting the Arabs and Israelis round the conference table, however, was
no easy matter. Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's right-wing Prime Minister, was
the toughest nut to crack because his ideological commitment to the
land of Israel left very little room for compromise with the
Arabs. Yet Israel's dependence on American financial help in
coping with large-scale Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union gave
Bush unprecedented leverage. He exploited this leverage to the
full. By withholding the $10 billion loan guarantee requested by
Shamir, Bush forced the Israelis to the negotiating table.
Nor was it simply a question of the loan guarantee. America had
given Israel aid totalling $77 billion, and continues to subsidize the
Jewish state to the tune of $4 billion a year. Never in the
annals of human history have so few owed to much to so many. Bush
himself felt he owed no debt either to Israel or to American
Jewry. He had been Vice-President for eight years in the most
pro-Israeli administration in American history, yet he got only five
per cent of the Jewish vote in the 1988 presidential elections.
Bush was thus in a strong position domestically to present Shamir with
a choice: keep the occupied territories or keep US support.
President Hafez al-Asad of Syria was another awkward customer. He
ended up by accepting the invitation to Madrid not as a result of a
sudden conversion on the road to Damascus to the idea of peace with
Israel, but because he had lost the support of his old superpower
patron and had to make his peace with the sole remaining
superpower. To those who accused him of capitulating to American
pressure, Asad quoted the Arab saying that you have to decide whether
you want the grapes or a fight with the vineyard keeper. He left
no room for doubt that he wanted the grapes. Once Asad agreed to
go to Madrid on America's terms, the government of Lebanon meekly
followed his example. It was a relief to be at the peace table rather
than on the peace table.
King Hussein of Jordan, having aroused the wrath of America and her
Gulf allies by his association with Saddam Hussein, was anxious to
rehabilitate himself and resume the flow of badly needed economic
aid. He therefore readily agreed to the formation of a joint
Jordanian-Palestinian delegation in order to provide an umbrella for
Palestinian participation in the peace talks.
Excluding the PLO from the peace table was not too difficult after it
had placed itself in the dog-house by its support for Saddam Hussein
during the Gulf crisis. Over the last few years, the political
centre of gravity within the Palestinian national movement had been
shifting in any case from the PLO leadership in Tunis to the local
leadership in the occupied territories. The intifada, a
full-scale revolt against Israeli rule which broke out in December
1987, was initially successful in placing the Palestinian problem high
on the international agenda, but later it started to lose much of its
focus and energy and degenerated into internecine killings.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government, led by aggressive and Arab-scorning
Housing Minister Ariel Sharon, accelerated the drive to build new
Jewish settlements on the West Bank. This made the local leaders
desperate to play the few cards they still had left before it was too
late.
James Baker was very blunt with the Palestinians. He kept telling
them that their only chance to stop Israel's galloping annexation of
the West Bank lay in going to Madrid on his terms and he warned them
that the bus to Madrid would come only once. Baker insisted on
excluding the PLO and residents of East Jerusalem and on a joint
Jordanian-Palestinian delegation rather than an independent Palestinian
one. He refused to make concessions of an even symbolic
nature. There was to be no Palestinian flag and no keffiyas, the
traditional Palestinian head-dress, in Madrid. The Palestinians
had to turn up in business suits, just like Texas oil men. In
return for paying this stiff price for their ticket of admission to
Madrid, Baker promised the Palestinians substantive negotiations on a
footing of equality with Israel. This they had never been offered
before.
Baker also told the Palestinians that if they got on board his bus, it
would probably carry them to self-government. It was crucial, he
argued, to gain momentum in the peace process, to put pressure on
Israel to start making concessions. Once they were convinced that
a genuine change had taken place in America's attitude to Israel, the
Palestinians agreed to participate in the peace talks on Baker's terms.
The Madrid peace conference was carefully stage-managed by the
Americans, with Baker acting as the chief puppeteer. It was he
and his aides who picked the venue for the conference, issued the
formal invitations, provided written assurances to each participant and
laid down that the basis for the negotiations would be Security Council
resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of exchanging territory for
peace.
During the lead-up to Madrid, Baker followed the advice of Theodore
Roosevelt: he spoke softly and carried a big stick. To diversify
the range of weapons in his armoury, Baker also carried with him a few
carrots. And it was by a skilful manipulation of the carrot and
the stick that he eventually persuaded all the parties to attend the
conference - his conference.
Everybody was there in Madrid bar the British, despite the fact that
the seeds of the conflict under discussion had been planted in the
Balfour Declaration which pledged support for the establishment of a
Jewish National Home in Palestine while ignoring the political rights
of the Arab majority. Although none of the participants mentioned
the Balfour Declaration, it was curious to reflect that it had all
begun with a one sentence letter from the British foreign secretary to
Lord Rothschild back in 1917, the year that the Soviet Union was born.
The other notable absentee was the United Nations whose agenda over the
past four and a half decades has been dominated by the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Two previous Middle East peace conferences had been
held under the auspices of the United Nations, in Lausanne in 1949 and
in Geneva in 1973. The first was a prolonged exercise in
futility, the second a fiasco which lasted only one day. What
these abortive conferences demonstrated was that the world organisation
does not have the capacity to settle one of the most persistent and
dangerous conflicts of modern times. If the peace process
launched in Madrid has better prospects of success it is because it
carries the label Made in the USA.
Having the Soviet Union as a nominal co-sponsor of the conference was
helpful to America in two ways. First, it provided the Arab
participants with some defence against criticism from their radical
constituencies that they were simply marching to an American
tune. Second, it enabled America to have the best of both worlds:
a pliant Soviet partner and a plausible justification for excluding the
United Nations from the action. The Soviet presence was used to
legitimize what was in fact a unilateral American diplomatic initiative.
At the opening session of the peace talks in the Palacio Real in
Madrid, President Bush stood as the proud victor in two wars: the Cold
War and the Gulf War. He showed magnanimity in victory by saying
that the United States and the Soviet Union were there not as rivals
but as partners. But it was all too obvious from President
Gorbachev's pathetic speech about his country's economic needs that the
Soviet Union was there as America's assistant. The Soviet Union
was not in Madrid to compete with America, but rather to compete with
Arabs and Israelis for American largesse. Gorbachev's speech
irrevocably ended any residual pretension on the part of the Soviet
Union to being a superpower in its own right.
President Bush was faultlessly even-handed: by calling for peace based
on security he pleased the Israelis; by calling for peace based on
fairness he pleased the Palestinians. The United States, he said,
in one of the few understatements of the conference, was simply there
to facilitate the search for peace, to serve as a catalyst.
The opening speeches by the heads of Israeli and the Palestinian
delegations faithfully reflected the positions of the two sides.
Mr Shamir, like the Bourbons of France, seemed to have learnt nothing
and to have forgotten nothing. The whole tone of his speech was
anachronistic, saturated with the stale rhetoric of the past. He
used the platform to deliver the first ever Israel Bonds speech in
front of an Arab audience. His version of the Arab-Israeli
conflict was singularly narrow and blinkered, portraying Israel simply
as the victim of Arab aggression and refusing to acknowledge that any
evolution had taken place in the Arab or Palestinian attitudes to
Israel. All the Arabs, according to Shamir, want to see Israel
destroyed, the only difference between them is over the ways to bring
about her destruction. His speech, while long on anti-Arab
clichיs, was exceedingly short on substance. By insisting that
the root cause of the conflict is not territory but the Arab refusal to
recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel, Mr Shamir came
dangerously close to rejecting the whole basis of the conference - UN
resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of land for peace.
Dr Abdul Shafi's basic message was that Israeli occupation must be
ended, the Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and that
they are determined to pursue this right relentlessly until they
achieve statehood. The Intifada, he suggested, had already begun
to embody the Palestinian state and to build its institutions and
infrastructure. But while staking a claim to Palestinian
statehood, Dr Abdul Shafi qualified it in two significant ways.
First, he accepted the need for a transitional stage, provided interim
arrangements were not transformed into permanent status. Second,
he envisaged a confederation between an ultimately independent
Palestine and Jordan.
As the head of the Palestinian delegation was delivering his speech,
Israel's stone-faced Prime Minister passed a note to a colleague.
One of the five thousand journalists covering the conference was moved
to speculate that it said: 'We made a big mistake. We should have
insisted that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people.'
Dr Abdul Shafi's speech in Madrid was both the most eloquent and the
most moderate presentation of the Palestinian case ever made by an
official Palestinian spokesman since the beginning of the conflict at
the end of the last century. The PLO, for all its growing
moderation, has never been able to articulate such a clear-cut peace
overture to Israel because of its internal divisions and the
constraints of inter-Arab politics. No PLO official had ever been
able to declare so unambiguously that a Palestinian state would be
ready for a confederation with Jordan. The whole tenor of the
speech was more conciliatory and constructive than even the most
moderate statements of the PLO. In the words of one PLO official,
the speech was 'unreasonably reasonable.'
There was a palpable feeling of history in the making as the
soft-spoken doctor from Gaza read his text in the magnificent Hall of
Columns in the royal palace in Madrid. Future historians will look back
on 31 October 1991 as a landmark in the quest for reconciliation
between the national claims of the Palestinians and the Israelis.
If the Palestinians proved to Mr Shamir that he could no longer rely on
them to let him off the hook, he had better luck with Mr Farouk
al-Shara, the Foreign Minister of Syria. Shara played the old
record of rejectionism and vituperation. He was without doubt the
most militant and radical Arab representative in Madrid and he was also
the most isolated. The conference degenerated into an unseemly
slanging match between the Israeli and the Syrian. Mr Shamir
denounced Syria as one of the most repressive and tyrannical regimes in
the world. Mr Shara replied in Kind, denouncing Israel as a
terrorist state led by a former terrorist and later refused to answer
questions at a press conference from Israeli journalists. Shara
was like a bat trying to fly in the daylight. His performance
revealed what a closed dark place Syria still is, notwithstanding its
move from the Soviet camp into the American camp. Against the
background of this strident display of Syrian rejectionism, the
readiness of the Palestinians to engage in a constructive dialogue with
the Israelis was all the more striking.
After the plenary session was over, stage two of the peace process
began in Madrid. It took the form of a series of separate
bilateral meetings between Israel and each of the three Arab
delegations. Here too the Syrians were the most rigid and
intransigent, while the Palestinians seemed more eager than any of the
Arab delegations to forge ahead with the talks in order to bring about
a freeze on Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. As a
result of these differences the common Arab front collapsed.
Syria held out for a unified Arab position to back its demand of an
Israeli commitment to trade the Golan Heights for peace before the
bilateral talks began. Among the Palestinian delegates there was
considerable irritation with Syria's attempt to set an overall Arab
agenda in the talks. They broke ranks with Syria and not only
held their meeting with the Israelis but shook hands in front of the
cameras. What the Palestinians were saying, in effect, was that
Syria had no power of veto over their own moves and that they would not
allow the peace process with Israel to be held hostage to inter-Arab
politics.
One of the distinguishing marks of the madrid conference was the
emergence of a Palestinian-American axis. Of all the delegations
to Madrid, the Palestinians were the only ones who agreed to nearly all
the American requests on both procedure and substance. It was the
American officials who advised the Palestinians to appeal to the
American public and this advice was followed almost to the point of
neglecting public opinion in other countries. In order to
minimise the risk of an Israeli walk-out, the Americans went with the
Palestinians over different scenarios before the conference began and
they were well pleased with the performance put on subsequently by the
novices in their dיbut on the international stage in Madrid. In
his closing speech Mr Baker even paid tribute to Palestinians like
Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi 'whose personal courage in the face
of enormous pressures has created the possibility of a better life for
the Palestinians.'
What mattered much more than the polished performance by the novices,
was that they were a lot closer than the Israelis to the American
position in Madrid. They explicitly accepted that the
negotiations should be based on UN resolutions 242 and 338 and the
principle of land for peace, whereas Israel did not. They got on
board the bus which Mr Baker told them would come only once, whereas Mr
Shamir continued to quibble over the fare, the powers of the driver,the
rights of other passengers, the speed of the bus, the route and the
final destination.
The official American position towards the Arab-Israeli conflict has
remained unchanged since 1967. America supports the exchange of
land for peace, refuses to acknowledge the Israeli annexation of East
Jerusalem and regards the building of Jewish settlements in the
occupied territories as illegal and an obstacle to peace. What
has changed is the evident determination of the Bush administration to
do more than repeat these positions like a gramophone record. The
moderation shown by the Palestinians in Madrid made it easier for the
Bush administration to tilt further in their direction and away from
Israel. As the conference drew to a close, all the signs were
that when Bush came to shove, the Palestinians would be on the side of
the most powerful man on earth.
In his concluding remarks Mr Baker repeated the polite fiction that
America will not impose its own ideas but act as the honest broker in
furthering the peace process. But he knows, and everybody else
does, that the Arab-Israeli conflict requires more than an honest
broker for its resolution. The lesson of history is that a
settlement cannot come from within the Middle East; it has to be
imposed from the outside. The gulf between the positions of the
two sides is too wide to be bridged by direct negotiations.
America is the only power on earth with the resources and the authority
to bridge this gulf. In Madrid America demonstrated that she also
has the commitment and determination to pursue her vision of peace for
the Middle East. It was only a beginning, but a fair, and
therefore highly promising, beginning.
Subsequent developments, however,soon dashed many of the hopes that the
Madrid encounter had raised. Just as the Gulf War was a neat war
followed by a messy peace, so Madrid was a neat peace conference with a
messy sequel. Kick-starting the peace process was one thing; staying
the course was quite another. In peace as in war the Bush
administration proved to be rather better at generating a concentrated
burst of activity than at sustained political and intellectual
effort. Once again, the Bush administration deserved the lion's
share of the credit for the promising start and some of the blame for
the subsequent faltering.
The administration invited all the parties to hold substantive
bilateral peace talks in Washington starting on December 14. The
Palestinians accepted with alacrity: at long last they were going
to get into the corridors of power. The Israelis, on the other
hand, delayed their arrival in Washington by a few days to register a
protest at what they saw as an increasingly abrasive and one-sided
American approach to the peace talks. The last thing they wanted
was the kind of brisk and concrete down-to-business approach urged by
the Americans. Mr Shamir who had been suspicious of the peace
process from the start came under growing pressure from the settlement
lobby and his right-wing coalition partners not to make any concessions
on Palestinian autonomy. A past master at playing for time, he
resorted to all his familiar tricks of obstinacy, obfuscation and
obstruction.
The issue used by Shamir to spoil the talks was the status of the
Palestinians. On the last day of the Madrid talks an
understanding was reached that in the bilateral phase the Israelis
would negotiate separately with the Palestinians and the
Jordanians. Accordingly, the Americans prepared two rooms in the
State Department,one for the Israeli and Palestinian teams and one for
the Israeli and Jordanian teams. But on arrival in the State
Department, the Israelis insisted on negotiating with a joint
Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to underline their opposition to a
separate Palestinian entity. For six days the heads of the
Israeli and Palestinian delegations haggled in the corridor of the
State Department, unable to agree even to enter the negotiation
room. The American hosts thoughtfully placed a sofa in the
corridor. This bizarre experience added a new term to the rich
lexicon of the Arab-Israeli conflict - corridor diplomacy. But
the only thing the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators could agree on
was that the coffee in the State Department was undrinkable.
Matters of substance were discussed in the Israeli-Syrian and the
Israeli-Lebanese talks but no progress was made. Throughout the
talks the Americans maintained a 'hands off' approach, telling the
negotiators to sort out their own problems. James Baker was away
on a visit to the Soviet Union which was about to go out of
business. George Bush was preoccupied with domestic problems not
the least of which was the spectacular fall in his own popularity, from
the peak it had reached during the Gulf War. The upshot was that
instead of going forward into negotiations on substance,the Washington
talks remained bogged down in procedural wrangles. Washington
represented not a step forward but a step back from Madrid. There was
no ratchet mechanism and no American intervention to stop the
back-sliding.
It took another round of talks in Washington, in early January 1992, to
break the procedural deadlock on the Israeli-Palestinian front. A
compromise was reached on the status of the Palestinians that enabled
both sides to claim victory. Israel was to negotiate with two
separate sub-committees consisting of nine Palestinians and two
Jordanians on Palestinian-related issues and nine Jordanians and two
Palestinians on Jordan-related issues. With a sigh of relief
Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian spokeswoman, announced that 'corridor
diplomacy' had ended.
The move from corridor diplomacy to proper negotiating forum set the
alarm bells ringing in Israel. The settlers stepped up their
pressure on the government to break off negotiations and crack down
harder on intifada activity. Mr. Shamir's two small right-wing
partners, Tehia and Moledet, resigned from the government because
Palestinian autonomy was put on the agenda for future talks.
Their resignation deprived Mr Shamir of his majority in the Knesset and
forced him to bring forward the date of the elections. With
Israel heading for elections in the summer of 1992, the peace process
was relegated to a state of limbo. The prospects for real
progress therefore looked distinctly bleak following what was hailed as
a major procedural breakthrough in Washington. It is
difficult to avoid the impression that Mr Shamir's real aim from the
beginning was to scuttle the peace talks in a way for which the Arabs
could be blamed or, failing that, to wait for the Israeli and the US
presidential elections to ensure that nothing happened.
The principal lesson of the Washington round is that Arab-Israeli peace
negotiations cannot go forward without constant and high-level American
engagement. Do-it-yourself peace is a laudable aspiration, but it
cannot work unless both sides are equally committed to achieving
it. For the Arabs and Israelis to achieve peace without American
intervention would be nothing short of a miracle.
Back