America Must
Get Tough With Israel
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- Short two and a half years ago, the then foreign
minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, observed, "I don't think
we have in the Middle East a process of peace. We have a war
for peace, because it calls unfortunately for victims and
casualties." Probably, not even in the most pessimistic
moments of this melancholic man, did he himself forsee that
soon after he spoke he'd witness the triple whammy of the
murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the subsequent
victory at the polls of Likud's party Binyamin Netanyshu and
the effective pacing of negotiations under the Oslo accords
by terrorist elements on both the Israeli and Palestinian
sides.
While Mr. Netanyshu may not have wanted the tide of
events to move in his direction by such a route he and his
Likud philosophy is the clear beneficiary. The political cul
de sac that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians now find
themselves manoeuvred into is where the grand strategists of
the Likud right wanted them to be all along. In recent
months the tables have been so turned on Arafat that the
Israel he faces now demands from him its security agenda or
nothing--and all that is left as bait on the Oslo hook is
unrecognizable to the Palestinian eye. Even Stephen
Rosenfeld of the Washington Post, columnist and chief
foreign editorial writer, has now been provoked to nail his
colors as a Jewish dissident, criticizing Israel for only
offering to the Palestinians "a small dependent misshapen
territory carved up by Israeli roads and vulnerable to
Israeli intervention the first time a kid threw a stone." It
would never be a Palestinian state. It would not even be a
viable Palestinian economic entity. It would be a quasi
refugee camp squeezed into the interstices of Greater
Israel.
Doubtless, Israel has the military muscle to impose its
interpretation of peace, at least in the short run. (In the
long run the Arab world will find a way to subvert it.) But
that would mean totally forsaking the Fourth Geneva
Convention. Drafted in 1949 in the wake of Adolf Hitler's
ethnic cleansing, paragraph 6 of article 49 reads, "The
occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its
own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
Israel, however, has been establishing settlements on the
conquered West Bank since 1967 and recently has been
accelerating the process in the most provocative manner
possible. How can there be "land-for-peace," the essence of
UN resolution 242 and the heart of the Oslo accords, when
Israel is manifestly determined to torpedo away the last
stays and constraints of the Geneva Convention?
Only one power in the world at the moment can say "stop"
or "no" to Israel and it mean anything and that is America.
But since the dying days of the Bush Administration
Washington has veered from inactive to passive. So passive
indeed has been the Clinton Administration that on occasion
it has put aside its self-described "neutrality" to get
Israel out of a jam--as when in the first Clinton term the
U.S. used its veto in the UN Security Council to halt what
would otherwise have been a universal condemnation of
Likud's aggressive settlement policy.
Now the new Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, seems
intent on re-galvanizing Washington's role. But is Mrs.
Albright prepared if necessary to make public a profound
philosophical difference with Likud, or will it be more of
fudge and smudge, of the same order as when Henry Kissinger
described Netanyahu's election victory as "a call for change
in the definition of peace." That was a classically anodyne
statement that papered over the fact that the defeated
Labour party would not rule out the eventual creation of a
viable Palestinian state and Likud does.
Mrs. Albright should pay heed to the observation of James
Noyes, a Hoover Institution research fellow, who argues that
"Some of Washington's most useful contributions have come
when the U.S. strongly disagreed with a particular Israeli
action." Not surprisingly there have only been a handful of
occasions when this happened but they do stand out as
markers.
President Dwight Eisenhower memorably went so far as to
insist on the abortion of the ill-conceived French, British
and Israeli invasion of Egypt, following Nasser's
nationalization of the Suez Canal. President George Bush
took a telling stand when he refused to permit Prime
Minister Yitshuk Shamir's Likud government to use American
loan guarantees to expand Jewish settlements on the West
Bank. He suffered a torrent of abuse for this, but it
changed the climate and made the Israelis more flexible in
negotiation.
Although there have been some vicissitudes in the Clinton
presidency, defending settlements one year, criticizing them
the next, the basic stance remains in its main essentials
supportive of Netanyahu's uncompromising rigor. That has to
change and must do quickly if a de facto Greater Israel is
not going to be locked in place in the next couple of
years.
Washington must stop looking over its shoulder at the
American Jewish lobbies who represent only a minority of the
Jews in the diaspora. It should not feel in hock to the
apparent mandate of the Israeli voter when the election was
won by a mere 29,500 votes in an atmosphere that was
anything from normal, following Rabin's assassination. Mr.
Clinton and Mrs. Albright have to realize-- and very quickly
too--that in this "war for peace" America cannot afford to
give any more hostages to fortune. The time for getting
singularly tough with the Likud philosophy has now arrived
and can no longer be avoided.
August 27, 1997,
LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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