Mideast Looks to U.S. for Peace Guidance

Despite what you hear, prospects for successful peace talks between the Arab states and Israel are better than they’ve been in a long time.

The key to seeing that is to understand the economic ambitions of Syria and Israel, the devastating decline of the Palestinians in the wake of the Gulf War--and the overriding power and influence of the United States.

Everybody in the Middle East these days looks to the United States for guidance, for which Americans should be proud but also ready to ask a few questions.

First, however, to the region itself, where nothing is straightforward. Publicly, Syria and Israel thumb their noses at President Bush’s peace initiatives.

But watch what they do, not what they say. Look at recent events in South Lebanon, where last week the Lebanese Army, acting under orders from Syria, forced Palestine Liberation Organization troops to hand over heavy weapons with which they had been threatening Israel.

Syria is removing the PLO threat so that Israel will feel comfortable enough to withdraw from its security zone in South Lebanon. And if that sounds improbable, even more unusual are reports in Israel that its military and political leaders are amenable to the scheme and are talking of withdrawal--provided the United States oversees the whole matter.

Syria is also counting on the United States to bless its peace moves and to persuade Israel to go along.

The losers on all fronts are the Palestinians. For more than 40 years, the roughly 3.5 million Palestinians spread around the Middle East were the official focus of Arab enmity toward Israel and the recipients of Arab almsgiving. There was always a lot of lip service. While richer Arab states gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the PLO, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families were left in refugee camps.

Now even the lip service has ceased. Palestinians are losing their jobs in Kuwait; the oil-rich Gulf states have cut off contributions to Palestinians, and Arab states such as Syria are moving against them militarily.

Meanwhile, the roughly 1.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza territories inside Israel are poorer than ever after three years of the intifada uprising. Economic output in the West Bank and Gaza has fallen to $1.2 billion a year from $2.4 billion.

Palestinians have lost jobs in Israel; where 120,000 used to get day labor in Israeli construction, now 80,000 get work. Palestinian towns, such as Ramallah on the West Bank, show the cracked plaster and shuttered stores of economic distress.

Charles Shamas, a Palestinian lawyer and businessman in Ramallah, puts fresh hopes in a new Israeli-approved Investment Bank that would pool money from Palestinian entrepreneurs the world over.

“But before Palestinian entrepreneurs, in South America or the Middle East, put in long-term investments, we need political stability,” Shamas says. He means the kind of Palestinian home rule that would follow peace negotiations, a local autonomy that would be unarmed and pledged not to threaten Israel.

It could come to pass. With the Palestinians so weakened, Israel theoretically could spread its people in housing settlements all over the West Bank and Gaza. But many Israelis, including government officials, don’t see Israel refusing to negotiate autonomy for the territories. To do so could be costly in terms of international politics. The European Community has just warned Israel that it will get trade privileges after 1992 only if it makes peace with the Palestinians.

Thus, continued housing settlements could conflict with Israel’s real interest these days, which is to move toward a closer relationship with Europe by achieving an economy much greater than any of its neighboring nations--which Israel distrusts for good reason.

The Israelis have just rescued 15,000 Ethiopian Jews who faced almost certain massacre, a fact that prompts Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai to speak of the region with contempt. “The real profession of this region is killing,” he says.

But Syrian Economics Minister Mohammed Imady speaks more in sorrow of the region’s troubles, as if the Gulf War has opened his eyes to how underdeveloped the region is.

“It is sad to see so much poverty in the Arab world,” Imady says. “A tenth of the Earth’s surface and 200 million people, and yet we have so little.” His solution is economic reform: “If we open our economies to private initiative, it is my hope we will get greater cooperation between nations and open the way to democracy.”

The United States is essential to such hopes. Its power in the region is so great now that it has a free hand to help any and all countries improve their economies and move toward more representative government--to make the “new world order” a reality in other words. “We are all dependent on America” is a line heard in every country.

Some Americans are not thrilled at the compliment. “What about Bridgeport?” asks a U.S. economist working in the region. Bridgeport, Conn., an old industrial city with plenty of cracked plaster and shuttered stores and factories, is declaring bankruptcy. “Why should we help this region?” asks the economist. “Why don’t we help Bridgeport?”

Israeli Finance Minister Modai answers with a view to history. “Remember the Marshall Plan,” he says. “It didn’t make much sense on its face. Your enemies were devastated, and you could have held them down forever. Yet you helped them, and without that you would have no markets, no customers, no allies--you would still be facing the Russians.”

He is suggesting that the same will be true of the Middle East, that its 200 million people will develop more cohesively in the coming decades and that the United States will reap the benefit.

He has a point. The United States would not further its own prosperity by leaving the Middle East underdeveloped and prone to violence.

But the economist’s provocative question is also valid. Unless Bridgeport and many other struggling U.S. cities and states see concrete benefits, the new world order will be dismissed as hot air--and the hopeful spirit of the moment in the Middle East and elsewhere will fade.

And that would be a shame.