Middle East to Bush: It’s No Time to Retreat

Is President George W. Bush good for the Israelis? For the Palestinians? These are questions people in the Middle East are asking frequently these days.

The aborted peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority last fall failed for all kinds of reasons. But one strong undercurrent was the Palestinian assumption that a Bush presidency might bring them a better deal than former President Clinton was pushing. It was Bush the elder and his partner James A. Baker, after all, who prodded the Israelis into meeting with an official Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid Conference.

But Bush the son is not Bush the father. President George Bush was an internationalist, head of the CIA, ambassador to the U.N. and to China and served as a global-minded vice president for eight years.

The current President Bush came of political age in the post-Cold War era, and his training as Texas governor hardly prepared him for a role in international mediation. It’s no wonder that, given Bush’s early isolationist rumblings, some Palestinians are having second thoughts about whether a Bush presidency will benefit them.

Does this mean that things are better for Israel under Bush than they were under Clinton? Not necessarily. On the surface, it would appear that there is a happy confluence of ideology between the conservative Bush and Ariel Sharon administrations--much as there was between Clinton and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

But Bush’s noninterventionist tendencies do not bode well for Israel. International involvement has been crucial at every juncture of Israeli history. It was essential in 1917, with the British Balfour Declaration for the right to the revival of a Jewish national home in Palestine; in 1947, when the U.N. put together its Partition Plan; in 1974, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy led to disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria; in 1978, when Jimmy Carter dedicated himself to the Camp David accords; in 1991, when the first President Bush convened the Madrid Middle East peace conference; and in 1993, when Norway hosted discussions that led to the Oslo Accords and the subsequent signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn with President Clinton.

Committed, idealistic Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Clinton and hard-nosed Republican realists like Kissinger and Bush-Baker all assisted the Israeli need for movement toward peace and stability.

And now--suddenly nothing? President Bush seems to want to stay behind the lines, to remain uninvolved, even to the point of dismantling the special American Middle East task force headed by Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller. It is the Egyptians and Jordanians pushing for a cease-fire, with Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell coming in only as bit players.

Seven months ago a majority of the Israeli population thought it was on the verge of an agreement with the Palestinians, Pope John Paul II came and went, tourism was booming, dreams of creative high-tech innovations abounded and people were confident about the future.

But the renewed Israeli-Palestinian violence that has escalated since the outbreak of the second intifada last September has traumatized Israeli society and produced a previously inconceivable Sharon-led government, characterized by such retro phrases as “the Arabs only understand the language of power,” ’Israel has to rebuild its deterrent capabilities” and “maybe there is no solution to this intractable conflict--we have no alternative but to live by the sword.”

Barak’s strange combination of courage, go-it-alone arrogance and political amateurism, coupled with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s inability to make the psychological transition from an outsider struggling for national liberation to a pragmatic sovereign leader, helped to bring us to the present impasse.

Sharon was elected because he promised to bring personal security to the Israeli people and to continue the pursuit of peace, in that order. But as the daily headlines can attest, he has no magic formulas for either. So is there any hope on the horizon?

One oasis of activity suggests that all is not lost. Every day, a small team of Israelis and Palestinians go to the East Jerusalem offices of the Palestine-Israel Journal, a quarterly magazine published and written by a group of prominent Israeli and Palestinian journalists and academics. Israelis include former Jerusalem Post Editor Ari Rath, senior Haaretz daily commentator on Arab affairs Danny Rubinstein and the Hebrew University’s Edy Kaufman and Galit Hasan-Rokem. The Palestinians include journalist and Al Quds University Media Department head Daoud Kuttab, Bethlehem University professor Mannuel Hassassian and Bir Zeit University’s Gaby Baramki. The founding co-editors in 1994 were Palestinian lawyer and journalist Ziad Abuzayyad and veteran Israeli journalist Victor Cygielman.

Back in 1967 following the Six Day War, Abuzayyad was among the first Palestinians who decided to learn Hebrew so that he could enter into a dialogue. The founding of the joint journal was a logical extension of this approach. Since then Abuzayyad has been elected to the parliament of the Palestinian Authority and even serves as a minister in its government.

While some Palestinian representatives have called for a total boycott of joint Israeli-Palestinian activity until full independence is achieved, Abuzayyad and his colleagues have remained committed to keeping the spark of dialogue alive.

And despite Sharon’s “no talks till the violence ends,” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres continues to meet with Palestinians both here and abroad. Perhaps the strangest and most mysterious contacts are the meetings with Palestinians, including Arafat himself, being carried out by Omri Sharon, the prime minister’s 36-year-old son and apparently his most trusted confidant.

But with the level of confidence between the two societies at such a point, all of this is not enough to jump-start the negotiations.

There is an Egyptian-Jordanian proposal on the table to break the impasse that contains a framework for mutual steps to be taken by Israel and the Palestinian Authority to reach a cease-fire, rebuild confidence and resume a formal dialogue. After initially dismissing it, Sharon is now saying, “Yes, but ... “ In response, the Palestinians have hinted that they will control the violence in exchange for a complete halt to settlement activity.

During his recent visit to Washington, Peres actually invited American intervention. It’s time for President Bush to get off the fence and to appoint an active point man for his Middle East policy. Who will it be--former Secretary of State James Baker? Former ambassador to both Syria and to Israel Edward Djerejian? Secretary of State Colin Powell?

The parameters of a final agreement are more or less known. They were worked out at Camp David last summer, and the details were refined in 32 subsequent meetings that were held between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators until the Feb. 6 elections and were outlined in President Clinton’s speech in early January. They include Palestinian sovereignty over 95% of the West Bank and Gaza, a concentration of Israeli settlements in a few blocs close to Israel proper, some exchange of land, a workable formula to satisfy both Israeli and Palestinian rights and needs in Jerusalem, and a formula that acknowledges the pain caused to the Palestinians in the wake of the ’48 and ’67 wars, which led to the refugee problem, with a plan for compensation and voluntary repatriation, primarily to the future Palestinian state.

The question is: How many Israeli and Palestinian lives will be needlessly lost before that point is reached, and how will an open-ended continuation of the current crisis affect the general stability of the Middle East?