Hope against hope, and the search for peace

Throughout human history, every war, every conflict, however terrible, however long, has eventually ended. The Hundred Years War between England and France lasted from 1337 to 1453, the Russo-Turkish Wars continued from the 17th century well into the 19th, but both came to an end. France and Germany, after several long and bloody wars over two centuries, are now at peace. For those caught in such conflicts, the historical inevitability that they would end at some point brought no comfort, but end they did.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, too, will end, but not knowing when or how compounds the pain of both peoples -- who suffer tragic losses daily -- and adds to the despair of their friends. The thin results of a decade of serious peace efforts might easily lead to the conclusion that peace is not possible in the Middle East, certainly not now.

Two men, writing from inside those efforts, disagree strongly with that conclusion. Peace is possible, they assert, and important steps can be taken even in the midst of the current violence. For 12 years, from 1988 to 2000, Dennis Ross held the Mideast peace portfolio for the United States, serving in the first Bush administration and then in the Clinton administration. Yossi Beilin, a member of the governments of three Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, initiated the talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization that led to the landmark Oslo agreement in 1993.

“Some may look at the Middle East and draw only one lesson: Peace is not possible. Conflict is the norm. A decade of peacemaking efforts was noble but futile,” Ross writes in “The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.” With his day-by-day chronicle of American diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one might expect cynicism and disillusionment from Ross, but he insistently details improvements in the political landscape of the Middle East others may not see and the progress that Israelis and Palestinians have made toward peace.

Even taking into account the long impasse in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Ross sees an “opening,” a possibility for political progress, in the planned unilateral moves by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to pull out of the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank; those moves, however, are likely to come at a high cost for the Palestinians with rival factions already battling for control.

“Peace may not be just around the corner, but it is not beyond our grasp to produce a way station to it,” Ross insists, arguing that limited agreements, even the coordination of unilateral moves, on how and when Israel withdraws can “re-create an environment that makes peace possible again.”

Beilin and Ross have written diplomatic memoirs, each wanting in part to frame events with his own interpretation. But Beilin and Ross want them also to be important books for the peace process. In celebrating what worked -- and some initiatives did succeed -- and dissecting what failed, Beilin and Ross seek to encourage renewed efforts. Both books are published at a time, however, when prospects are particularly grim for any negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Beilin, one of the most creative minds in Israel’s search for peace and security, writes with hope in “The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004” that yet another dramatic breakthrough -- like Oslo in 1993, like Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in 1977 -- will develop and draw upon the 2003 Geneva agreement that he helped foster with Yasser Abed-Rabbo, a key Palestinian negotiator, who has proven himself as courageous as Beilin.

That peace plan, drafted privately by leading Israeli and Palestinian political and military figures, resolved through very difficult compromises the toughest issues -- borders and security arrangements for Israel and the new Palestinian state, resettlement of Palestinians still living as refugees, the incorporation into Israel of the close-in Jewish settlements on the West Bank and the repatriation of settlers from other areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and, finally, a way for Israel and Palestine to share Jerusalem as a capital with a complex system of sovereignty over religious sites.

“Some foresee for Israel another hundred years of living by the sword, believing that those with faith in peace are naive and do not understand the region in which they live,” Beilin writes. But this would be an always-at-war state with its prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories and, in reality, would end the Zionist dream on which Israel was founded, Beilin asserts; with only violence ahead, generation to generation, Israel would become the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live and only those unable to leave would remain.

Sharon quickly rejected the draft Geneva agreement as suicidal for Israel and has proceeded with his own plan for Israel’s separation from the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of the PLO, had previously refused to accept the bold, “last chance” peace plan put forward by President Clinton and accepted with reservations by Barak in December 2000. The plan would have given the Palestinians 94% to 96% of the West Bank but given to Israel the communities where four-fifths of the Israeli settlers live; provided for a “non-militarized” Palestinian state with a strong security force and safeguards for Israeli security; suggested ways to share control of Jerusalem, including its holy places; and provided a formula for the return of Palestinian refugees to the new state of Palestine or to Israel if accepted or for their permanent resettlement somewhere else. Although rejected by Arafat and Sharon, the Clinton formulation may become the basis for negotiations in the future.

So, where do Beilin and Ross find their optimism? Ultimately in the conclusion, widely shared by Israelis and Palestinians alike, according to surveys of public opinion, that the two peoples are destined by history and geography to be neighbors and that the sooner they come to an accommodation the less blood will be shed.

“Neither can wish the other away,” Ross writes. “Neither can forge an outcome in which the other does not exist. Moreover, neither can impose an outcome on the other. The Israelis with all their military power cannot extinguish Palestinian aspirations. The Palestinians with all their anger and use of terror will not succeed in forcing the Israelis to submit through violence.”

And so what blocks a settlement? Political cowardice -- largely that of Arafat. As far as Beilin and Ross have come to understand the Palestinian leader, his motives and his moods, and able as they are in explaining Palestinian politics with some sympathy, a reader can conclude only that there would be peace today but for Arafat. Had Arafat accepted the Clinton plan, as Barak did albeit with some reservations, Palestine would be a member of the United Nations now and the plight of the Palestinians not the subject of yet another U.N. conference.

At one critical juncture after another, Arafat is the spoiler, portrayed in both books as irascible, inconsistent and insincere. Other Palestinian leaders tell Beilin and Ross that there can be no progress without Arafat, but currently there is no progress with him. There are others who, in Ross’ measured assessments, have also failed crucial tests of leadership, notably Sharon, and thus added to the current crisis; there are also those, arguably President Bush, who have stood by when they might have intervened.

As a journalist who covered Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem and later the Oslo negotiations, I appreciate the role of a leader who has the vision, the courage to act on that vision and the readiness to seize the right moment. Sadat, Rabin and Peres were such leaders; Arafat is not. These two accounts reinforce the reluctant conclusion that Israelis and Palestinians must wait again for leaders of vision and courage before there will be peace.

For Ross, the cost in blood of such waiting is too great. There is a consequent moral responsibility to seek a way forward, however hard the circumstances. “The situation is hopeless only if we make it so,” Ross tells us. He is an advocate of small steps that keep the Israelis and Palestinians in dialogue, reduce violence and build confidence between them. He also strongly believes in a U.S. role as a mediator, and he excoriates the present Bush administration for all but ending U.S. mediation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to focus on Iraq, even though Bush later committed the United States to support Palestinian statehood. “Ousting Saddam Hussein was never going to yield peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” Ross observes tartly.

“The fallacy here was thinking that if the conflict could not be ended, there was nothing to be done,” Ross says in assessing U.S. responsibility for the escalating hostilities over the last 3 1/2 years. “But there was something to be done. It was essential to act to prevent the situation from deteriorating, from becoming a war, which would make it far more difficult to pursue peace at a later juncture.”

Yet Ross’ approach has strong critics, and the U.S. role in Middle East negotiations should be reexamined, for it is not axiomatic that there can be progress only through Washington’s mediation.

Many in the Arab world, particularly Palestinians, felt that Ross’ small steps, his “creative diplomacy,” complicated and prolonged negotiations; indeed, the Oslo talks were undertaken because both Palestinians and Israelis felt the need to escape U.S. mediation, even Ross himself, and to seek a breakthrough on their own. By his own description of the various U.S. initiatives over his 12 years as the Mideast envoy, Ross was clearly the master of the diplomatic aide-memoire, of legalisms and of squinting modifiers from which each side could derive comfort.

Beilin is gentler in his criticism of Ross, simply noting what he judges to be the failures of American diplomacy in negotiations with the Palestinians, in dealings with Israel, in negotiations with Syria.

For his part, Ross pronounces the Oslo agreement a failure, saying that both Israel and the Palestinians fell far short of the fundamental “transformation” required in relations between them and in their own politics and institutions. Again, Ross blames Arafat primarily and faults the Palestinian’s lack of leadership. Ross is right, but the sharpness of his condemnation of Oslo reflects the long-standing belief in Washington that Israel and the Arabs cannot make progress without the United States. To many in the region, this is the arrogance of a superpower that sees itself as indispensable.

To be sure, Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem required President Carter’s subsequent mediation at Camp David before there was a treaty between Egypt and Israel, and Oslo needed a great deal of fleshing out, much of which was done with U.S. mediation. Beilin, the advocate of direct negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, pays great tribute to Clinton, whose plan he describes as the starting point for any future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

But Beilin makes the point strongly in “The Path to Geneva,” as he did in his earlier account of the Oslo negotiations, that the core of any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians must be mutual acceptance and that this will come through the agony of compromises on the most difficult issues between them. For that, there must be leaders in Israel and Palestine with vision and courage.

Richard Ben Cramer has written an entirely different kind of book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though it too comes to the conclusion that without new leadership on both sides there will be no progress toward peace. “How Israel Lost” is intended to demystify the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the proverbial Joe Six-Pack, the average American struggling to understand “just what’s the problem over there?”

A journalist who covered the Middle East for the Philadelphia Inquirer for seven years in the 1970s and ‘80s, Cramer writes as though he were trying to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to his neighbors on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The approach and style are unexpected and, at least initially, discordant; it is as if Hunter S. Thompson were discovering the Middle East. And there is a carelessness with facts and with history in Cramer’s “gonzo” journalism.

Still, as Cramer tries to tell the story in terms of the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, he asks the basic American questions: “Why do we care about Israel?” “Why don’t the Palestinians have a state?” “What is a Jewish state?” “Why is there no peace?” The book’s limited value is in posing, rather than answering, those questions. Cramer substitutes anecdotes and impressions for analysis. Example: “Any Jew who’s not an Israeli, and not on psychotropic drugs, could solve this Peace-for-Israel thing in about 10 minutes of focused thought.” How? Just pull out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Cramer ignores the real security concerns of Israel and mocks the years of negotiations to achieve peace. Cramer’s greatest lament, however, is that Israel today is not the “nice Jewish state” he found in 1977; indeed, the long occupation of the Palestinian territories has damaged every aspect of Israeli society, but Israel has hardly lost its soul, as Cramer suggests.

He is equally simplistic in his portrayal of the Palestinians. Ignoring the deep roots of Palestinian nationalism, he reduces the desire for a state of their own to an unrequited injury to their “family honor.”

For all this, Cramer does not share the historical optimism of Beilin and Ross that, at some point, Israelis and Palestinians will come to terms. For Cramer, Israel, largely because of the occupation, has already lost its chance to live at peace with its neighbors: “What Israel lost ... was precisely the capacity to act in the national interest,” he says. “The interest of the nation was replaced by tribal interests -- and, in a lot of cases I see, now by purely individual interest.”

Appraising the Geneva agreement that Beilin helped formulate with Abed-Rabbo on the Palestinian side, Cramer calls the proposals “beautiful -- brave and just -- a credit to their drafters,” but then he notes that those involved in the process had decided that “they had a better chance to stop the killing without their governments than with them.” There is always a chance, Cramer acknowledges with what seems to be a feigned wistfulness, that Israeli society will again coalesce and develop a “national consensus,” that a new Yitzhak Rabin will emerge, that the efforts of people like Beilin and Abed-Rabbo will catch a popular, pro-peace wave. As Cramer puts it, “To borrow an old movie line (as the children keep saying in ‘Angels in the Outfield’) ... ‘It could happen!’ ”

So, what could happen? What would bring this conflict to a close? Will there ever be peace? Need it take a century? One could respond that when the situation is “mature” (a favorite word of policy analysts), when the sides are tired of fighting, when both peoples realize that they are destined to live side by side and when there are courageous new leaders, then a solution will emerge.

For Beilin and Ross, however, that is morally insufficient; indeed, it is indefensible. For those with responsibility -- be they Israelis or Palestinians or their friends in the Arab world, Europe and the U.S. -- waiting 50 or 100 years is not acceptable, especially when for a time in the 1990s a resolution, and the peace it would bring, was very possible. And so Beilin seeks another big breakthrough, and Ross argues that no change or shift, even if negative at first glance, should remain unexplored as an opportunity.

But those who hold power -- most notably, Arafat and Sharon -- seem to be maneuverers, men who seek immediate advantage with little regard for the consequences, who act not out of vision but from what they perceive as necessity, who perhaps look to tomorrow but not to horizons beyond.

Despite this, peace will come to the Middle East as it has to all of history’s bitterest conflicts. The only question is how many of the 15 million Israelis and Palestinians will die before it does. For them, peace is the most desperate of hopes. *