From Challenge # 63
September - October 2000

EDITORIAL

Out of their Depth

Barak
Barak at Camp David was a political exile. His cabinet ministers had quit left and right: He let the leftist Meretz go in order to keep the ultraorthodox Shas, but once Shas got wind of his peace agenda, it dropped him - as had two other right-wing parties, the Mafdal and Israel b'Aliyah. Out of the 120-member Knesset, he could count on only forty. Within Barak's party (Labor), senior figures such as Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin and Haim Ramon oppose his approach of "agreement or bust!" They lean toward a new intermediate arrangement that will postpone the Day of the Lord and keep the region quiet. Barak disagrees. He refuses to give up another inch of land until he gets what he wants: the dropping of all Palestinian claims, together with a declaration that the conflict is over. Barak is not one for intermediate solutions. He likes to feel decisive. He prefers broad, sweeping gestures even at high political cost. A year ago, for example, he thumbed his nose at Syria, saying he would withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon with or without an agreement; when the Syrian conditions seemed hard, he went it alone. The hope had been that Hafez al-Assad would come to terms, thus giving Yasser Arafat a precedent for making concessions. But Assad died suddenly. Barak had to shift to the Palestinian track, where Arafat remained with little choice but to imitate the adamant Syrian lion. Thus Barak's Lebanese gamble, without an agreement, resulted in the hardening of the Palestinian position.

The Israeli PM has two mutually exclusive options, which he plays off against each other. If he manages to get a peace accord, he believes, he can go to the electorate and win a strong parliamentary majority. If such an accord is out of reach, however, he will seek to make his mark on the domestic front - and that will require a national-unity government with the right-wing Likud. With this second option in mind, Barak has recently aired what he calls a "secular revolution", designed to free Israel from certain archaic norms imposed by the religious parties. This is a way of pressuring the Arabs, as if to say, "Unless you bend, I'll turn my back on the peace process and tend my garden at home." It is a clumsy trapeze act over the abyss. He is able to carry it off, for the moment, because of two tattered and temporary safety nets: The Knesset is taking its summer break, and several right-wing MK's are anxious about possibly losing their seats in new elections. These MK's prefer to wait and see: if there's no agreement with Arafat, then Barak will likely invite them to join his government.

The Israeli PM conducts himself as though he knows something no one else does. On the merely mortal level, however, his sheer braggadocio astonishes. As a leader sans government, sans Knesset - sans any guarantee that the paper he signs will become reality - what makes him think that the Palestinian or the Arab side will go out on a limb for him? 

Arafat
The conditions under which Arafat went to Camp David were even harder than those that accompanied Barak. At Oslo Israel gave him a regime and some patches of land. He cannot hope to build a state or any semblance thereof without international recognition and support, but these will not be forthcoming except in the context of an agreement. On the other hand, there will be no agreement unless he is ready to surrender on all the issues Oslo postponed: final borders, Israeli settlements, Jerusalem and the refugees. Oslo postponed these matters for the simple reason that Israel has no intention of yielding on any of them. Yet now there can be no more postponing: the time has come for Arafat to pay up. Yet he hesitates. Accusing fingers are leveled at him: those of four million refugees whose right of return he compromised by recognizing Israel prematurely; those of the farmers locked in endless land disputes with armed Jewish settlers; those of hapless workers who have to run the blockades.

It suited Arafat at Camp David to shift the focus of the conflict to Jerusalem, for here he does not bear the total responsibility - he shares it with the entire Muslim world. In this way, he thought, he could elude American pressure on him to make a decision that would recognize Israeli sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem. Since Camp David, however, Arafat has suffered two diplomatic failures: First, Europe has refused to support him if he declares Palestinian statehood without first reaching an agreement. Second, the Arab world has continued to waver. On the one hand, Arab leaders pronounced as unthinkable the idea of making concessions on Jerusalem - not to mention al-Aksa! On the other, they said it would be up to Arafat to decide. At the Jerusalem Council, convened by the PA chief in Morocco on August 28, sixteen Arab and Muslim states came out with a vague, non-committal statement.

Arafat has remained alone with the mess he made by going alone to Oslo. The Arab regimes, unwilling to bail him out, mark time. Why should they appear to be recalcitrant hard-liners, drawing Washington's ire? On the other hand, why should they appear to their peoples as agents of Israel? Better to remember Sadat and keep a low profile, awaiting the results of the US elections. In the West Bank and Gaza, meanwhile, disgust with the corrupt PA continues to mount. To one achievement alone can Arafat point: security cooperation with Israel.

Clinton
Despite his desire to enter history as a peacemaker rather than a philanderer, the prestige of this lame duck has fallen to zero in the Middle East. This is due less to the immorality of his once-private life than to that of his attacks on Iraq. He added insult to injury, shortly after Camp David, by giving a lengthy interview on Israeli TV, in which he clearly showed his preference for Israel. It is clear to the Arab world that this man can be no fair mediator.

Can these three pseudo-leaders, hemmed in and without support, manage nonetheless to settle the century-old conflict? Of course not. At most they may finesse a flash in the pan. It will not be enough, by any reckoning of possibilities, to satisfy the Palestinian people.