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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible -- but only if the president is willing to confront Ariel Sharon. If history is a guide, he won't.
Feb 9, 2005 | As Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced an end to four years of bitter fighting, even the most hardened observer could be forgiven for daring to hope that this time, it really might work.
Two new developments have broken the bloody Israeli-Palestinian stalemate and inspired optimism that a lasting peace could be at hand: Sharon's so-called disengagement plan, in which Israel plans to withdraw from all of the Gaza Strip and a few northern West Bank settlements, and the death of Yasser Arafat. But these developments are Janus-faced: They give just as much reason for doubt as hope. Unless the Bush administration is prepared to make a complete about-face in the almost totally pro-Israel policy of its first four years and aggressively push for a comprehensive peace deal in which final-status issues are dealt with from the beginning, this optimistic day will end up in the trash can with all the other summits and peace plans and meetings that promised an end to the world's most dangerous conflict.
With the unreliable Arafat gone, the Palestinians exhausted, the Israelis apparently prepared to trade land for peace, and the Bush administration in desperate need of a tangible achievement in the Middle East, this moment presents a rare opportunity for peace. Unfortunately, nothing in Bush's first term inspires confidence that he or his administration has the vision, wisdom or courage to seize it.
Time and again, Middle East peace plans have come to grief because they got bogged down in "transitional periods," "interim steps" and "confidence-building measures" and failed to deal forthrightly with the real issues. The disengagement plan and the death of Arafat are momentous events, but they have not changed those issues -- or the positions of the two sides.
Sharon is willing to part with Gaza, but he has no intention of pulling out of any but a small part of the West Bank. (Yes, it is always possible that Sharon will radically change his stripes and accept a viable, contiguous Palestinian state more or less on the 1967 borders with a capital in East Jerusalem and some symbolic provision for a right of return. But it is about as likely as Abu Mazen becoming a Zionist.) He is framing the cease-fire almost exclusively in terms of Israel's security, ignoring the political dimension. Abbas (Abu Mazen) has persuaded the militant Palestinian groups to declare a cease-fire, but his political demands are identical to Arafat's, and unless Israel takes real steps to meet those demands, the cease-fire will not hold. The present peace is therefore extremely delicate: It requires a delicate mutual calibration and coordination of concessions and demands, with the United States monitoring both sides, not allowing outbreaks of violence to derail it and, above all, keeping its eye constantly on the endgame.
That endgame is no secret: In one form or another, it has been at the heart of the Camp David plan, the Taba talks and last year's back-channel Geneva Accords. A contiguous Palestinian state on almost all the West Bank, with minor territorial swaps to allow some of the large Jewish settlements to be incorporated into Israel; a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, with provision for Jewish access to the holy sites; and some face-saving compromise on the Palestinian refugees that does not alter the demographic nature of the Jewish state. This plan, with an international military presence to prevent terror attacks and massive aid to help the Palestinian economy and resettle the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who will not be allowed to return to their former homes in what is now Israel, will end the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. And everybody knows it.
So why hasn't it happened?
Because only the United States can make it happen -- and because George W. Bush has taken Ariel Sharon's side to a degree that has shocked the world and surprised even Americans used to their country's pro-Israel default button.
In retrospect, it's easier to understand how it happened. Even before 9/11, Bush was eager to please his fervently pro-Israel evangelical Christian base and siphon off Jewish votes from the Democrats. Himself a devout born-again Christian, he had religious and emotional reasons to favor Israel. He wanted to take a different path from the despised Bill Clinton, who had gambled and lost by trying to broker a last-minute peace deal. He was aware that his father lost the U.S. election after slapping Yitzhak Shamir over loan guarantees. He was under no pressure from Congress, which rubber-stamps pro-Israeli legislation. He was surrounded by hard-line Likudnik neocons like Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as nationalist, pro-Israel hawks like Dick Cheney (who once said that Arafat should be hanged) and Donald Rumsfeld (who departed from official U.S. policy by referring to the "so-called occupied territories").
Then 9/11 happened, and Bush really got religion. If he had ever considered, even briefly, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be a classic case of asymmetrical warfare, with terrorism being the weapon of the weak; that the Israeli occupation and the settlements, not just Palestinian fanaticism and intransigence, might have played a role in the continued violence; that this conflict was at the heart of the confrontation between Islam and America -- those thoughts flew right out of his mind. Politics, history, grievance, context -- those murky matters, which make it impossible to sort out absolute God-given right from absolute evil, were never his strong suit anyway. With the mighty prophetic certainty of a Lear, he smote and divided the world into two categories: terrorists and freedom fighters. The Palestinian militants now became indistinguishable from al-Qaida. Bush and Sharon were embarked on the same crusade -- fighting evil. And that crusade against evil (justified by a bogus self-defense argument) ultimately led Bush to invade Iraq -- with its neocon backers waving the banner "The road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad."
This history hardly affords much reason to believe that Bush will be prepared to do what is necessary to broker a lasting peace: force Sharon to give up the West Bank -- and give up his lifelong dream of smashing the Palestinians' political aspirations. The odds remain dauntingly long, but there are a few reasons to believe that Bush could surprise everyone.
