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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The U.S. still has a chance to broker a lasting peace in the Middle East. But to do so, it must go beyond merely denouncing terrorism and push through a political solution.
Mar 30, 2002 | The Middle East just inched one step closer to a firestorm that could end up burning the United States, and the Bush administration did nothing to stop it.
On Friday, Israel did what it had signaled it would do after Palestinian suicide bombers killed 30 Israeli civilians in three days. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat the "enemy," saying he had "established a coalition of terror against Israel," and Israeli tanks invaded Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital. As the United States appeared to signal its approval -- with the administration's supposed "dove," Secretary of State Colin Powell, blaming Arafat and saying that Israel had the right to defend itself from terrorism -- the Israeli army smashed into Arafat's compound, killing five Palestinians and taking 70 prisoner. Early Saturday morning, the U.S. backed a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution urging Israel to withdraw from Ramallah, but still no senior administration official had demanded that Sharon stop the escalation.
Whether or not Israel will physically expel Arafat from the occupied territories -- it says it has no plans to kill him -- is unclear. But regardless of Arafat's fate, Israel will almost certainly undertake a significant escalation of its recent major incursion into Palestinian-controlled territories, in which Israeli forces carried out search-and-destroy missions aimed at killing or capturing Palestinian militants and their weapons.
The outcome of this operation is not difficult to foresee: The gruesome ritual of violence has become numbingly predictable. Hundreds of Palestinians, including many noncombatants, will be killed or wounded, as will a lesser number of Israeli troops. Many potential terrorists will be killed or captured, but many more will escape, and even more than that number will be radicalized. At some point, maybe in days, maybe in weeks or months, there will be another massive terrorist attack against Israel. The Israeli public will demand even harsher countermeasures. With Arafat either out of the territories or rendered completely isolated and impotent, the Israeli army will unleash its force once again on the Palestinians. There will be more terror attacks, and still more severe Israeli responses. Meanwhile, the Saudi peace plan that could offer a way out of the horror will sit on the shelf, waiting for that nonexistent day when terrorism will stop.
This is simply the reality, and all the American denunciations of terrorism in the world and all the Israeli missiles launched ever closer to Arafat's feet will not change it. Unless the United States accepts that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and abandons its reactive stance to boldly broker a peace deal based on the historic Saudi initiative offered at the Arab summit, more and more Israeli and Palestinian blood will flow.
The endgame of this scenario is all too clear to everyone except, apparently, the Bush administration. With Arafat out of the picture and the U.S., citing Israel's need to defend itself against terrorism, blocking any moves by the international community to intervene, Sharon will attempt to batter the Palestinians into submission. If "the bulldozer" fails to stop the terror attacks, his unity coalition will inevitably fall and will likely be replaced by a government led by Binyamin Netanyahu -- an even more extreme nationalist and right-wing leader who rejects the idea of Palestinian statehood, refuses to give up any land and has made no secret of his desire to totally vanquish the Palestinians.
But as the terrorist attacks that have followed the Al-Aqsa intifada -- and the Sept. 11 attacks -- have made clear, no state can absolutely defend itself against people who are physically in a position to carry out an attack and who are willing to die. There are too many Palestinians in the occupied territories and Jerusalem, the borders are too long and there are too many ways to smuggle weapons in. Therefore, it seems likely that the only way Sharon or Netanyahu can succeed in permanently ending the Palestinian threat -- short of a political solution, which neither seems capable of grasping -- is through a double strategy: First crushing the Palestinians militarily in all-out war, which could well involve tens of thousands of casualties, including thousands of civilians, and the destruction of entire cities and refugee camps; then "transferring" the entire Palestinian population out of the occupied territories and into neighboring states like Jordan or Lebanon. "Transfer" is a polite euphemism for ethnic cleansing, but large numbers of Israelis now say they support it because they are convinced that the Palestinians want to ethnically cleanse them right out of Israel and off the face of the earth.
It is unlikely that the United States would allow Israel to undertake such extreme measures, even if the Jewish state wanted to (which is also unclear). Which means that the most likely outcome is more of the status quo, only worse: more Palestinian suicide bombers and ever-harsher Israeli reprisals.
In other words: Short of a "total solution" to the Palestinian problem that would be too morally repugnant for the U.S. to countenance or the Israelis to undertake, or a complete change in the Bush administration's Middle East policy, what lies ahead is an endless, uneven war, with Palestinians blowing up Israelis and Israelis responding by blowing up three times as many Palestinians.
Let us leave aside for a moment the moral issues and simply examine this outcome from the cold-blooded perspective of strategic American interests. Is this outcome something that would benefit the United States?
The answer is obviously no. Even from the perspective of the ascendant hawks in the administration, like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, a bloody, unresolved semi-war between Israel and the Palestinians is completely counterproductive, indeed dangerous. Not even the most fervent personal and ideological support for Israel and antipathy for the Palestinians -- feelings that run deep in key positions in the Bush administration, as the Israeli journalist Aluf Benn has reported in Salon -- can overcome the fact that an open wound in the Middle East threatens to infect the United States.
The administration's desire to invade Iraq has already been dealt a severe blow by the Arab leaders, who have made it clear that the Palestinian issue trumps Iraq. But even more damaging to American interests is the growing anti-American hatred throughout the entire Arab and Muslim world that would assuredly follow such a conflict. In their triumphalist daydreams, the likes of Wolfowitz may imagine a world in which Israel and the United States, fresh from demonstrating our mutual might with a military victory over Iraq, call the shots to a cabal of cowering Middle East despots who may whimper but respect the lash. But those are the hallucinations of zealots. The reality is that it is in the United States' interest to have good relations with the Arab and Muslim world, not nakedly dominate it directly or via our Israel proxy. Anyone who doesn't see that somehow missed Sept. 11.
So why is the U.S. clinging to its bankrupt policies? Why is it locked into a position in which moralistic condemnations of "terror" trump everything else -- history, context, strategy, even American self-interest?
