Fall 2000
American Purpose
Issue 1, Volume 14

Publication Date: September 1, 2000
Posted: Wednesday, October 10, 2003

This issue includes 'The Mideast "Peace Process" and U.S. Interests'; 'An Era of Good Feeling'; 'Netanyahu, Arafat, and the Peace Process '; 'Civil Society on the West Bank'; 'Back to Partition?'; 'What Are the U.S. Interests?'; 'Giving Lebanon and Turkey Their Due'; 'The Main Threat: Iraq and Iran'; and 'Needed: Enhanced Resolve'.


In This Issue :

The Mideast "Peace Process" and U.S. Interests
The usual accounts of American policy toward the Arab/Israeli conflict in the 1990s stress discontinuities, at least on two sides of the triangle: in Washington and in Jerusalem. In Israel, the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir gave way to a Labor government dedicated to peace. Under Yitzhak Rabin and, after he was assassinated, Shimon Peres, Israel sought an accommodation with the Palestinians. In the United States, unfriendliness toward Israel under the Bush/Baker administration gave way to the warm friendship of the Clinton administration, which even many American lews apparently regard as "the best friend Israel ever had in Washington." Unfortunately, the Clinton efforts were frustrated when, from 1996 to 1999, a Likud government came back to power and under Benjamin Netanyahu Israel's policies reverted to the obstructionism of Shamir. So goes the most popular account. [More]

An Era of Good Feeling
In broad outline, the 1990s saw Israel expanding its peace treaty with Egypt to include its immediate neighbors, the Jordanians and the Palestinians, and, under a new government in 1999, beginning to focus on arrangements with Syria and Lebanon. What made these changes possible was the outcome of the Cold War and of the Gulf War rather than any "peace process." The end of the Cold War and the Soviet collapse ended Soviet support for client states like Syria, for the PLO, and for Arab radicalism in general. Immediately after the demise of the Soviet Union came the U.S. victory in the Gulf, which vastly increased American prestige in the region. For the PLO leadership, the lessons became clear: new relations with the United States and a new policy toward its ally, Israel, were necessary, for neither country was likely to disappear from the region.  [More]

Netanyahu, Arafat, and the Peace Process
The honeymoon lasted from late 1993 to mid-1996, when the Netanyahu government was elected. Both U.S. and Palestinian officials blame Netanyahu for the end of the era of good feeling. Their argument is simple: the new prime minister was not committed to the peace process, and he obstructed implementation of the Oslo Accords. Untrusting and untrustworthy, he dragged his feet, needlessly and dangerously slowing the process and increasing Palestinian frustration. All would have gone well without Netanyahu-and will do so now that he is gone and Labor is back in power.  [More]

Civil Society on the West Bank
During the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (from 1967 to 1994), NGOs and civil society had flowered; by 1995, it was estimated that there were 700 NGOs there. But the Palestinian Authority "aborted and reversed the process of social democratization," and the NGOs were systematically crushed while their Western financial support disappeared.4 Similarly, while there were compliments about the new and independent Palestinian Legislative Council, there was no support for that body when Arafat ignored and humiliated it. In 1997, for example, the Legislative Council issued a report complaining of corruption by Arafat's ministers and demanding that two resign. Arafat's response was to replace the more independent actors in his cabinet while pointedly keeping those whom the Legislative Council had found stealing money.  [More]

Back to Partition?
More serious is the PA's flirting with reliance on U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, the partition resolution of 1947, as a basis for a peace settlement in place of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which were the basis for Camp David and Oslo. Resolutions 242 and 338 assumed that whatever the fate of the lands Israel conquered in the 1967 war, the territory it held prior to that is beyond challenge. But Resolution 181 established Jerusalem as a "corpus separatum" to be administered by the U.N. and thus challenged Israeli sovereignty even in West Jerusalem. By reverting to the proposed partition borders of 1947, the PA suggests that those that existed in 1967 were illegitimate.  [More]

What Are the U.S. Interests?
A sound American policy must avoid such optimism and with it pressures on Israel based on the notion that more Israeli "flexibility" would lead to permanent peace. We should abandon both the assumption that Palestine is incapable of democratic self-rule and the willingness to wink at repression or corruption in the Palestinian Authority. Many of the issues Israelis will see as critical when "final status" talks are reached are, in fact, critical to U.S. policy in the region; they require the United States to move from honest broker to defender of its interests and allies. Limitations on Palestinian weaponry, prohibition of a Palestinian air force, and refusal to permit Palestinian military alliances with other states, to take three examples, should be American as much as they are Israeli security issues. The policy of playing down and thus condoning massive Palestinian violations must be abandoned before Israelis come to think that the peace process is stacked against them and threatens their national security—or, worse yet, before it culminates in the creation of a sovereign, repressive, and aggressive Palestine aligned with the region's radical states.  [More]

Giving Lebanon and Turkey Their Due
Israel's policy toward Lebanon remains obscure: is it to minimize the Syrian presence, or bind the Syrians to controlling Hizbollah guerrillas there? Acquiescence in continuing Syrian domination would be a foolish error, giving hostages to fate by leaving in Syria's hands the means to inflame the Israel/Lebanon border at will and at the same time dooming Lebanon to years more of oppression, thievery, and strife. Given the weakness of the Syrian military, which owing to Syria's financial problems has been little modernized in a decade, Lebanon remains Syria's only real means of pressuring Israel. It should therefore be Israeli and U.S. policy to take those means out of Syrian hands. Any settlement with Syria that leaves the status quo in Lebanon is doing too little for Israel's security, while a comprehensive agreement with Syria that includes respect for Lebanese self-rule would truly secure the last of Israel's insecure borders.  [More]

The Main Threat: Iraq and Iran
If Israel's negotiations with the PA and Syria are the focus of our attention today, in the long run the main threat to U.S. interests in the region comes from the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems by Iraq and Iran. To this threat there are two remedies: regime change in Iraq, and the building of missile defenses. As to the former, Saddam Hussein's fall would favorably affect the entire Middle East political and military situation. Unfortunately, under the Clinton administration Iraq's isolation has been diminishing, and our containment of Iraq is failing. There is now no effective inspection regime at all in place. It is therefore fair to assume that Iraq is once again replenishing its stocks of chemical weapons and missiles and is continuing with its nuclear program. The United States rather than Iraq appears to be growing diplomatically isolated, while Saddam seems to be growing bolder. The American errors that contributed to these developments include our apparent undercutting of the UNSCOM inspection teams when they existed.  [More]

Needed: Enhanced Resolve
As the advances in the "peace process" since the Cold War and Gulf War have demonstrated, progress on individual issues depends less on the brilliance of our negotiators than on the overall balance of forces in the region. None of the players—not even Qadafi, it seems—is irrational, and all are constantly measuring America's ability and will to promote its policies and interests. Both ability and will need significant enhancement in the coming years. A combination of building missile defense systems and helping along the Israeli/Turkish defense alliance would enhance our ability, and an end to Saddam's regime in Iraq would obviously remove a key enemy. But the precursor to all these steps is greater resolve. To overlook and therefore acquiesce in Palestinian violations of agreements already signed, to wait humbly for audiences with Bashar Assad as we did for meetings with his father, to permit Saddam to escape the restraints under which he was living—such failures to act would reflect either an unwillingness to use American power fully or a dangerous and self-fulfilling assessment of the inadequacy of the power we retain.  [More]

Endnotes
Spring 2000
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