- I read something recently about America's Middle East
initiative, the "road map," offering Bush the chance for greatness.
Verbal excess like that demands a realistic discussion of the prospects.
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- When Britain achieved a breakthrough for peace in Northern
Ireland, it did not do so by telling the IRA that its representatives were
terrorists, unacceptable to negotiate. It had not surrounded the houses
of IRA leaders with tanks, blasting away until ruins remained. It did not
forbid IRA leaders from attending church or travelling. Yet this is the
way - along with a daily toll of reprisal killings and assassinations -
Mr. Sharon prepares for peace.
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- For many reasons, I can only be pessimistic about the
"road map." Sharon's immediate instinct was to reject and belittle
it. Under pressure from Washington to reverse himself, he only did so with
a list of qualifiers long enough to make it a different document than the
one Palestinians accepted.
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- The fact that Mr. Sharon used, just once, the honest
word occupation, normally forbidden in the Cloud-cuckoo-land of Israeli
politics, and offered to trash a couple of clumps of abandoned, beaten-up
trailers where the most-crazed settlers play cowboys-and-Indians with assault
rifles do seem less than signs of great events to come.
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- Consider some of the constraints around this initiative.
First, it is sponsored by a President who has just launched the United
States into two meaningless, destructive wars. American forces, resources,
and diplomacy now face huge, complex, and long-term obligations in Afghanistan
and Iraq that did not exist a short time ago. Bush has, at the same time,
threatened Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and, at least in the case of North
Korea, a serious conflict may well be coming.
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- Second, this President's policies have not ended terrorism,
nor do I believe they ever can, which means American concerns and resources
will be stretched even further. The President's policies since 9/11 have
been exactly those followed by Israel for fifty years, striking out against
someone, almost anyone, wearing the right kind of headdress. Has fifty
years of that solved Israel's problems? If anything, it has only created
new and desperate enemies, like the hopeless young people willing to blow
themselves up to strike a blow.
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- Third, the plan is in the hands of Secretary of State
Colin Powell, who has proved ineffective at almost everything undertaken,
a judgement from one who once admired him. More importantly, Powell's stature
among Bush's intimates is so low that you suspect they have secretly uncovered
he is a distant relative of Bill Clinton, the political anti-Christ of
neocon America.
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- Bush appointed Powell to reassure the world that America
had not fallen to a coup of drawling closet-fascists, but the appointment
has not proved especially helpful. The insane, arrogant intensity of Bush's
inner cabinet - including Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Ashcroft - does mean that
any civilized foreigner with something important to say to the United States
might rather face Powell, but he or she will be addressing an exalted messenger
with little influence.
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- Powell works hard trying to overcome the zealots' distrust,
as with his recent rants and threats about everything from French ingratitude
and delusions of yet finding strategic weapons in Iraq to warning Mr. Arafat
about blocking the "road map." He's even gone back in time to
the 1960s by attacking the neocons' second-most hated figure after Bill
Clinton, Fidel Castro. All this only has him clumsily climbing trees, sawing
off unwanted limbs that block the Oval Office view, while the viciously
dysfunctional family that hired him gazes through the windows gleefully
awaiting his plunge to earth.
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- But perhaps the most important reason for bleakness over
the "road map" is the man who is not at the discussions.
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- Yasser Arafat is now treated as the source of all evil
in the Middle East. He is for Sharon the Middle East's equivalent of what
Bill Clinton is for America's neocons, although in Israel the nasty game
is played with real blood, and likely only Arafat's world-stature and connections
have saved him from Sharon's assassins.
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- Arafat doesn't speak English well, making it easy to
give him a bad press in America, and he is indeed given a bad press. Few
Americans even know that Arafat has a better analytical brain than their
current President. He is a civil engineer and comes from a family that
includes a remarkable brother who is a pediatrician and the founder of
many medical institutions - not exactly the kind of hot-tempered, inarticulate
tribal chief he is so often portrayed in America.
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- As with almost anyone raised to authority in his part
of the world, his experience with democracy is limited to being on the
receiving end of what nations boasting of democratic values - America,
Britain and Israel - dish out abroad but wouldn't dream of doing at home.
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- Since democracy naturally flows from a healthy, growing
society, it should come as no surprise that Arafat's democratic values
are less than perfect. One form or another of authoritarianism is the way
all the world's people have been governed before experiencing the revolution
of economic growth. It is the way most of the world's people are governed
still. Does that preclude us from having negotiations, treaties, and agreements
with the governments of most of the world's people?
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- I do not think there is the slightest question that Arafat
sincerely wants peace, although the peace he wants includes the long-term
interests of all parties with the injustices and grievances attending the
birth of modern Israel having been reasonably settled. This runs up against
the Sharon concept of peace which means absolute, unconditional security
for Israel while giving little more than words to those who insist on running
around in keffiahs and kaftans. One suspects Sharon's idea of a concession
is to have his tanks roll back from the center to the edge of a village
recently flattened.
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- Of course, all of human history and the especially the
discoveries of modern physics demonstrate that there are no absolute certainties
in this world. Einstein, troubled about quantum mechanics, said God didn't
play with dice, but we now know he was wrong about that. Israel's insistence
on impossible absolutes always prevents genuine progress - that is, the
kind of practical progress that characterizes normal human relationships
and decent relations among nations.
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- Short of driving the Palestinians, like three-and-a-half
million head of cattle, across the Jordan river - an idea which finds considerable
support in Israel and in America's loony Bible-belt - Sharon's vision of
peace appears to consign Palestinians perpetually to walled ghettos, dotted
with settlements of armed, hostile fanatics and crisscrossed with no-go
roads. That is a fairly accurate summary of Barak's Camp David proposal
for a Palestinian state, and nothing since has happened to increase Israel's
inclination to be large or statesmanlike - rather, quite the opposite.
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- Arafat correctly rejected Barak's degrading concept of
a nation, feeling humiliated after so many years of effort and so many
compromises before and after the Oslo Accords. Accepting such an offer
would only have seen Palestinians assassinate him and likely tipped them
into civil war, hardly contributions to Israeli security. Indeed, once
the insanity of civil war takes hold anywhere, normal restraints and humanity
are pitched aside in a frenzy of killing and vengeance.
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- The second Intifadah can be understood both as a natural
human reaction to decades of oppression and as an escape-valve for immense
internal pressures. Israel blindly insists on seeing only terrorism.
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- American commentators like Thomas Friedman embroider
the theme of Palestinian unreasonableness by asking why Palestinians have
not followed the teachings of Gandhi and Dr. King to achieve their goals.
I do not know whether this is asked from naivete or utter cynicism, but
the answer is simple: the structures of these abusive situations are entirely
different.
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- Israel, on short notice, can close Palestine completely
down and has done so briefly many times. Israel simply imports guest workers
or new migrants for the many daily tasks done by Palestinians. Neither
Imperial India nor Bull Connor's South could do this. Also, the afflicted
people of Gandhi and King lived in many locations and were actually the
large majority in many or most places. Further, Palestinians have no citizenship
and no rights and no standing before Israeli courts. Even citizens of Israel
have no defined rights. A nation defined by ethnic/religious identity makes
a meaningful bill or charter of rights something of a logical puzzle, a
puzzle Israel has not solved in over fifty years.
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- The possibility of bloody civil war among the Palestinians,
brought on by the steps of the "road map" itself is not to be
treated lightly, because the steps of every American initiative always
demand concessions disproportionately from the weak side. Palestinian Prime
Minister Mahmoud Abbas has only restated the obvious in refusing a harsh
crack-down on militants for fear of civil war, something Arafat has understood
for decades and that has always informed his resistance to Israel's harsh,
absolute demands.
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- Arafat has spent his adult life trying to get a reasonable
settlement for the Palestinians. He has made mistakes, plenty of them,
but the truth is that none of them proved as bloody and destructive as,
for instance, Mr. Sharon's brutal invasion of Lebanon. Yet, Mr. Sharon's
career of blunders and bloodshed seems not to have disqualified him as
spokesman for his people. Indeed, he does more than this, he now determines
who is a fitting representative for the Palestinians.
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- Excluding Arafat may look attractive from the limited
vantage points of Israel's volatile politics and Bush's born-again crowd,
but to an independent observer, it looks hopeless.
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- Israelis may be the victims of their own propaganda about
Arafat the terrorist, believing that his replacement in talks can genuinely
change the dynamics of the situation. How easily Israelis forget that several
of their prime ministers had extensive service as terrorists on their resumes.
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- The achievement of peace requires genuine risks and brutally
hard work from all parties, but Israel demonstrates no willingness to assume
the kind of risks that ended Apartheid in South Africa and has come close
to ending the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland, and Bush is someone
who has never worked hard at anything in his life. The existing human and
political mess in the Middle East is frozen in place by the immense protection
and subsidies of the United States, and so we come full circle to the nature
of the people in the present American government and the terrible new obligations
they have thoughtlessly assumed. Then we have Bush's intimate relationship
with America's delusional Religious Right whose leaders daily rant against
a Palestinian state and cheerfully anticipate the promise of Armageddon
from the jumbled nightmares of the Book of Revelations.
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- Hopes for greatness? I think not.
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