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Jewish World Review
July 8, 2003
/ 8 Tamuz, 5763
A ‘shot’ at peace
By
Daniel Pipes
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
In private conversations with Bush administration officials this past week, I was favorably impressed by their realism about the U.S.-sponsored "roadmap" plan to stop Palestinian-Israeli violence. But I worry nonetheless that things could go awry.
Those worries stem from the seven years (1993-2000) of the Oslo round of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, when well-intentioned Israeli initiatives to resolve the conflict only worsened it. I learned two main lessons about Palestinian-Israel negotiations:
- Unless Palestinians accept the existence of Israel, the agreements they sign are scraps of paper.
- Unless Palestinians are held to their promise of renouncing violence, agreements with them reward terrorism and therefore spur more violence.
My caution today concerns both points: Palestinian ambitions to destroy the Jewish state remain alive; and can the U.S. government enforce Palestinian compliance more effectively than did its Israeli counterpart?
Questioned again and again on these issues of Palestinian intentions and American monitoring, the senior officials I spoke with offered impressively hard-headed analyses.
- On Palestinian intentions to destroy Israel, they echo Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's recent statement, who said he worries about "terrorist organizations that have not given up the quest to destroy the state of Israel."
- On the need to enforce signed agreements, both officials insist that the roadmap diplomacy would screech to a halt if the Palestinians fail to keep their word. One of them also volunteered that Israel would not be expected to fulfill its promises if the Palestinians betrayed theirs.
| (w)E-THE PEOPLE |
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Let your voice be heard! To express your concerns about the administration's plan for the Holy Land, you may contact
President George W. Bush by fax: (202) 456-2461, (Andrew Card, Chief of Staff)
or by e-mail.
Dr. Condoleeza Rice, National Security Advisor, FAX (202) 456-2883, PHONE (202) 456-9491
Mr. Elliot Abrams, the Director for Near East and North African Affairs, at FAX (202) 456-9120, and by phone through his secretary Joanna, (202) 456-9121
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 1000 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301-1000 or by e-mail form:
http://www.defenselink.mil/
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, 1010 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301-1010 or by e-mail form
http://www.defenselink.mil
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I was especially pleased by the modesty of their aspirations. As one official puts it, "We have a shot at peace." He emphasized that the U.S. president cannot merely snap his fingers and expect Palestinians to do as summoned. He showed a reassuring awareness that this project is chancy and that the odds of its succeeding are not that good.
All this is music to my skeptical ears.
Yet, I worry. Won't human nature and governmental inertia combine to induce the Bush administration to push the roadmap through to completion, riding roughshod over the pesky details to keep things moving forward? Suppose that Palestinian violence continues; won't there be a temptation to overlook it in favor of keeping to the diplomatic timetable?
That has been the historic pattern whenever democratic states negotiate with totalitarian enemies to close down their conflicts, starting with the British-French attempts to appease Nazi Germany in the 1930s, then the American-Soviet détente in the 1970s, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the 1990s, and South Korea's sunshine policy with North Korea since 1998. In each case, the delusion that sweetening the pot would bring about the desired results persisted until it was dashed by a major outbreak of violence (the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Oslo war).
In theory, American policymakers can break this pattern. Should Palestinian violence against Israel continue, they would announce something along the lines of: "Well, we did our best, but the Palestinians failed us. The roadmap is a good idea in principle must be postponed until they are ready for it. We are giving up on it for now."
Can they do it? We'll probably find out soon enough, for the violence has continued, as in the case of this very morning, despite some signs that the Palestinian Authority has started cracking down since three Palestinian terrorist organizations agreed to a hudna ("temporary ceasefire") on June 29. The Israeli defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, summed up the situation this way: "There is a certain decrease in the number of terror warnings and also a certain decrease in incitement, but [the Palestinians] still have a long way ahead of them in order to live up to their commitments."
How demanding will the U.S. government be about those commitments? One troubling sign came a week ago, when Secretary Powell stated that "We can't let … minor incidents or a single incident destroy the promise of the roadmap that is now before us."
Oslo is just a slippery-slope away; to prevent a repetition of that debacle, American officialdom needs to reject all violence, and not wink at "minor incidents." The goal, everyone needs firmly to keep in mind, is not the signing of more agreements but (short-term) the ending of terrorism and (long-term) the Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading."
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JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of several books, most recently Militant Islam Reaches America. Comment by clicking here.
© 2003, Daniel Pipes
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