Small World

Jewish World Review Dec. 11, 2000 / 14 Kislev, 5761


The real question for Israel: Will any leader truly re-think the peace process?



By Daniel Pipes

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- ON THE FACE OF IT, Saturday's announcement by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel that he has resigned his position and called for new elections sounds like an important development.

Anyone who is familiar with Israel's public life knows this will be a donnybrook, with high passions, powerful personalities, ubiquitous election posters and vehement denunciations of rival candidates.

But from a larger perspective, it is not clear the election will make a difference.

By this, I mean that the voters will not likely have a real choice about the paramount issue of Israeli politics - the way their government approaches the Palestinians. To understand why requires taking a step back and a look at the larger picture:

Broadly speaking, Israelis have three basic choices toward the Palestinians. The "forget it" approach says that the territories Israel won in 1967 are forever Israeli, so there is no point in negotiations about them. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir embodied this approach and its recent spokesman has been Ze'ev ("Benny") Begin. This approach has virtually disappeared from the scene.

The two other approaches both approve of negotiations but differ in what they expect in return.

  • The traditional Likud "yes but" attitude, now held by fewer than a quarter of Israelis, demands a change of heart from the Arabs in return for giving them land.

    Negotiations are fine in principle; they must, however, result in a clear payoff for Israel; Arabs must prove their permanent intention to forego violence before they get a reward.

  • Then there is the "be my guest" approach, which has been overwhelmingly the most popular since about 1993. It requires almost no change by the Arabs, giving them land and other benefits in the hope that such generosity will in itself create an environment conducive to their accepting Israel's existence.

"Yes but" involves a finely calibrated accounting of what Israel gains from its concessions; "be my guest" is a much vaguer process that cheerfully assumes Israeli concessions will on their own win Palestinian cooperation and goodwill.

While "be my guest" is closely identified with such Labor leaders such as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Barak, it has no less been implemented by Likud. Specifically, when Likud was last in power, in 1996 to 1999 under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, it signed two "be my guest" agreements with the Palestinians, getting virtually nothing in return.

Thus, both of Israel's leading parties, Labor and Likud, have pursued basically the same set of policies. True, Likud did so more slowly and reluctantly than Labor, but that is a matter of style more than substance; the key point is that it has abandoned its old "yes but" approach in favor of Labor's "be my guest."

This similarity appears still to be the case. Since the violence began in late September, Barak has said tough things about Arafat but has by no means given up on continuing the negotiations with him. At present, his stated policy is to demand only a "drastic" drop in violence before returning to the bargaining table.

As Sharon explained at a New York Post Forum last month, he demands only slightly more - a "full cessation" of hostilities - before he too would restart the diplomacy.

This is a distinction without a difference. Their agreement on continuing with "be my guest" diplomacy reflects a deeper fact: Polls show Israelis widely want negotiations with the Palestinians to go on.

A poll published on Oct. 13, at the very height of the violence, found that no less than 63 percent of the electorate favoring a return to negotiations, a number not much lower than at the height of the peace-process euphoria.

What to look for: If Likud offers the voters a real alternative to the "be my guest" policy prevailing since 1993, then the elections in February can make a real difference. If it merely continues to echo Labor, the elections will concern personalities and patronage, but not policy.


JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of several books, most recently Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes from. Let him know what you think by clicking here.


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© 2000, Daniel Pipes This article first appeared in the NY Post