Spectator's Journal / To Syria, With Love
Lewis, Saul
To Syria, With Love by Saul Lewis W hen Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, ran for office last summer, he campaigned on a platform that promised, among other things, not to recognize the...
...Perhaps Rabin calculated that progress on the Syrian front was impossible without an initial breakthrough on the Palestinian front...
...In short, Rabin was an old man in a hurry (during the campaign, he had promised to reach a deal with Palestinians not affiliated with the PLO within six to nine months...
...Maybe that's all there is td it...
...H ow Rabin's great gamble will work out is anyone's guess...
...To Syria, With Love by Saul Lewis W hen Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, ran for office last summer, he campaigned on a platform that promised, among other things, not to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, and not to negotiate with it...
...But my views were not sought out...
...Peres, like most members of 52 The American Spectator November 1993 Israel's left-oriented "cultural elite," is obsessed with resolving the "Palestinian problem...
...But of Israel's immediate neighbors, Israel already enjoys a formal peace with Egypt and a de facto peace with Jordan, which leaves only Syria as the main object of this entire exercise...
...What would a Syrian-Israeli peace entail...
...It is an agreement between peoples...
...From the strategic point of view," Rabin said, "Syria poses a greater problem than the problem with the Palestinians...
...As a "senior security source" told the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv, "Syria was and remains the central axis in the peace talks...
...If he approved of the deal that Peres and Arafat cooked up, he must have had some compelling reasons of his own to do so...
...Rabin, like most members of Israel's military establishment, believes that Syria, which is receiving missiles from North Korea and Russia capable of striking any part of Israel, and which is currently engaged in a massive arms buildup, is a far graver threat to Israel's security than the Palestinians...
...This is an outcome that Likud predicts is inevitable, Labor promises will never happen, and I think depends on what the U.S...
...is too unreliable, and the margin for error is too small for you to gamble with your country's future...
...position is five years from now, when...
...Another Israeli commentator wrote: "While Peres has assumed the most active role in the political field, the Prime Minister is giving the impression of a two-bit player...
...By contrast, when Rabin discusses the Israel-PLO accord, he almost seems to damn it with faint praise...
...To answer these questions, you can't rely on the American press, which doesn't even know what questions to ask...
...It would seem, then, that Rabin's assessment of what he and Peres have wrought might be correct...
...The agreement with the PLO is, indeed, far from a "masterpiece...
...If I'm reading Rabin accurately, then whatever happens in Gaza and Jericho as a result of the Israel-PLO accord is basically a sideshow...
...Syrian-Israeli negotiations have progressed...
...Peres has long been known in Israel as the "Arik Sharon of the Left," a single-minded politician who pursues his own agenda regardless of what his party leader or prime minister happens to think...
...the status of the West Bank and Gaza must be finalized...
...T hese glaring differences between prime minister and foreign minister have led some Israelis to conclude that Peres forced Rabin into an agreement with the PLO...
...Secretary of State Warren Christopher has announced that if a Syrian-Israeli accord is reached, the U.S...
...On the contrary, "It is still our enemy and remains so...
...I would not say that the entire package is a masterpiece," is the way Rabin typically characterizes it...
...And these reasons, I suspect, have much more to do with Syria than the PLO...
...That Rabin may have reasoned along these lines is suggested by some remarks he made on August 30, in a speech before a special session of his governing coalition...
...Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin once said of General Sharon, "He always tells me what he's doing either before or after he's done it," and much the same might be said of Peres...
...But there are a number of indications that some sort of deal is in the works...
...CI The American Spectator November 1993 53...
...A breakthrough with Syria would tilt the "correlation of forces" sharply in Israel's favor—so much so, hopefully, that Israel would not be in much trouble even if the current Israeli-PLO agreement were to culminate in an aggressive and expansionist PLO state...
...But in the absence of a peace agreement with Syria, a PLO state, arising alongside a Syria that still belonged to the "rejectionist" camp, would only add to Israel's already grave security problems...
...A tremendous revolution has taken place inside the PLO...
...After coming into office, he discovered that reaching an agreement with non-PLO Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza was impossible...
...Lebanon, Syria's vassal state, doesn't count...
...Thus, when Peres presented him with the outlines of a deal with the PLO, Rabin (after tinkering around with it quite a bit) held his nose and embraced it, not because, he thought it was an especially good deal, but because he hoped it would pave the way to what he really wants—a peace accord with Syria's President Assad...
...You've got to consult the Israeli press—which is what I did...
...It seems crazy to Rabin's political opponents in the Likud party, and, frankly, it seems crazy to me...
...But if the PLO reneges on its commitments, "we will always be able to turn back the wheel"—i.e., reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza...
...Perhaps a combination of personal and political factors led him into a monumental foreign policy blunder...
...According to "an official close to Rabin," the prime minister concluded that the West Bank Palestinians "were not the type of leaders who could turn to Arafat and say `Kiss my ass, we are the leadership.' They were first and foremost afraid of assassination and boycott by the inhabitants of the West Bank...
...And just as Sharon more or less maneuvered Begin into amajor war in Lebanon, so, quite possibly, did Peres more or less maneuver Rabin into an accord with the PLO...
...However, a solution of the latter means solving the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...ing the PLO of yesterday, but the PLO of today...
...But it may offer Israel a great chance—ple opportunity to neutralize its most dangerous adversary, which, contrary to public opinion, is not the PLO, but Syria...
...That a dovish Peres dragged a skeptical Rabin into an agreement with Arafat is certainly a possibility...
...The agreement between Israel and the PLO," Peres declared, "is more than an agreement between leaders and institutions...
...T he first thing to understand about Rabin is that he used to be chief of staff of Israel's armed forces, and he remains a military man to the core...
...We will bring about a new, modern Middle East...
...Now that Rabin has broken his pledge to the Israeli electorate, he is being lionized the world over as a great statesman...
...So what is he trying to accomplish...
...Listening to Peres, one might suppose that Israel stood on the verge of either the First or Second Coming, depending on which part of the Judeo-Christian tradition you subscribe to...
...Had he asked for my opinion, I probably would have said, "Don't do this, Yitzhak...
...Israel would agree to withdraw from much, if not all, of a demilitarized Golan Heights...
...More surprisingly, neither were Israel's military leaders brought into the secret negotiations until the very last moment...
...When Rabin says "peace," he's thinking of peace with Syria...
...It contains great chances as well as risks...
...Clearly, if the loss of his Soviet patron, the deteriorating state of his'economy, and the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism finally push Assad in the direction of peace, Arafat has just provided him with a convenient pretext...
...Why, exactly, did Rabin do it...
...Rather than face the prospect of electoral defeat and the end of his political career, maybe Rabin convinced himself that, as Benjamin Franklin said, "a bad peace is better than a good war," and a deal with the PLO, however distasteful, is better than no deal at all...
...The Sphinx of Damascus is too inscrutable, the PLO is too slippery, the U.S...
...Hence, what was agreed in Oslo, and will be presented and signed in Washington, is agreat step forward in promoting Israel toward peace with all our neighboring countries...
...He would never allow Peres—a man he despises almost as much as Arafat—to lead him around by the nose...
...Nor does Rabin think that the PLO has undergone a "tremendous revolution...
...Rabin, after all, is no lightweight...
...So now all we can do is sit around and wait for the other shoe—the Syrian one—to drop...
...Maybe that's what Rabin had in mind when he said, "The horizons for peace are open...
...and the United States, in addition to stationing troops on the Golan to serve as a buffer, between Syrian and Israeli forces, would provide Syria with all sorts of financial and technological goodies (assuming the parched Gaza Strip does not soak up whatever remains of American foreign aid), not to mention a gala White House reception for President Assad, which is ourway of letting terrorists, mass murderers, and war criminals know they are forgiven...
...In the Likud's worst-case scenario, a PLO state on the West Bank first conquers Jordan, then teams up with Iraq and Iran to threaten Israel...
...At the same time, however, it threatens to empower Israel's most implacable foe—which is the PLO—and to introduce a new and dangerous factor, a Palestinian state, into the Arab-Israeli equation...
...Although it is not the only one, it is the main focus of the conflict...
...When Peres says "peace," he is thinking mainly of peace with the Palestinians...
...would put its troops on the Golan Heights as a peacekeeping force...
...Maybe an aging prime minister, eager to go down in history as a peacemaker and confronted by his foreign minister with a fait accompli, was afraid that if he didn't accept it, his coalition would break up, new elections would be held, and the Israeli public would not return him to office...
...Yasser Arafat visits Damascus with a draft of the Israel-PLO accord and is told, "It is up to the Palestinian people and their institutions to decide whatever they deem appropriate"—not exactly a ringing endorsement, but very different from Syria's hysterical reaction, fifteen years ago, to the Camp David Accords...
...Yet I have to believe that Rabin is not crazy...
...We are not recognizSaul Lewis is the pen name of a longtime Middle East observer...
...It would probably look a lot like the current Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty...
...The Israeli press is full of stories about an imminent agreement, which government spokesmen deny, but which keep resurfacing anyway...
...Why did he agree to deal with a terrorist organization that all previous Israeli governments have sought to exclude from the so-called peace process—an organization, moreover, that without Soviet backing and Saudi money seemed well on its way to self-destruction...
...Syria would agree to recognize Israel, exchange ambassadors, and normalize relations...
...The first thing that struck me is how differently the two Israeli leaders responsible for the Israeli-PLO deal—Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres—described it...
...I can't altogether rule this possibility out, but neither can I rule it in...
...But how can Israel conclude a peace agreement with a Syrian regime that, defining itself as the champion of Arab nationalism in general, and Palestinian nationalism in particular, furiously denounced the late Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, when he signed a peace treaty with Israel...
...Prickly, hard-asnails, and highly analytical, Rabin is not the kind of leader who goes along to get along...
...The highly regarded Israeli journalist, Ze'ev Schiff, contended that "Rabin was incrementally dragged into a process with the PLO through use of improper tactics [by Peres...
...A part from a handful of people in Jerusalem, Damascus, and (maybe) Washington, nobody knows how far...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
