Stalemate?
Fein, Leonard
STATEMATE? LEONARD FEIN Gypsy Rose Peace. Now you see her, now you don't. At Camp David, she stood there, for a long and tantalizing minute, and the MC promised that within three months, she'd go...
...The Israeli objection to any explicit linkage is that Israel cannot permit its agreement with Egypt to be held hostage by the PLO, for the PLO is perfectly capable of fouling Israel's plans for West Bank autonomy...
...Israel and Egypt both want peace, and so does the United States...
...Implementation of the plan is a way of postponing rather than resolving the Palestinian problem...
...It is not a changed perception of either Begin or Sadat, although it is possible that some American officials, in their enthusiasm for a result, assumed that more had been conceded at Camp David than was...
...It is quite widely supposed that President Sadat, by introducing new demands at nearly the last minute, has derailed the peace process, and that calls his commitment into question...
...Again and again, the problem of the West Bank from Israel's perspective is that it has no reasonable alternative to getting rid of most of it, because it cannot both be Israel and control 1.1 million Arabs...
...Then why the steady increase in Egyptian demands since Camp David...
...Egypt...
...In the stablest of all possible worlds, the Saudis could still not sit comfortably on their thrones...
...The issue is not an issue of substance, save as after so many years of war, symbols themselves have substance...
...Had the United States rejected the Saudi threat to cut off aid to Egypt in the event of an "unsatisfactory" treaty, Sadat would have been forced to choose between the prospect of American aid (if he signed despite Saudi objection) and Saudi aid (if he refused to sign despite American pressure...
...The United States...
...Sadat cannot and will not agree to a peace which is completely silent on the matter of the Palestinians...
...But peace is not all each wants...
...Saunders to pick that particular time to suggest that Jerusalem would one day be redivided...
...For whatever Mr...
...It is not—again, some Arabs misinterpret this point—that Israel, hawk or dove, wants a separate peace with Egypt...
...Sadat knows that Begin prefers a West Bank annexed to Israel, and he does not know—none of us does—whether Begin has decided to deny his own preference for the sake of a higher goal...
...Indeed, given the unexpected pressures to which President Sadat has been subjected by his Arab colleagues, his continuing devotion to an agreement with Israel reflects a commitment of uncommon depth...
...What can possibly have happened to account for the utter clumsiness of American interventions since Camp David...
...Iran is the protector of the Gulf states against subversion from South Yemen...
...Begin's insistence on the original language of Article 6 is based on his need to provide his people with symbolic reassurances that Sadat's intentions are honorable, and that the treaty has real meaning...
...The problem is that so radical a revolution as peace necessarily involves costs, risks, and fears, and it is the effort by each side to reduce all three that has caused the interruption in the talks...
...But it is no more than a symbol...
...The cost that frightens the Egyptians is their isolation in the Arab world...
...Indeed, one wonders why Israel, even as it continues to negotiate with Egypt, has not already begun to implement the plan—a plan, after all, first proposed by Israel before the Sadat initiative...
...He would most likely have chosen to go with the Americans, since (a) their aid is not only in the form of dollars, but also in the form of technical assistance, and (b) he would have assumed that the Saudis would in time relent...
...Israel...
...Across the Red Sea, Ethiopia...
...It may be that even before Baghdad, he knew he would insist on linkage...
...The Israeli objection to the Sadat proposals is not only a substantive objection, nor is it only based on Israel's need for reassuring symbols...
...It is not that Israel is ambivalent about the autonomy plan, although some Egyptians evidently think it is...
...It was in September 1977 that Day an suggested "self-rule" for the West Bank and Gaza...
...Today is the third day of Chanu-kah, three months, one week and three days later...
...More likely, the way out is an interim agreement going beyond even that which Yigal Allon has lately proposed, providing not only for immediate termination of the state of war and substantial Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, but also containing a commitment by Egypt, after several years have passed, to fully normalize its relations with Israel, in return for Israeli withdrawal from the rest of the Sinai (although it would, under such an agreement, make sense for Israel to seek to reopen the question of the airbases), these last clauses contingent on positive developments toward autonomy on the West Bank...
...Turkey, with its own domestic peace now threatened, is increasingly neutralist...
...Insofar as we may have been concerned that once he entered into an agreement with Israel, the autonomy plan would be shelved, he could plan to press for linkage between the two agreements...
...From Sadat's post-Baghdad perspective, in any case, he must decide whether to sign a peace treaty with a country whose intentions on the West Bank and in Gaza he does not fully trust, at a time when his Arab colleagues are insisting to him that, save as the West Bank and Gaza problems are resolved, he will stand utterly alone...
...it is an ingenious method for deferring a definitive statement, designed to provide enough movement to satisfy both Egypt and the United States, while preserving enough ambiguity to keep Israel's ultimate options open...
...It was the Israelis themselves, after all, who proposed the plan for autonomy, hoping that would do the job...
...Article 6, which is the article in question, is an important symbol of Egyptian intention...
...There is little question that if the linkage problem can be resolved in more substantial ways, this proposal will be withdrawn...
...They have done this in part because they recognize the enormous complexity of the West Bank-Gaza problem, and do not want to confuse a relatively straightforward negotiation by introducing an impossibly twisted one...
...Then why all the fuss...
...Those commitments are, almost certainly, what led Prime Minister Begin to cede the entire Sinai with such unexpected haste...
...There are four proposals which Secretary Vance brought with him from Alexandria to Jerusalem...
...Begin himself has frequently observed, five years is a long time, and it may well be another Israeli prime minister who will have to deal definitively with the issue of sovereignty...
...properly drafted, it could be a very substantial step toward the still elusive final destination...
...That is the principal virtue—and the major failing—of the plan for West Bank-Gaza autonomy...
...What went wrong...
...Israel and Egypt lie in the center of a region whose periphery is crumbling...
...But it is an extraordinarily modest form of linkage that is here proposed, as indicated by Mr...
...Under these circumstances, it is difficult to understand why Sadat wants more of a timetable— or, for that matter, why the Israelis object...
...From a global standpoint, the United States has suffered a major disaster during the last twelve months...
...The Saudi's longest land border is with Iraq...
...Can it be set right...
...The colossal error of American policy toward Saudi Arabia these past years has been to rest that policy on the need to make the Saudis happy, as if they were the power, we the petitioner...
...In the Israeli view, America remains committed to a comprehensive settlement (especially in light of events in the region), and will not permit Israel even to catch its breath once a treaty is signed...
...At the very least, Sadat wants to insure that once he has gambled on peace, the PLO will not be in a position to derail the effort...
...By deferring the matter, he can remain true to his convictions and, at the same time, contribute to the peace process...
...across the Persian Gulf, Iran...
...Saudi Arabia has informed Egypt that its aid will cease unless the agreement that is signed includes a specific timetable for Palestinian autonomy, and unless that autonomy is clearly seen as a step along the road to Palestinian independence...
...The most plausible interpretation of the Begin maneuver is that, by displaying uncommon generosity regarding Sinai, he expected to elicit reciprocal generosity regarding the West Bank and Gaza...
...If the autonomy plan is a specific program which rests on ambiguous intentions, why did President Sadat accept the Camp David agreements...
...United States policy is the other part...
...Some imagination will be required—and a dose of good sense that will teach the American team that there is a time to be silent...
...The hawks in Israel suspect that autonomy gives away too much, but are pleased at the prospect of removing Egypt from the conflict before pressing their case for Israeli sovereignty on the West Bank...
...If peace were all, we'd have the treaty by now...
...Israel, in short, will have three full years to test the intentions of the Egyptians, as well as the viability of the West Bank agreements...
...But a peace which alienates the other Arab countries is both economically and ideologically unacceptable...
...Sadat's willingness to sever the West Bank from Gaza in determining when ambassadors shall be exchanged...
...And so they almost surely would have, if the United States had been tough enough...
...Sadat does not want to be made a fool of...
...Surely there was no other reason for Mr...
...Afghanistan is now a Soviet satellite...
...If Egypt is persuaded that Israel did not really make the effort on the West Bank, it need not conclude the full peace...
...at Saudi Arabia's southwest tip, is South Yemen...
...That, and the Saudi position on Camp David...
...It is, presumably, because of Saudi Arabia that Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders was dispatched to the Middle East immediately after Camp David in order to "interpret" the Camp David agreement and there to offer an official interpretation which went far beyond anything that President Sadat had publicly claimed...
...More important still, the United States is bound to ask what an unstable Iran, allied with Iraq, might imply for the stability of Saudia Arabia...
...Kuwait has already informed Egypt that its aid will cease the moment an agreement is signed...
...And when Saudi Arabia is nervous, America panics...
...This appears to be a serious problem, because unless the Egypt-Israel treaty has explicit priority, Egypt can be brought into a war against Israel by the invocation of the collective defense clauses of its treaties with its Arab neighbors...
...What is perplexing here is that the critical aspect of the Egypt-Israel treaty, Israel's withdrawal from its military bases in the Sinai and its relinquishing of the Rafiah salient and its settlements, is not to be implemented for three years...
...Instead, the United States caved in, preferring once again to pursue its policy of moderation and bribery toward Saudi Arabia, launching a process which culminated in the brusque announcements by Secretary Vance and by Jody Powell that Sadat's proposals were generous and that Israel was bound to accept them...
...He has made that clear since his speech in the Knesset...
...It is a propagandistic distortion to suggest that any of the three has lost its appetite for an end to the sterile and dangerous conflict...
...Not even peace and security, or peace and economic development...
...The Baghdad conference is part of the answer...
...More important, insofar as the intent of the plan was ambiguous, he could suppose that once it was implemented, it would take on a dynamic of its own, a dynamic that would lead inevitably to a satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian question...
...But Sadat's fear that the Israelis are not serious about autonomy is also real...
...Attention to the details of the implicit timetables is one obvious way of resolving the impasse insofar as it has a substantive foundation, but the subtlety of the inherent linkage that is already present in the timetables is likely to be lost on the citizens of the two nations and on the attentive bystanders...
...No, it is more likely that a number of other international developments of potentially major consequence have altered American policy...
...If at the end of that time, Egypt seeks to withhold full peace because Israel, despite its best efforts, has not managed to achieve what it had hoped to achieve on the West Bank, then Israel need not withdraw...
...Accordingly, he seeks to be reassured that the stated Israeli intentions regarding the West Bank and Gaza are sincere...
...But his silence is not the silence of a penitent whose views have changed...
...The most troublesome issue remains, as it has been since Camp David, President Sadat's insistence that there be some sort of a timetable for Israeli performance under the terms of the second Camp David agreement...
...Under the terms of Camp David, it will be recalled, negotiations on the eventual disposition of the West Bank and Gaza are not to begin until three years after the first steps toward autonomy have been taken, one month after the Israel-Egypt treaty has been signed...
...no one really believes it can be restabilized...
...Sadat's insistence on amending Article 6 through an exchange of "clarifying" letters is based on his need to provide his neighbors with symbolic reassurances that Egypt still sees itself as part of the Arab world...
...Whether the seeds as they were sown at Camp David were in and of themselves satisfactory to Sadat, whether he would have been prepared to sign the treaty envisioned at Camp David and negotiated at Blair House had it not been for the Baghdad conference and the very visible loss of Saudi support which was announced at Baghdad, remains an open question...
...An interim arrangement of sufficient scope and boldness need not even be seen as a consolation prize...
...That scenario envisions the establishment of a comprehensive peace between Israel and Egypt, with all the social, political and economic implications which thereunto pertain, which is then subverted by Palestinian radicals...
...The technical aspects of arranging a durable peace are complicated, but not impossibly so...
...Sadat to establish some form of linkage between his own treaty with Israel and Israel's performance of its obligations under the second Camp David accord...
...But if the issue is symbols, then it is entirely possible that other forms of symbolic reassurance may be proposed and accepted...
...Iraq and Syria, attending these events, have interrupted their drift towards the West...
...When President Sadat visited Jerusalem more than a year ago, he confidently informed some of the Israelis with whom he spoke that at least eighteen Arab states would follow his lead once a treaty was concluded...
...According to Mr...
...At Camp David, she stood there, for a long and tantalizing minute, and the MC promised that within three months, she'd go all the way...
...The Israelis believe that it was Baghdad which messed things up for Sadat, and which caused him to insist on "new" conditions...
...Begin's private convictions, he is incapable of renouncing Israeli sovereignty over these areas—at least, over the West Bank...
...The problem is not a lack of will, or of intelligence...
...Autonomy is one way out of Israel's bitter dilemma of what to do about the West Bank...
...Dayan, the problem here is a simple misunderstanding, and can be easily resolved...
...What it does want is to get that peace in place before moving on to the next step in a comprehensive settlement, and it wants that not only for obvious military reasons but also for pressing domestic political reasons...
...Egypt requires peace with Israel if its economic development is to begin...
...It remains the case, after all, that Israel's concessions are tangible, Egypt's intangible...
...Secretary Vance is just back from Brussels, and poor Gypsy is wrapped in layers of winter clothing, as lumpy as the tattered rummy who picks the trash barrels in my back alley, as homeless...
...In international affairs, which are much simpler—and more telling— than international law, countries go to war when they choose to go to war, not when their treaty commitments require them to go to war...
...And that is a real fear, given the checkered record of American policy towards the Middle East...
...Begin is trying to trap him...
...And if, therefore, autonomy is a way of resolving the dilemma, Israel has no need to await peace, or any other international development, before moving in that direction...
...From the Israeli perspective, this is a very serious matter...
...Iran, be it remembered, is important not only by virtue of its oil reserves and its size...
...The decision to go to war or to refrain from going to war is a political decision, not a legal decision...
...In the world that now emerges, they must be very nervous indeed...
...And Egypt will have those same three years to test the intentions of the Israelis...
...The Sadat proposals need to be seen in context...
...But if the fulfillment of a set of firm conditions such as that proposed in the Egypt-Israel treaty is made contingent on the fulfillment of a set of complex arrangements on the West Bank, arrangements which are not entirely within Israel's control, then the Israelis have reason to worry...
...The second proposal seeks some adjustment of the relationship of the Egypt-Israel treaty to prior treaty commitments of the parties...
...One of these, the proposed revision of Article 4 of the draft agreement, is a trivial matter...
...Sadat proposes that certain security provisions of the agreement be "reviewed" after five years...
...The Saunders mission did nothing to bolster that confidence, nor did the Vance endorsement of the Egyptian proposals...
...The doves in Israel know that any chance they have of winning the argument depends on an increase in Israeli confidence of Arab intentions, the kind of confidence that can come only after a treaty with Egypt has been implemented...
...Hence the impasse...
...It goes quite a way beyond the fantasy that some Israelis have that there can be an entirely separate peace with Egypt...
...that this year of high hopes and expectations cannot be permitted to come to naught...
...Here is where Sadat is most nervous, and here is where he has been most consistent in his demands...
...As Israel defined the plan, including a continuing Israeli military presence and continuing Jewish settlement on the West Bank, it is a relatively low-risk program which provides two critical political benefits: it provides Sadat—or so it is hoped—the evidence he needs that he has fulfilled his promise to the Palestinians, and it permits the Israelis to absorb the agreement with Egypt before engaging in the inevitably acrimonious debate which will finally determine the nation's policy toward the disposition of the West Bank...
...Everyone in Israel, whatever his political predisposition, recognizes that Mr...
...In other words, there is already a timetable built into the body of the agreements...
...And the Israelis are quite right when they point out that President Sadat could hardly permit himself to be more moderate in his demands than the Americans unexpectedly became in their interpretations...
...Iran trembles, and no one knows how to restabilize it...
...Begin's closest colleagues as evidence that Mr...
...Sadat's concern with the Palestinians derives not only from his fear of isolation, but also from his own worst-case scenario...
...The Israeli objection to the Sadat proposals rests essentially on the weirdly undiplomatic American enthusiasm for those proposals...
...Ethiopia is now a Communist nation...
...To his vast credit, he has avoided the assertion of Israel's claims to sovereignty over the West Bank...
...As Mr...
...One need only follow the tracks of Minister Sharon to understand whence that fear derives...
...The controlling perception here must be that if the notion of West Bank autonomy makes sense, it makes sense not as an Israeli concession to Egypt, but in its own terms...
...And they have done it in part because of the ideological commitments of the Begin government...
...It does not seem to penetrate the American mind that Saudi Arabia is far more dependent on the good will of the United States than this nation is on Saudi good will...
...it is the silence of a diplomat who knows that some things are best left unsaid...
...Under the circumstances, it is a proposal that especially rankles the Israelis, who want full peace, with all its trappings...
...Because of his fear of isolation with the Arab world, any agreement between Israel and Egypt had to speak as well to the question of the Palestinians, had to contain at least the promise of a resolution of that question...
...In his view, that means that the comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Egypt conflict must contain at least the seeds of a settlement of the Palestinian problem as well...
...Such an arrangement would squarely recognize that thirty years and more of hostility and suspicion cannot be undone in an instant...
...Sadat's proposal that an exchange of ambassadors be postponed until after the elections on the West Bank and in Gaza—or, if West Bank elections cannot be held, just Gaza—is a modest effort by Mr...
...In his own defense, however, Sadat insists that he has made it clear ever since the beginning that he could not and would not conclude a wholly separate peace with Israel...
...Camp David's Jimmy Carter was deft, creative, authoritative...
...The major concession he has been prepared—in fact, eager—to make is that the PLO need play no part in the effort to resolve the Palestinian problem...
...As much as the United States may be committed to a settlement of the Israel-Egypt problem, or even, more generally, of the Israel-Arab problem, it cannot be casual about that disaster, especially about the prospective loss of its relationship with Iran...
...that an interim agreement which specifies clearly at its outset what the potential rewards are at its conclusion is better than the kind of slapdash arrangements which have been entered into in the past...
...he seeks to bind Israel to the performance of its obligations under the second Camp David agreement...
...But appearances may be deceiving here...
...Israel's conviction that it is doing the right thing depends critically on its confidence that the United States will not, on the morrow of the final signing, begin a campaign for massive Israeli concessions in other sectors...
...It is now clear that he was very wrong...
...Since the inception of negotiations, the Israelis have sought to separate the Egypt-Israel problem as much as possible from all other outstanding problems, most specifically from the West Bank-Gaza problem...
...The proposals...
...So does Mr...
...But the Israelis have from the start exaggerated Sadat's desire for a separate peace, imputing to Sadat a position some Israelis have wished him to have, but which no hard evidence suggests he ever has had, not since Baghdad, not before...
...Sadat, who takes the Israeli refusal to make a firm, timetabled commitment as an indication of bad faith, and points to the vocal opposition to the arrangements envisioned for the West Bank by some of Mr...
Vol. 4 • January 1979 • No. 3
