Paradigms for a Mideast Peace

...His doubts that the Palestinians will ever give up their struggle to eliminate Israel notwithstanding, Ben Ami turns the traditional Israeli aversion to outside intervention on its head...

...In this context, it is not unreasonable to re-examine the notion that Israel must accept a newly minted hostile dictatorship spitting distance from its population centers...

...then Arab and Jewish states could live together happily ever after...

...To the argument that the Palestinians will simply shoot over any fence Israel erects, Schueftan responds that increasing Israel's ability to prevent some forms of aggression would be an important step forward, and that Israel would not have to limit its defensive measures to the Israeli side of the separation line...

...In fact, such a state would be born in violation of the central commandment of the post-September 11 world order: Harboring terrorists is a crime punishable by regime change...

...Its long arm reached the hijackers at Entebbe, picked off the terrorists at the Munich Olympics one by one, and struck at the Iraqi nuclear reactoratOsirak...

...In the broadest terms, they envision Israel giving up almost all of the West Bank and Gaza, plus half of Jerusalem, in exchange for peace and Palestinian abandonment of the "right of return...

...Sharon's recent talk of establishing "buffer zones" between the Israelis and Palestinians was a nod to the public yearning here, if not for peace now, then for separation now...

...In a sense, both sides have lived to see Pyrrhic victories for their philosophies...

...If anything, it is striking how little credit Israel retains for its flexibility at Camp David, even within part of the Israeli Left...

...It is generally assumed Jerusalem did not issue such a final demand out of deference to the United States...

...This entry pass says: 'The debate over whether Israel is ready for peace or not is over.' Now that Israel has proved that which needed to be proved, the role of the international envelope is to tell Arafat: 'You have no escape routes left.'" There are several problems with this approach...

...Sovereign nations, such as Lebanon, learned that Israel would go after terrorism emanating from within their borders if they were unwilling or unable to stop it...

...and Europe, merely confirmed Israel's ambivalence toward him...

...In Schueftan's view, Israel's dependence on Palestinian labor, though much reduced from some years ago, is unhealthy for both sides and facilitates a "creeping return" to Israel, or what other countries call illegal immigration...

...Once "Arafat rejected the Clinton plan, turned the right of return into a matter of principle, and denied that Israel has any right at all to the Temple Mount, it became clear that the Palestinians were not prepared for a historical compromise," Avineri declared...

...Ben Ami is not concerned that such a conference would result in undue pressure on Israel...

...Among the Palestinians there is a certain clarity: This is a war of independence...

...Atthe subsequent United Nations Millennium summit, Barak was the man of the hour and Arafat was in the doghouse...

...First, it would be neither just nor advisable for Israel to accept today what the Palestinians walked away from before murdering hundreds of Israelis during more than a year of constant terrorist attacks...

...Under the circumstances, one might think that compounding intransigence with violence would be a bad idea...

...A more fundamental explanation, though, may be Israel's confusion over what it wants...

...The more intractable the Palestinians become, the more the unilateral option comes to the fore...

...No one should be surprised, therefore, if Israel's new paradigm for peace reflects not only the failures of Oslo but also time changing sides...

...In an interview last April he said: "The [Sharon] government received from us an entry pass into the international community...

...Prior to that statement the nuclearization of radical regimes was considered an inevitability...

...The 1978 Camp David Accords negotiated by Prime Minister Menachem Begin envisioned "autonomy" for the Palestinians...

...No one could deny that Israel had gone the extra mile for peace, while Arafat had refused even to negotiate...

...Weapons of mass destruction would make the world a more dangerous place for Israel...

...The government's formal decision that Arafat was "irrelevant," while criticized as wrongheaded by the U.S...

...Everyone knew the purpose of the whole exercise was to establish a Palestinian state in exchange for peace...

...Dan Schueftan, a University of Haifa professor and Shalem Center fellow, has advanced a more popular idea that might be described as a variation on an old theme...

...Actually, the epithet can best be understood as a pale substitute for Washington's ultimatum to the Taliban: Stop harboring terrorism or lose power...

...Meretz leader Yossi Sarid, for example, is now saying the solution to terrorism is "ending the occupation," as if the Palestinian rejection of exactly such an offer at Camp David never happened...

...The result was war...

...Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton revealed all their cards and then some, to no avail...

...During the past few decades things were simpler...

...Second, it is not clear that his confidence in the international community's recognition of Israel's generosity is well placed...

...The handshake between Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn was supposed to set the parties on a glide path toward Palestinian statehood...

...Shlomo Avineri, a former leader of Israel's peace camp, likened the situation to the collapse of the Western intellectual romance with Stalinism described in The God That Failed...

...The logic behind this notion harkens back to Rabin's campaign slogan about "getting Gaza out of Tel Aviv...

...Within Israel there were two sides, bitterly opposed to each other...

...The Left is now split between those who concede that the Palestinians are not the partners they once thought them to be, and those who think the solution is to give in to them...

...The Clinton Parameters included a neighborhood-by-neighborhood division of Jerusalem, and were based on the idea that the Palestinians could be trusted to live next to Israel in peace...

...In these circumstances, how can Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians...

...Furthermore, accordingto Bernard Lewis —the West's most distinguished observer of the Islamic world—their successors are likely to be pro-Western and may be quite amenable to peace with Israel...

...Israelis are still scratching their heads—didn't we offer them that...

...The United States, in a war of self-defense belatedly joined, is committed to disarming both of these guns, which not coincidentally are aimed at it as well...

...He would have an international conference impose an agreement along the lines of the Clinton Parameters set forth in December 2000...

...And worse, it had no notion of how to pick up the pieces...

...But Ben Ami himself does not seem to believe this...

...Instead, says the charismatic Right-winger, the focus should be regional...

...The ideological vacuum is not simply a theoretical problem...

...But Arafat followed a formula the Palestinians had spoken of for some time, although it was not taken seriously by the United States and Israel...

...He seems to be the first to suggest Jordan and Egypt must play a central role in addressing the Palestinian refugee problem, and to attempt to revive the idea that Jordan should become the sole Palestinian state...

...But the Right is also split between Sharon, who openly favors a Palestinian state, and a large number of his own Likud Party's members, who reject this...

...In their eyes the talks were only a way of getting what they wanted—not a painful process of give and take...

...The mainstream Israeli Right was and still is unwilling to admit to itself that it does not want to grant the Palestinians citizenship or an independent state, but lacks a coherent option to these two choices...

...My own suspicion is that in looking backward Eitam is ahead of his time, but perhaps not by much...

...Schueftan does not argue that unilateral separation will bring peace...

...All it had to do was hand over the West Bank and Gaza—captured from Jordan and Egypt in the pre-emptive 1967 Six-Day War—to the Palestinians...

...seems to be thinking even further out of the box...

...Brigadier General Effie Eitam (ret...

...The not-so-hidden force behind the Oslo Accords was Rabin's feeling that time was not exactly on Israel's side...

...Saul Singer, a new contributor to The New Leader, is the editorial page editor and a columnist at the Jerusalem Post...

...Everything was in place: a dovish Israeli government, a determined American President trusted by the two camps, plus impending Israeli and American elections that imposed a strict deadline for results...

...For Israel, it is not clear what to call the war, whether it is war, or even how to think about this new phase of the ArabIsraeli conflict as a whole...

...One side, encapsulated in the slogan "Peace Now," believed peace was Israel's for the asking...

...It is widely acknowledged by outside observers and the Palestinians themselves that Hezbollah's success in unconditionally expelling Israel from Lebanon served as a model for the current Palestinian offensive...

...In 1993 Israel embraced the Peace Now position, in the form of the incremental Oslo Agreement...

...At this point, Israel's Left wing felt its worldview collapsing before its very eyes...

...Yet if he was irrelevant, what was the point of demanding that he crack down on terrorism...

...In many ways, a substantial Israeli withdrawal that abandoned dozens of Israeli settlements without the signing of any peace agreement would be a dream come true for Arafat...

...They would have no reason to believe that their "right" to attack Israel had diminished, or that such attacks would not eventually force a further Israeli withdrawal...

...But the Oslo landing was worse than inelegant, it was a devastating crash...

...A few years late, and after much turbulence, the July 2000 Camp David summit was to be where Oslo would finally cruise in for a perhaps inelegant yet definite landing...

...In reality, however, they would claim a partial victory, and their hopes for a total one would be intensified...

...Writing in the November 2001 issue of Middle East Insight, he put the matter bluntly: "Unilateral disengagement is designed to deprive the Palestinians of access to the levers inside Israel—demographic, economic, and strategic—that can be the most effective in the Palestinians' attempt to undermine the Jewish state...

...their goal is] undermining our existence as a Jewish state...

...Frustrated, Clinton yelled at Arafat, "If the Israelis can make compromises and you can't, I should go home...

...Incredibly hard...

...The advantage of Eitam's conception is that it is the beginning of a true alternative to the Oslo/Camp David approach, which has proved to be a recipe for unending fighting rather than a lasting peace...

...Thus one day after Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon's September 28 visit to the Temple Mount, Arafat used the event as an excuse to revive the armed struggle...

...Most Israelis believe, with good reason, that at Camp David and the follow-up Taba talks Barak gave the land for peace model its strongest shot...

...According to him, trying to solve the Palestinian problem by creating a new sovereign entity is a mistake...

...Schueftan claims that the Lebanon effect would be limited because Israel would retain large swaths of territory, including the Jordan Valley, so it would be hard for the Palestinians to claim victory...

...United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, the Magna Carta of the Arab-Israeli peace process, does not mention the Palestinians by name (though it does refer to "refugees"), let alone envision a new independent state...

...You have been here 14 days and said no to everything...

...The significance of the war is not only its delegitimizmg effect on Palestinian terrorism, but its impact on the rogue states that pose the greatest strategic threat to Israel's security and fuel the enemies of peace...

...Of the three post-Oslo paradigms I've cited, his may be the most relevant to a Middle East that has been radically transformed by America's war on terrorism...

...Historically, Israel had gained a reputation for being at the forefront of the fight against terrorism...

...In other words, the price of being in a somewhat better position to defend against Palestinian aggression would be a demonstration that aggression works...

...Those days have long been forgotten, but before the Six-Day War, when the West Bank and Gaza were held by Jordan and Egypt, there was no demand for a Palestinian state...

...On the contrary, he sees it as allowing Israel to better manage and ultimately prevail in a continuing conflict...

...The Palestinians, he concluded, "don't want a solution as much as they want to place Israel in the docket of the accused...

...It is also difficult to imagine that the Europeans, after years of railing against the illegality of the Jewish settlements and championing Palestinian demands for a total Israeli withdrawal, would suddenly embrace the idea of territorial compromise...

...The strongest argument against his plan, Schueftan admits, is its resemblance to Israel's hasty withdrawal from Lebanon...

...He argues that since there are no defined borders between the two hostile populations, and there is no possibility of reaching a negotiable border agreement, the only option is unilateral separation...

...Whoever expected Yasir Arafat to turn into Nelson Mandela was proved wrong, but admitting it is hard...

...Israel has tried making peace with two guns to its head, one held by terrorists, the other a potential nuclear gun in the hands of radical anti-Western states...

...America's awakening following September 11 is likely to fundamentally change this outlook in ways that Rabin could not have imagined...

...Its disadvantage is the same...

...When I asked Benjamin Netanyahu, before his meteoric rise to the prime ministership, what comes after autonomy, his whispered answer was "more autonomy...

...it attempts to roll back to the first days after the 1967 conflict, when a new Palestinian state was not even a twinkle in anyone's eye...

...It has had a direct impact on Israel's response to suicide bombers and other forms of guerrilla warfare, in a way that has become especially striking since the U. S. war on terrori sm began after September 11...

...Even when Sharon came in on a wave of resounding public opposition to negotiating under fire, Israel showed a distinct reluctance to "burn its bridges" with the Palestinian Authority...

...If Ben Ami believes an agreement must be forced on the parties, and Schueftan that Israel must assume the lack of agreement...

...peace agreements were the best hope of mitigating that danger...

...The reaction to the present wave of Palestinian terrorism, by contrast, has been marked by reticence and ambivalence...

...Now Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's days, and that of the Iranian theocracy, appear to be numbered...

...Initially, the Barak government not only continued to negotiate with the Palestinians but improved on the offers tabled at Camp David...

...The other side, dubbed the "nationalist" or "whole Land of Israel" crowd, believed just as fervently that a second Palestinian state (Jordan already had a Palestinian majority) would pose an existential threat to Israel, and in any case the newly won Biblical heartland belonged to Israel...

...When President George W Bush declared in his January State of the Union address that the United States "will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons," a new era dawned...

...But if Oslo was a Pyrrhic victory for Israel's Left, because the end result was a discrediting of its worldview and the landslide electoral victory of Sharon, the Right, despite being able to say "I told you so," had no reason to celebrate...

...Ben Ami, an academic and Labor Party stalwart who served as Barak's Foreign Minister, became completely disillusioned with Arafat at Camp David...

...Even before Oslo, it was not apparent what the Right's alternative was to a Palestinian state...

...Three Israeli mavericks —in that they break out of the pro- and anti-Oslo rut — have each put forward proposals to answer this question: Shlomo Ben Ami, Dan Schueftan, and Effie Eitam...

...In his judgment, clearly accepted by Barak, it was in Israel's interest to cut a peace deal before Iran or Iraq obtained nuclear weapons...