THE MIDDLE EAST IS EVERYBODY'S FAULT
Ignatius, David
THE MIDDLE EAST IS EVERYBODY'S FAULT BY DAVID IGNATIUS In the morning of April 18, 1983, I visited the American embassy in Beirut to, interview two U.S. Army officers who were...
...The residents of the West Bank pay the price for the PLO's corruption and bad leadership...
...each time he would ask: "Was there anything we could have done...
...As a Lebanese friend said in February 1984, on the day President Reagan announced he was pulling the marines out of Beirut: "If you don't have the will to use a gun, don't carry one...
...It was right for the U.S...
...Both sides feel unloved, unappreciated, mistreated, ill-used...
...For a variety of reasons, including an American effort to restrain the Israelis, the PLO forces in Beirut generally stood their ground, forcing the Israelis to begin a long siege under the scrutiny of American television...
...After their crushing defeat in 1967, the Arabs realized the extent of Nasser's lies but couldn't bear to give them up...
...The U.S...
...The Israeli soldiers, tired after their dash to Beirut, basked in the attention and posed for pictures beside their tanks and APCs...
...When 1 arrived back at what had been the front door, rescuers were gathering pieces of bodies from the rubble...
...The problem was partly poor performance by American diplomats, at home and abroad...
...This defiant Islam offers the Arabs a way out of a confrontation with Israel and the West in which they fear they will be defeated and humiliated...
...Begin's error, in my judgment, was that he acted as if he were doing the U.S...
...When I mentioned once that I had read his book, The Revolt, he responded, "What...
...But in the Middle East I think that "doing good" is a more complicated problem, requiring a more positive, assertive—even interventionist— approach...
...It was never clear to me, in three years of covering Arafat, whom he thought he was kidding...
...That was the beginning of the end for the Americans in Lebanon...
...It was also the beginning of the end of a ten-year period in which the U.S...
...Eric Rouleau, the Middle East correspondent for Le Monde and a man who knows Arafat very well, once described him as a "clown ." What is sad is that Arafat's clownish behavior managed to trivialize the suffering of his own people...
...It was a lightning operation, aimed at intimidating the enemy, shattering his morale, making him panic and run...
...tried hard—through four presidential administrations — to bring peace to the Middle East...
...During the .three years I covered the Middle East for an American newspaper, from 1980 to 1983, 1 observed the rise and fall of American policy in the region...
...The situation wasn't much better in Beirut...
...General Sharon must have assumed that the same thing would happen once he reached Beirut...
...Most people, including me, stopped arguing about Lebanon after the marines left...
...The problem is that it's an unequal contest...
...George had finally arrived to slay the Palestinian dragon...
...My arguments about Lebanon were not all that different from those of the young men and women who came back from Saigon in 1963 mumbling the same phrases: marvelous people, need our help, fighting for democracy, stand up against aggression, don't abandon our friends, stay the course...
...Hit hard, move fast, confuse and demoralize...
...The implication—that everything would have worked out fine if it hadn't been for the damned journalists—was one that any Israeli who had first-hand experience of the war would reject...
...The issue raised by the events of that summer wasn't whether American reporters were biased against Israel, but whether any country can fight a war when the daily mayhem is being shown on television...
...As I write, the third truck bomb in 18 months has destroyed an American installation in Lebanon, and the idea of a new American peace initiative in the Mideast seems laughable...
...In Christian East Beirut there was a festival mood, as if St...
...It is customary when writing about the Middle East to assign blame for its problems to one of the three main actors: Israelis blame the Arabs and the dastardly "Arabists" in the State Department...
...meanwhile the momentum of the peace process was lost and, in 1981, Anwar Sadat was dead...
...I last saw Arafat in October 1983 in Tripoli, Lebanon, where he was under siege from Syrian forces in another one of his Perils of Pauline dramas...
...Every day, they said, the prime minister would demand briefings about the latest casualties and terrorist attacks in Lebanon...
...When I returned to Washington in December 1983 after three years of covering the Middle East, I tended to get into arguments about Lebanon...
...King Hussein played Hamlet for a few months, trying to make up his mind about whether to join negotiations, before he capitulated to Syrian pressure and rejected the Reagan plan...
...It was Nasser who defined Arab nationalism in terms of the negation of Israel, who convinced a generation of Arabs that, until the Israelis were vanquished, the Arabs could not be free...
...The strategy was to take advantage of crises in the region—mostly wars—that provided creative opportunities...
...It is the Palestinians who have suffered most from the Arab politics of self-delusion, which has reached its fullest flower in the person of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...Terrorists will detonate a small nuclear device in the densely populated area around Tel Aviv...
...The Jordanian border post illustrates a form of hypocrisy that is embedded in Arab life...
...Indeed, it's possible that the war in Lebanon and its aftermath left the Arabs stronger and less afraid of the Israelis...
...it meant not doing harm, not making the world any worse than it already was...
...The press-baiting did Israel itself a disservice by trivializing the issues raised by the war...
...Henry Kissinger began the effort in 1973, in the aftershock of the Yom Kippur war, with his "stepby-step diplomacy...
...Mediation keeps the two parties at arm's length...
...The clearest sign of this is Arafat's maddening game about whether he recognizes Israel's right to exist...
...When they're mad, both sides want to sit in a corner and sulk...
...In February 1983, at a gathering in Algiers of a PLO group called the Palestine National Congress, a West Bank mayor looked out over a group of PLO officials, flunkies, and hangers-on who were gorging themselves on one of the endless free meals available for delegates...
...The answer isn't obvious...
...To the end of his life, Nasser was greeted by masses of people chanting his name, "Nasser...
...NBC's John Chancellor was excoriated for delivering an anti-Israel standup...
...it is part of the crazy system in the Middle East in which Jordanians won't look at Israeli passport stamps and Israelis call all Palestinian political leaders "terrorists...
...The Israelis will lash out in blind fury, predicted the former official, even though they may not be sure who was responsible for the attack...
...can do in the Middle East is worth the risks in trying...
...should stand its ground in the Middle East and fight—one hopes, diplomatically—for what it believes in...
...And even in Moslem West Beirut, most Lebanese seemed glad that someone had finally decided to throw out the Palestinians...
...There are some West Bank Palestinians who think that Arafat has dithered so long that it may now be too late for a negotiated settlement...
...and the Arabs a favor in negotiating peace agreements...
...Through four administrations, the U.S...
...The expansion of Israeli settlements during the Begin years, they believe, has irrevocably altered the character of the West Bank...
...THE ARABS A visitor learns something important about Arab psychology when he travels across the Allenby Bridge, into Jordan from the Israelioccupied West Bank...
...The State Department reacted rather than planned...
...During the time I covered the Middle East, my newspaper had two long interviews with Begin...
...As the war dragged on and the Israelis kept moving north and tightening their siege, reporters in Beirut took to wearing t-shirts that read: "Operation Peace for GalilleeScandinavian Division...
...The Israelis would defy American policy—would reject, for example, a peace initiative by an American president on the very day it was proposed—and the response of Congress would be to offer the Israelis more aid...
...And it was with that defiant spirit that a Sephardi-backed government invaded Lebanon in 1982 in an operation known as "Peace for Calillee...
...The growth of that extremism was the consistent theme of my three years in the Middle East...
...Jimmy Carter harnessed the euphoric emotion produced by Sadat's trip to Jerusalem to pull Israel and Egypt toward the Camp David agreements...
...He tried to free Egypt and the rest of the Arab world from the reign of self-delusion by making peace with Israel...
...But Begin, ever the lawyer, treated the Reagan peace plan as a threat and did everything he could to sabotage it, including dragging his feet in negotiations over withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon...
...It was right for the U.S...
...Perhaps a country that isn't prepared to play rough—that does nothing, for example, when two embassies and a Marine headquarters are bombed—should play in a safer part of town...
...241 American marines had been killed by a truck bomb at the Beirut airport...
...racing back to Arafat's command bunker with a maniacal driver from Al Fatah...
...The task of any Israeli leader is to create the conditions for Israel's security 10 or 20 years from now, rather than only next year...
...In the group of numb survivors gathered outside the building I found the two U.S...
...in most countries, the real power lies with the secret police, the moukhabarat, who operate as a Pretorian guard for the leader...
...It was like the old movie footage of the Allies liberating France: Lebanese Christian girls were leaning out the windows smiling at the Israelis...
...A poor Egyptian fallahin, trying to explain to me why Sadat had shamed Egypt, put it this way: "Sadat let his wife dance with Jimmy Carter...
...Studies bristling with footnotes sought to document allegedly biased coverage by such newspapers as The Washington Post...
...favored a particular course of action and the leading politicians would scurry to adjust themselves to what they took to be the American policy...
...During and after the war there was considerable whining from Israelis and their American supporters about the news media and its coverage of the war...
...The dancing incident symbolized to him the way Sadat had humiliated himself by adopting Western ways and seeking Western approval...
...B ack in Washington, on the sixth floor of the State Department's headquarters in Foggy Bottom, the Near East and South Asia Bureau spent its time processing all the paperwork generated by the embassies in the Middle East...
...When they're trying to kiss and make up, both sides often talk as if American and Israeli interests are identical...
...It is highly likely, he said, that by the year 2000 nuclear weapons will be used there...
...The failure of American mediation may be a mixed blessing, because ultimately mediation isn't the answer to the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...Haranguing my friends about America's mission in the Third World, I felt sometimes as if I had fallen out of a time capsule from the early 1960s...
...Carter was less skillful, but he had the good sense to follow Sadat's lead and to commit his own prestige to the peace process at a crucial moment...
...It was Nasser who led the Arabs into the 1967 ArabIsraeli war, urging them on with boasts of Arab military prowess that seem, in retrospect, to have been nothing more than Arab poetry...
...had lost sight of its broader objectives in the Middle East and was drifting toward the disasters of 1983 and 1984...
...In practice, that meant dropping on West Beirut leaflets warning residents to flee for their lives...
...During the period of the Vietnam war, it seemed to me that for the U.S., "doing good" overseas was mostly a neutral or a negative process...
...In the field, American embassies often seemed the last place to go for reliable information about local political developments...
...Yet the outcome of the Begin years, paradoxically, was that it showed the limits on Israeli military power...
...This round of press-baiting was a sad exercise that entirely missed the point...
...The Lebanese army that the officers had been so hopeful about had collapsed...
...The embassies had become large bureaucracies and the staff was too often absorbed in administrative paper work...
...and then waiting for the Great Man to arrive...
...for Arafat, it as an abstraction that is debated in endless conferences and press interviews...
...Westerners saw it as an extraordinary act of political courage...
...Its theme, as idealistic and inspiring as ever, as naive and dangerous as ever, was that America could save the world...
...The U.S...
...they could not destroy Arafat and the PLO as a political force...
...What caused problems for Israel in the summer of 1982 weren't the loaded casualty estimates that appeared in print, or the banal and tendentious TV commentaries, but the daily television images of the war itself...
...and it was evident, perhaps most of all, among Lebanese Christians and Moslems who kidnapped and slaughtered each other at roadside checkpoints because of religion...
...When meeting with Westerners, he will hint, suggest, imply (but never quite say directly) that he does...
...The problem for the Israelis was that these tactics succeeded more in frightening American TV viewers than in intimidating the Palestinians...
...the nation is sharply divided over what to do about the West Bank...
...What these antics demonstrated was that the premise of American mediation in the Middle East—the notion that the U.S...
...Nothing in Israel today is quite the way the Zionist pioneers imagined it would be...
...T he PLO is not only badly led, it is thoroughly corrupt...
...What the U.S...
...The Reagan peace plan never really had a chance...
...We made a study in 1982 of the Palestinian leadership below Arafat," recalls a Lebanese intelligence source...
...It gave a picture of American methods—logistics, training, discipline—putting a shattered nation back together...
...most Americans, regardless of which side they favor, usually begin by denouncing the current U.S...
...What Cairo residents noticed was the fleet of poorly made American buses, whose deafening exhaust noise became known as "the Voice of America...
...The catastrophe will begin, the former official said, with an incident of nuclear terrorism in Israel...
...The U.S.-Israeli relationship is probably the most complex and neurotic in the world of diplomacy...
...Army officers who were supervising the equipping and training of the Lebanese army...
...It was a sad and frustrating process to watch, most of all the final stage in Lebanon, in which terrorists forced the U.S...
...Every day, even as television cameramen sent home more hair-raising footage, the PLO became increasingly convinced that the Israelis were not, after all, going to pound them to smithereens...
...His closest aides, who had worked with him through a career of bravado and bombast, described him as a man overcome by grief about the war...
...Both sides in this dialogue are attacked within their own ranks as "traitors," but they're still talking...
...THE ISRAELIS After a thorough check by Israeli security guards, a visitor can proceed to the inner sanctum of Israeli democracy: the Knesset dining room...
...Ronald Reagan tried to exploit the crisis caused by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to create a federation between the West Bank and Jordan...
...The U.S...
...Pinned down in Lebanon, the U.S...
...The Israelis, with the exception of their Air Force, haven't improved much...
...The sensible military tactic was obvious—a campaign of intimidation that would frighten the Palestinians and force them to leave the city...
...What would happen next, said the former official, would depend on the ability of the U.S...
...didn't seem to be helping in Vietnam, so the answer was to stop doing harm and get out...
...On June 10, 1982 the Israeli Defense Force arrived in Baabda on the outskirts of Beirut...
...As a result, the U.S.-Israeli relationship during the last years of the Begin government became a classic case of the tail wagging the dog...
...Strong American support for Israel—whether you think it's good or bad—is a political fact of life...
...You have to travel a bit in the Middle East to appreciate how rare this sort of democracy is in that part of the world...
...the alphabetsoup collection of Lebanese militias was still fighting its perpetual civil war...
...had this skill as recently as the Kissinger years, and it made diplomacy much easier...
...attacks on the PLO are a conspiracy between the U.S., Israel, and Syria...
...All of this said by Arafat with his head trembling and his eyes popping out of their sockets...
...The poorest Sephardi teenager, with an Uzi submachine gun in his hand, was more powerful than the Arabs who had pushed around his grandparents back in Casablanca or Baghdad...
...Describing this morose behavior, his personal secretary said simply: "He is sad ." It was like watching King Lear in the last act, watching a man tormented by a recognition of his own folly...
...So a traveler must pretend that he has never been in Israel and furnish a passport without the offending Star of David...
...Indeed, if you ask an Arab intellectual now in his 30s or 40s what political experience he remembers best from his youth he is likely to say it was listening to Nasser give his speeches in musical Egyptian Arabic on a radio station called "The Voice of the Arabs...
...embassy officials would have loved to do the same thing...
...Kissinger had a broad strategic vision of what he wanted to accomplish in the Middle East and, by and large, he succeeded brilliantly...
...Though the foreign service and military officers there were often outstanding people, they became preoccupied with the routine of keeping the embassy functioning and, as things got worse, with trying to stay alive...
...The ArabIsraeli conflict carried, quite literally, the seeds of World War HI...
...seems to have lost in the Middle East, by the 1980s, was the ability to manipulate...
...Lebanese merchants, in an unusually magnanimous mood, were accepting Israeli shekels...
...But we could not find one who was workng only for his people...
...The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a classic Israeli maneuver...
...But they were too busy filing cables or arranging visits for American big-shots...
...He blew his first opportunity after Camp David by failing to broaden the peace agreement with Egypt into a solution of the Palestinian problem...
...He had built his entire career on saying "no," in relying on what he liked to call "the fighting Jew," rather than well-meaning mediators...
...Arafat, to put the matter bluntly, has been an abysmally bad leader for his people...
...it would have meant cutting a weak and vulnerable Syrian regime down to size before it could subvert American policy in Lebanon and intimidate King Hussein...
...And most Americans—with the instinctive reaction of a child who touches a hot stove and gets burned— wanted to get as far away from Lebanon and the Mideast as possible, for as long as possible...
...A hundred yards away from Israeli border guards, the Jordanians are officially maintaining the pretense that the state of Israel doesn't exist— that it is a diplomatic leper whose passport stamps aren't fit to touch or even to look at...
...The new Lebanese commander, they said, had fired the old generals and colonels, taken away the fancy limousines, and required all officers to wear proper military boots instead of the Gucci loafers that were so popular with the Lebanese officer corps...
...the political leadership is weak...
...The Israelis rejected it the day it was announced...
...And it seemed to be working again in Lebanon...
...is going to stay in the Middle East, it will have to operate more skillfully and courageously...
...This appalling scenario helps explain why the U.S...
...That would mean a nuclear retaliation against one or more Arab capitals...
...It was Nasser who, after the Israelis had effectively won the 1967 war in the first hours by destroying the Egyptian Air Force, continued to boast to Jordan's King Hussein of his triumphs...
...For Palestinian farmers, Israeli occupation means pleading or bribing for permission to export grapes or plant new fruit trees...
...When a colleague asked him what was the greatest achievement of the Jewish people through their long history, he cocked his head, as if he couldn't quite believe that someone had asked such a question, and then gave a long, deadpan answer about how the Jews had invented "the day of rest...
...The officers said the Lebanese army, with, American help, was beginning to shake off years of inefficiency and corruption...
...At that time, America could manipulate because it was feared and trusted...
...And in most Arab countries, the problems of society, large and small, continue to be blamed on "the Zionist enArab leader, from Qadhafi in Libya to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, tries to claim...
...The premise was that the U.S., because of its friendly relations with both sides, could "mediate" an agreement that would be impossible—unthinkable—without American help...
...The Knesset's non-stop political bargaining, conducted here over coffee and cake, is the embodiment of a nation that sees itself as a large and noisy family—whose members are always arguing and competing for attention but in the end are always united against the hostile world outside...
...What was imagined as a homeland for the Jewish people, which would gather in exiles and end the diaspora, is instead the land of the time-share condominium...
...There is more than enough blame to go around...
...to try to rebuild Lebanon, even if that meant the deaths of American marines...
...It is part of the extremism—the search for unilateral solutions—that is destroying the region...
...But if the U.S...
...The American ambassador was in a daze, walking around in a baseball warm-up jacket...
...Its leaders, in recent years, have spent more time running away from problems than solving them...
...it meant mock air raids over the city in the middle of the night, producing bone-jarring sonic booms and a perpetually sleepless population...
...We had a long talk about what, in the 1960s in Asia, used to be known as "nationbuilding...
...In Egypt, for example, there was an air-conditioned skyscraper full of AID bureaucrats reading reports, studying planning documents, meeting with contractors, writing evaluations—while outside in the sweltering heat the problems of the Egyptian economy grew worse month by month...
...What's more, the new commander had begun to discipline his troops...
...Around the ruined embassy, a company of marines had formed a quick defense perimeter...
...The answer isn't for the two sides to talk to each other through the U.S., it is for them to talk to each other directly...
...In Ronald Reagan's September 1 peace plan, the U.S...
...The fat man making the rounds nearby is Avraham Shapira, the political godfather of the ultra-orthodox Agudat Yisrael party and, for all his religiosity, a political wheeler-dealer who would put the Cook County Democratic party to shame...
...We're there because it's a democracy, and if the big democracies don't protect the little ones, the little ones aren't going to make it...
...Being manipulative in the early 1980s in the Middle East would have meant forcing the Lebanese Christian government to share power with the Moslems...
...Israeli democracy is what honest Arabs covet most from Israel and see as the key to Israel's military strength...
...It makes me sick," he said...
...The good the U.S...
...Finally, what was imagined as an outpost of Western culture is becoming, slowly but surely, a Middle Eastern nation, as the demographic balance shifts away from the European Jews who came in the first waves of Zionist immigration and toward the Jews who came to Israel from Arab lands after 1948...
...There was the usual PLO press-relations nonsense: trekking out to see the ragged troops at the front line...
...Lebanese remember a time when the American ambassador needed only to mention at a dinner party that the U.S...
...The Israelis—above all, their commander, General Ariel Sharon—had been using this strategy of intimidation successfully against the Arabs for 34 years...
...In contrast, Anwar Sadat, who was beloved by Americans and Israelis, was not much liked by the Arabs...
...to abandon what had seemed to me, as much as to those officers in the American embassy, a virtuous endeavor...
...It's dangerous ." My own judgment is that the U.S...
...Today the Israelis remain stronger than the Arabs, but there are some disturbing trends...
...While they struggle to survive under Israeli occupation, Arafat plays semantic games about whether he recognizes Israel's right to exist...
...Yet he had embarked as prime minister on an unnecessary war—what Israelis call a war of "choice"--that had left Israel weaker, in many ways, than it had been before...
...I saw Begin in his office in Jerusalem shortly before he resigned, and I will never forget the sight of that proud old man, his body wasting away because he had lost his appetite, shuffling down the hall toward the door...
...Below them is an array of small parties preoccupied with special interests...
...It was an impressive briefing, the kind American military men give better than anyone else in the world...
...that is, one that doesn't have Israeli passport stamps in it...
...A visitor gets a sense of the social strains brought on by this demographic change the first time he hears an enlightened liberal Ashkenazi, raised on a socialist kibbutz, refer derisively to the Sephardic Jews from Morocco as "the blacks ." For a nation with so many problems, there remained in the early 1980s one fixed beacon: the nearly universal conviction that Arafat and his gang of murderous Palestinian henchmen were "terrorists" who must be smashed...
...It was the same briefing, for that matter, that General George C. Marshall would have given about Europe in 1948 or that General Douglas MacArthur would have given about Japan in 1945...
...when meeting with Arabs, he will generally spout rejectionist rhetoric...
...The administration, by that time, barely noticed...
...which, in Arabic means "Victory...
...the Palestinians are the missing number in the Middle East equation...
...The Arab failure in the Middle East, epitomized by Arafat and the PLO, is one of honesty and courage...
...This sterile debate is part of the problem in the Middle East...
...became a bit clumsier...
...The U.S...
...it is the poor stepchild of a Jewish diaspora that has grown more secure than it once was and doesn't really want to live in Israel, at least not full time...
...ME AMERICANS Over lunch in a fashionable restaurant in Washington, light years away from the torment of Beirut, a former National Security Council official explained why Americans should care about the Middle East...
...Clutching their automatic weapons, their eyes darting at a landscape that had suddenly turned hostile, those muscular young marines, average age 19, looked vulnerable and frightened...
...The marines had been killed, the Lebanese government was collapsing, and the conventional wisdom back home was that it all had been an absurd waste of time...
...Many of its high officials have made considerable fortunes shaking down Arab governments for protection money, selling their services to foreign intelligence services, or simply converting PLO funds to private use...
...tried to capitalize on the weakened state of Arafat and the PLO to draw Jordan's King Hussein into the Camp David process...
...The problems that were so evident in 1984 are symptoms of a more basic difficulty: Israel, as a society, has begun to lose its way...
...In shaping American policy in the Middle East, the State Department "Arabists" simply aren't a match for the pro-Israeli lobby and its supporters in Congress...
...should get out of Lebanon...
...By February 1984 the Americans had been driven from Lebanon...
...they could not force the Syrians to capitulate...
...was serious...
...to try to negotiate a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, even if that meant manipulating all the parties to force a deal...
...Begin blew his second chance in 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon...
...administration...
...If I learned anything in the time I covered the Middle East it was that all sides are part of the problem...
...It was the spirit of Ayatollah Khomeini and Rabbi Kahane, of religious fundamentalism applied to intractable problems...
...NEA" should have been the nerve center of American Mideast policy...
...But by the time of the Reagan administration, the great American mediation machine seemed to have run out of gas...
...It was a rare opportunity to work toward a settlement that might give the Israelis a generation of peace...
...By 1984 not even the 16-inch shells of the New Jersey could convince Lebanese that the U.S...
...This sense of shame—above all a fear of being shamed before Israel and the West—is a pervasive theme in Arab culture...
...By the end of the Lebanon campaign the Israelis had achieved the worst possible outcome: they had convinced a large segment of Western public opinion that they were bloodthirsty killers, and they had convinced a large segment of Palestinian and Arab opinion that they were paper tigers...
...What is striking, reviewing this history of American mediation efforts, is that with each new peace initiative, the U.S...
...The economy is a mess...
...In less than a week the armored units of the IDF had raced to Beirut, bypassing areas of strong resistance and leaving them for mop-up crews...
...After the embassy bombing, people in the Middle East began to realize that the Americans couldn't even protect themselves, let alone bring peace to the region...
...The standard Israeli procedure in responding to terrorism is to strike back harder than the original attack...
...He has refused to make choices—to choose honestly whether the PLO will be a military organization, trying to overcome Israel by force of arms, or a political organization trying to negotiate the best deal possible for its constituents...
...Perhaps the reason these assembled worthies of the PLO were never willing to negotiate a settlement of the Palestinian problem, the mayor said, was that they knew the moment they did so the free ride would be over...
...Maybe she's talking to Eliahu Ben-Elissar, former ambassador to Egypt, who is chairman of the Knesset foreign relations committee...
...I liked Begin and admired many of his qualities...
...I had heard Arafat often enough, by that time, that I knew most of the lines by heart: the Palestinians are not the Red Indians...
...We're there because it's a nice little country at the mercy of a bunch of vicious thugs...
...Although the traveler is obviously coming from Israeli-controlled territory— indeed could not be crossing the bridge at all without the approval of the Israeli passport authorities on the other side—the Jordanians require what is known as a "clean passport...
...It is a measure of the weakness of American diplomacy that in Egypt, our most important Arab ally, CBS News knew that Anwar Sadat was dead before the American ambassador did...
...Recognizing the hopelessness of American mediation, Israelis and Palestinians have begun talking to each other...
...Lebanon marked the high-water mark, or perhaps the low-water mark, because it was the first time American soldiers were fighting and dying for the sake of the broader "peace process...
...We're there because it's the right thing to do, I would say...
...But I think he was a bad leader who squandered an opportunity to make a lasting peace with the Arabs...
...could be an evenhanded broker between the Arabs and Israelis— was wrong...
...You were having trouble sleeping maybe...
...and they could not suppress Palestinian nationalism on the West Bank...
...The problem was that the Israeli "liberators," having pushed all the way to Beirut, didn't know what to do next...
...The Israelis, for all their might, could not remake Lebanon...
...That is something that is regularly proclaimed by politicians from both parties, and it's true...
...For the sake of a perverse sense of dignity, they have refused to negotiate a settlement to a conflict they know they cannot win by force of arms...
...The Arab refusal to deal with the reality of Israel is part of a deeper corruption of politics that afflicts the Arab world...
...and the Israeli army is still bogged down in an unpopular war in Lebanon...
...About an hour after I left the embassy, it was rocked by a huge explosion...
...There were close-order drills and calesthenics...
...That was something on which Mozart-loving kibbutzniks and Moroccan-born policemen could agree, and it provided a kind of escape valve for Israel's internal problems...
...it was evident among Palestinians who regarded Israel with a crude racism and would have liked nothing better than to drive the Israelis into the sea...
...Army officers who, an hour earlier, had been explaining to me how we were going to save Lebanon...
...It was evident among Israelis who cared passionately about the welfare and national aspirations of Jews and consigned Palestinians to another moral universe...
...government, mindful of Arab sensitivities in such matters, provides Americans who travel regularly to both Israel and the Arab states with two passports so that the self-delusion evident at the Jordanian border post can be politely maintained...
...What was planned as a secular Jewish state is instead becoming a religious one, with elaborate administrative powers granted to the rabbinical authorities and the orthodox religious parties...
...In most of the Arab countries, dictators cling to power using the same tired slogans about Arab nationalism and the destruction of Israel that, for a generation, have taken the place of creative political thought...
...At about this point someone would say, "Yes, you must have had an interesting time in the Middle East," and change the subject...
...It had worked brilliantly in three major wars, allowing the tiny Israeli army to trounce much larger Arab forces...
...What was wrong was to try these things and fail...
...and the Soviets to contain the crisis...
...I have tried to set down here a brief account of the short-sightedness and stupidity that I saw on all sides during the time I covered the Middle East...
...Instead, Begin encouraged more Israeli settlements on the West Bank and got into a legalistic argument with Jimmy Carter over whether he had promised a settlement freeze...
...The Middle East is a rough neighborhood...
...With each war the Arabs have become better armed, better trained, and better able to assert their natural advantage in men and material...
...At some point the trend lines will cross, and the Israelis may find themselves in a war they cannot win, save through the "victory" of nuclear weapons...
...Victory...
...But inevitably there will be another, and perhaps this brief catalogue of folly will be useful for the next wave of hopeful American peacemakers...
...As I wrote from Beirut at the time, "The Israeli dilemma is how to appear belligerent enough to frighten the Palestinians, without seeming so belligerent that they alienate critics at home and in the U.S...
...Yet despite the generally high quality of the individual foreign service officers, it didn't function well...
...One of the few bright spots in the Middle East these days is that this process of direct communication has begun...
...There at one table, is Shimon Peres, the Labor party leader who is now Prime Minister...
...The behavior of Arabs and Israelis in this miserable conflict reminded me, on occasion, of professional wrestlers—of the guy who puts his thumb in his opponent's eye when the referee isn't looking and then, when the referee notices, throws up his hands in a gesture of innocence and shouts, "Who, me...
...We're there because we don't want to be pushed around by a two-bit country like Syria...
...Because the buildings in Tel Aviv are frail, mostly without steel girders or reinforced concrete, the firestorm caused by the nuclear explosion will produce enormous damage and loss of life...
...It can't make Arabs and Israelis love each other, but it can guide them—or prod them —toward agreements...
...Arafat has failed in the basic obligation of a political leader...
...But it didn't...
...Compromise simply wasn't his style, and he seemed almost grudging in signing the Camp David agreements...
...Begin had devoted his entire life to the state of Israel...
...Nasser...
...As the Israelis surged across the border, the PLO forces mostly scattered and ran...
...There is not one of them who could be elected to be the moukhtar [mayor] of the smallest village in the West Bank...
...Nearby is former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who is probably saying terrible things about Peres...
...Daily calesthenics...
...it meant shelling the city from sea and land, and bombing it from the air...
...isn't even-handed, it is strongly pro-Israel...
...the Arabs blame the Israelis and the "Zionist Lobby," by which they mean American Jews...
...tried to advance the peace process...
...The resignation in August 1983 of Menachem Begin—obviously a shattered man—stated more sadly and eloquently than any press commentary that the war had been a disastrous mistake...
...It suggests a powerful sense of inferiority toward the West, which I suspect is the driving force behind the rise of Islamic fundamentalism...
...It was, with different details, of course, the same briefing that American officers had given 15 years earlier in Saigon, or in the Laotian hills...
...The Israelis would defy American pleas and suddenly pull their troops out of the Shuf Mountains in September 1983, triggering a disastrous war, and the American response, a few months later, would be a new strategic cooperation agreement with Jerusalem...
...It is especially sad, when there are so many brilliant Palestinian doctors, university professors, and businessmen, that their international symbol is this bald little man with the stubbly beard...
...Even the blessing of Israeli democracy seems a curse these days: a desultory campaign in 1984 produced an inconclusive result, and, after much haggling, a coalition government headed by two losers—Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir...
...Yet in so many other ways Israel is .a nation in trouble...
...We found that some were working for the Israelis, some were working for the Americans, some for the Syrians, some for the Saudis, some for the Libyans, some for the Egyptians...
...For a man like Begin, that recognition must have been agony...
...it devised tactics rather than strategy...
...But as I think back over my time there, I am left with an odd question that applies to the Middle East, Vietnam, and the rest of the untidy Third World: Is it possible for the United States to do good abroad, to make the world better...
...It was a short-sighted, foolish decision, and the Israelis paid for it twice over—once in losing a precious chance for peace and again in the additional lives lost in Lebanon...
...But among many Arabs, it was seen as an act of capitulation...
...They will look for the most likely suspect— Iraq, perhaps, or Syria, or Libya, or maybe all three...
...But most of all, a successful American policy in the Middle East would have meant manipulating Israel...
...American journalists could and did travel the length of the country, back and forth, talking with the leaders of every militia and political faction...
...For whatever reason, I would get angry when I heard people say the U.S...
...he produced Israeli disengagement agreements on the Syrian and Egyptian fronts...
...The siege of Beirut presented the Israelis with a painful conflict between military and political priorities...
...At another table is Geula Cohen, loudly arguing the policies of her ultra-right faction known as Tehiya...
...Perhaps I just got tired of hearing lectures about security at the Marine compound from newspaper columnists and TV reporters who wouldn't have known a truck bomb from a Welcome Wagon...
...worked so hard during the past decade to negotiate a Mideast peace settlement...
...Instead, he has tried to have it both ways—to talk peace and war at once...
...In these sessions, we saw an expansive and humorous side of him that was usually hidden from Americans...
...That still seems to me the right view of Vietnam...
...America can't save the world, but it can use its power wisely and efficiently to help countries like Lebanon...
...Not only was President Reagan reluctant to get involved himself in peace negotiations, so was his secretary of state, George Shultz...
Vol. 16 • November 1984 • No. 10
