It seems somehow fitting that this week’s Annapolis Conference
on Palestinian Statehood, featuring appearances by Israel, the
Fatah leadership of the Palestinian West Bank, Saudi Arabia, Syria,
and other regional players, will be taking place just over a year
from the time that President George W. Bush is scheduled to leave
office. In what has become somewhat of a time-honored tradition
among recent American presidents, President Bush, like Bill Clinton
before him, has turned a hopeful eye to the Levant as a solution to
his “legacy” problem as the time for him to leave office draws
near.
Like his predecessor, the Bush and his presidency stand to be
remembered largely for poor choices, big-government policy, and
abysmal public relations rather than for any large successes in the
domestic or foreign policy realms. In an attempt to correct (or
obscure) this, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are
venturing forth into the well-traveled territory of the
Israel-Palestine conflict, in hopes of succeeding where all others
have failed and creating a lasting peace between the Jewish state
and her Arab enemies.
Unfortunately, as it has done in other areas of foreign and
domestic policy to poor result, the Bush administration has once
again decided to ignore history, and are attempting to negotiate
this “Middle Eastern peace plan” — built, of course, on Israel’s
giving away both land and sovereignty — in the same fashion, and
with the same terms, as those who have failed in the past have
done, while inexplicably hoping for a different result.
The apparent drive to salvage their legacy before it is too late
has driven the administration to make several mistakes in its push
for Middle Eastern peace through the Annapolis conference, whose
purpose has been radically altered since it was first proposed by
the President last summer as a means of measuring the progress of
“Palestinian institutions.”
The first, and arguably the largest, of these mistakes is the
fact that the administration is allowing Palestinian and Arab
representatives a seat at the negotiating table (and thereby
conferring legitimacy upon their positions in the exchange) without
setting the recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a
precondition. Unfortunately, the President used his position as
head of the negotiations to issue ultimata to Israel,
while kowtowing to Arab governments in hopes that the promise of
concessions (rather than a desire for actual peace) would spur them
to show up at Annapolis. An example of this is Syria, a state that
has officially been at war with Israel for nearly 60 years; the
Damascus government agreed to attend only after it was promised
that the potential return of the Golan Heights would be “on the
table.” Rather than making concessions to Israel’s neighbors in
exchange for their promise to simply grace the conference with
their presence, the administration should have made clear that
stipulating that Israel has a right to survival is a requirement
for beginning any ‘peace process,’ rather than being used as a
point of negotiation by regional representatives.
The second of these mistakes is the decision to follow the lead
set by previous administrations and failed negotiators, who set the
precedent of unilateral concessions by Israel as a starting point
for peace negotiations. Among the massive concessions the
administration is asking Israel to make this time in the name of
“peace” is the abandonment of Judea and Samaria and a return to
pre-1967 borders — a move which would not only make the over
100,000 Israelis living in those areas into refugees, but, more
importantly, would also eliminate the security buffer currently
created by the Territories of the West Bank, thereby deeply
threatening the Jewish state’s security. In an era when Arab
fighters are employing rockets and other standoff weaponry, moving
the border of an unregulated Palestinian state up to the border of
Israel would not only endanger Israeli citizens living in those
border areas, but would also put major coastal cities like Tel
Aviv, which is a mere eleven miles (18 km) from what would be
Palestinian land, well within range of Katyusha rockets.
Further, the administration is expected to propose the transfer
of sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem to the
Palestinians and the surrendering of Israeli sovereignty over the
sacred Temple Mount in that city. As if that weren’t enough, an
agreement regarding the so-called Palestinian “right of return”
(the right of Palestinians to re-populate the areas they left or
were driven from during the 1948 war for Israeli independence) is
expected to be on the table, as well. Were this last to be agreed
to and acted upon, Israelis would immediately become a tiny
minority in their own country.
The third major mistake lies in the administration’s assumption
that the Palestinians and their leaders, as well as the surrounding
nations, actually desire peace with Israel in the first place,
despite the fact that history seems to clearly show otherwise.
Since the last Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire was agreed to last
November, inhabitants of the Gaza Strip south of Israel have
launched nearly 400 homemade Qassam rockets (fashioned from water
pipes — was anybody wondering why Gaza has no infrastructure? —
and rebar, and filled with nails and ball bearings) at the Israeli
town of Sderot, as well as at the Israeli power plant which
provides Gaza with electricity. Though Secretary Rice has publicly
stated her belief that the Palestinian people hold the same
fundamental values and worldview as Americans, and are equally
desirous of peaceful, prosperous lives, a brief look at Palestinian
state television clearly demonstrates just how different the
Palestinians’ view of “quality of life” is from Americans’ and
Israelis’. The glorification of suicide bombers (or “martyrs”) and
the veneration murdering Israelis as the ultimate goal to strive
for in life — on children’s programming — is standard
fare on both Hamas and Fatah-funded state television. The sermons
and speeches aimed at adults are far worse.
In April of 2004, President Bush wrote a letter to then-Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon in which he reiterated his commitment to
Israel’s keeping of the “defensible borders” created in 1967 when
the tiny Jewish state took on its massive neighbors and defeated
them in battle. Unfortunately for Israel, it appears that the quest
for legacy has led yet another American President to attempt to
tread the path of least apparent resistance to Middle Eastern
“peace.” Thus far, this path has always passed through Israeli
concessions and Arab gains, with no positive results, and it is
most unfortunate that the man who has arguably been the most
pro-Israel President in recent history would cast reality aside and
follow in the failed footsteps of his forbears.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be “solved” in the mere
fourteen months that President Bush has remaining in office. It
especially cannot be solved through unilateral Israeli concession,
many of the details of which almost exactly mirror the concessions
that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to, and PLO leader
Yasser Arafat walked away from, under Clinton. The fact that the
Bush administration is going down this well-traveled path in the
last months of its tenure clearly demonstrates that cliched
attempts at legacy-saving are more important to the President and
his Secretaries than are meaningful policies.
Further, the fact that Bush and Rice are going about doing this
in exactly the same failed manner that their predecessors Clinton
and Albright did only seven years ago (in fact, Rice consulted
Clinton, as well as former President Jimmy Carter, on how best to
go about negotiating a peace settlement) demonstrates that the
decision-makers in the administration are apparently content to
maintain, for the duration of their remaining time in office, the
same lack of historical and practical understanding that led them
into the other foreign and domestic policy mistakes that they have
made to this point.
