Arabs and Israelis: A Political Strategy
The problem in the Arab-Israeli peace process in late 1985 is not how to arrange a negotiation. The problem is how to make it politically possible--even imperative--for leaders in the conflict to commit themselves to negotiate. Making peace is first a political process, and only second a negotiating process, as the experience of the 1970s taught us. The intense negotiations of that decade, from the shuttle diplomacy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger through the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, followed political steps that had already demonstrated commitment to negotiation and lowered the human and psychological barriers to peace.
Harold H. Saunders, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs from 1978 to 1981, is now Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington. He is the author of The Other Walls: The Politics of the Arab-Israeli Peace Process.
The problem in the Arab-Israeli peace process in late 1985 is not how to arrange a negotiation. The problem is how to make it politically possible—even imperative—for leaders in the conflict to commit themselves to negotiate.
Making peace is first a political process, and only second a negotiating process, as the experience of the 1970s taught us. The intense negotiations of that decade, from the shuttle diplomacy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger through the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, followed political steps that had already demonstrated commitment to negotiation and lowered the human and psychological barriers to peace.
In 1977, we American diplomats were focusing on working papers and diplomatic formulas designed to arrange a resumption of the Geneva conference. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt saw that the real obstacle was not the failure to find the right formula but rather the doubts among both Arabs and Israelis that the other side was sufficiently committed to peace that it would change its position in negotiation. Accordingly, he went to Jerusalem to dramatize a message that Israel could not ignore: that Egypt accepted Israel and was committed to making peace.
More recently, by contrast, a political strategy has been lacking, a strategy that held reasonable promise of making an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian negotiation happen. To be sure, some preliminary steps were taken. Early in 1985, King Hussein of Jordan, Chairman Yasir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt laid foundations for an Arab coalition to negotiate peace with Israel. For his part, Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel confirmed his belief that the integrity of the Jewish state depended on negotiating peace with Jordan and the Palestinians.
Yet over many valuable months, no one constructed the scenario that would join these two political tracks. No one successfully laid out a sequence of diplomatic and political steps, a scenario designed in substance and timing to meet the political needs of each party so leaders could commit themselves to negotiate.
Such a scenario serves two purposes. First, it outlines a sequence of actions to see how the political and substantive trade-offs would fit together to build an environment which could permit negotiation to begin. Second, it keeps the record clear on a pre-agreed series of interrelated actions and responses.
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The purpose of recent American diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East is simply stated. It is to stop the fighting and bring the peace effort back to the point, now nearly three years ago, when Ambassador Gunnar Jarring was setting out on his mission to help bring about an agreed Arab-Israeli settlement on the basis of a unanimous U.N. resolution. It is a measure of the deterioration since that time that these modest proposals, the results of which are uncertain as these lines are written, have generated optimism by their initial success in breaking the fixed pattern of reliance on force alone. For they came at a time of gloom over the prospects for settlement and of alarm over military events which could bring major Soviet gains or grave risk of war. Participation of Soviet pilots and missile crews in military operations had already limited Israel's mastery of the skies over Egypt and might in time shift the balance of power which now favors Israel. Once that balance is upset, President Nixon has said, the United States "will do what is necessary" to restore it.
After more than 50 years of Zionist activities-among them many decades over the international diplomatic front-and on looking back on the experiences gained in the 20 years of the existence of the state of Israel, I am beginning to have doubts as to whether the establishment of the state of Israel as it is today, a state like all other states in structure and form, was the fullest accomplishment of the Zionist idea and its twofold aim: to save Jews suffering from discrimination and persecution by giving them the opportunity for a decent and meaningful life in their own homeland; second, to ensure the survival of the Jewish people against the threat of disintegration and disappearance in those parts of the world where they enjoy full equality of rights. In expressing and explaining these thoughts, I want to make it clear that I have no doubt as to the historical justification and moral validity of Zionism. The concentration of a large part of the Jewish people in their own national home, where they are masters of their destiny, seems to me to be the only way to solve what has been called for centuries "the Jewish problem."
Most Americans approach the problems of the Middle East with a pro-Israeli bias - and rightly so. The desire of a dispersed people for a homeland cannot help but enlist the sympathy even of those with no Jewish roots, nor can any sensitive man or woman fail to be moved by the countless tales of valor and self-sacrifice in the years both preceding and following the creation of Israel. The brave Beauharnais with its desperate human cargo challenging the British destroyers, the poignant sage of the Exodus-47 - these and many similar incidents must recall for all Americans proud chapters from our own earlier history. Set against the grim background of the Holocaust, the story of Israel is a continuing chronicle of grit and enterprise, in which the Entebbe foray is only the most recent footnote. Yet the wonder of it all is that, while engaged in a seemingly endless struggle, the Israelis have managed to turn a desert into a garden.
