LONDON – There is a telling passage in the latest book by Patrick Buchanan – the former ultra right wing Republican presidential candidate, who actually often speaks a lot of sense. He tells of visiting the disgraced but still astute ex-president Richard Nixon. Just before they take their leave Buchanan’s wife asks Nixon a question. “What do you think are the prospects for Israel’s future existence”? “He extended his right fist, thumb up”, Buchanan writes, “in the manner of a Roman emperor passing sentence on a gladiator, and slowly turned his thumb over and down.”
Hamas, the radical anti-Arafat fighting group in Palestine, has always asserted- at least until its remarkable volte-face in Cairo a month ago- that they were determined to drive Israel into the Mediterranean. For them 700 years of Arab ownership of all of old Palestine cannot be overturned by the romantic-religious decision of the British foreign minister Stanley Balfour and his prime minister, Lloyd George, to allow the Jews to create a homeland on the territory of the then recently defeated Turkish Empire. But now it appears a new force has picked up the baton that Hamas perhaps has dropped. It is Al Qaeda. The bombing of the Jewish holiday retreat in Kenya and the recent pronouncements from Osama bin Laden’s inner circle suggest that Israel will be a more serious target for future atrocities. And bin Laden makes no bones about his ambition- to push the Jews into the sea.
Nevertheless, we live in fast moving times. Very senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic now realize the dangerous predicament that Israel through its stubbornness has got itself into. Even intimates of the Bush family, in particular Brent Scowcroft, the still influential ex national security advisor to the elder George Bush, believe that this is the time for the U.S. to make a major move to broker a final peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “It would show U.S. determination to deal with the one issue that is the primary lens through which the Arab world views the United States”, he recently wrote. This, he says, in a masterfully calm understatement, “would reduce the appeal of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups and the negative reaction that would ensue should force against Iraq prove necessary”.
Given all we know about the degree of antipathy for the U.S. that now runs through whole swathes of the Arab and Islamic peoples such an initiative would not come a moment too late. How could a majority of the Islamic people not be worked up? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is on the public record as saying 70% of the West Bank should be part of Israel, which would leave a future Palestine state with a small fraction of what it rightfully considers its possession. Even when he is in a conciliatory mood he talks of a Palestine that covers only 40% of the West Bank and 70% of Gaza. The process of Jewish settlement on the West Bank, which the first Bush administration tried hard to stop, even threatening to suspend aid to Israel in the effort, has skyrocketed under Sharon. As the Financial Times recently reported, “A situation in which Jewish settlements existed as islands in a Palestinian sea is giving way to one of Palestinian islands in a sea of settlements.”
This was not how the authors of the misconceived Balfour Declaration saw it. This is not how the membership of the UN saw it (including all the permanent members of the Security Council) when they voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947. And in fact it is not how most of the top policy makers of the Bush administration see it, exempting Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
We have little time left to escape the two equally awful choices that are coming to confront us: the driving of the Palestinians off most of their historic homeland or the driving of Israel into the sea. Everyone, exempting bin Laden and Sharon- including now Yasser Arafat and certainly including a majority of Israeli public opinion to judge from the polls- knows that the solution was mapped out on Bill Clinton’s table at Camp David. And equally, everyone with knowledge of the negotiations knows of the refinements to that historic enterprise successfully worked out between the two sides at Taba in Egypt a few months later. And also everyone knows that the statement made in February by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia removes the great worry of both Arafat and Clinton that the heavyweights in the Arab world might not accept such a deal.
Despite the violence, despite the suicide bombers and the atrocities of the Israeli army, despite the obsession of the White House to get Saddam Hussein out of the way before they think about anything else, the time could not be riper for a final settlement. It will take from Washington, as Scowcroft says, “the same kind of skill, audacity and laser-like attention” given to persuading the Security Council to line up behind America on the disarming of Iraq. The inference of what Scowcroft is saying is this: if Secretary of State Colin Powell could persuade President George Bush to take Iraq to the UN he can persuade him to bring Israel and the Palestinians to a final negotiating table.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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