A parting shot

By Gamil Mattar
In a few days President William Jefferson Clinton will leave the White House never to return. It is doubtful that historians will treat him kindly. And if they do, it will be due to his character more than it will be to his actions regarding the manifold circumstances which arose during this particular time in history.
There is insufficient scope here to offer an exhaustive analysis of Clinton's tenure; he was a controversial person in office at a dramatic time and he leaves behind a controversial legacy. What concerns us here is that portion of his legacy that pertains to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Clinton's acuity and extreme pragmatism are widely acknowledged, to the extent that he has been accused of being excessively opportunistic for his early realisation that he needed to gain the sympathy of American Jews on the grounds that they constituted the ethnic community in the US most capable of steering US foreign policy at one of the most crucial moments in US history. The US had only recently taken possession of the keys to international hegemony and was not sufficiently prepared for that role.
Within the space of a few months, communism had collapsed and, for the first time, capitalism became virtually uncontested as an economic ideology. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the US at the helm of the international community, in charge of a world too dazed to realise the true nature and impact of the changes that had taken place in the international order. Iraq invaded Kuwait, encapsulating in an instant that extended to many weeks these transformations. If some consider this development one of history's flukes, it was nevertheless the moment the US and Israel had been waiting for in order to set the Arab-Israeli conflict on the course to a final settlement.
The 1991 Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid was convened and, again, mirrored the state of the international order. Russia, claiming that it was still the world's second greatest superpower, was a co-sponsor. Europe participated on the grounds that it was on the point of becoming a united international power capable of rivalling the US and Russia. The Arabs were there because they could no longer refuse to participate in a settlement process, having been sobered by the lesson of the Gulf War and with the weight of their debt to the US hanging over their heads.
At the time, Washington was not certain whether it would need all of these partners because it was still unsure of its ability to rule the world by itself. Nor was it fully aware of the extent of the Soviet collapse. It was now up to Clinton to test Washington's strength to determine the true strength of Russia and Europe and to take advantage of the favourable circumstances in the Arab world following the Gulf War in order to make a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict. No expert himself on Middle East affairs, Clinton relegated this task to Israeli experts, or more precisely Jewish Americans loyal to Israel. These loyal elements were known when Clinton selected them, when it became clear that US peace efforts would fail, and when Dennis Ross, the US official responsible for these efforts, delivered a statement to that effect. But is it sufficient to assert that the US's abysmal failure in the Middle East after eight years of hard work was, in fact, the failure of the mandate Clinton gave to a handful of Jewish Americans who, in essence, were one of the parties of the conflict or, at least, blindly biased in favour of Israel?
Such an explanation is, in fact, insufficient. The failure of the peace process had many authors. I believe that all the parties, without exception, were responsible for the outcome of the process that the US initiated in Madrid. From the outset, all of the parties involved accepted Washington's monopolisation of the role of mediator, or helmsman, of the peace process, and, by acceding to this monopoly they conferred upon Israel the right to veto, the right to choose who may or may not intervene, the right to bring the process to a halt or to resume it and, finally, the right for pro-Israel Americans to negotiate on behalf of the US and Israel with the Palestinians and other Arabs. As a result, the European contribution dwindled to the bare minimum to the point that it did little more than remind the Europeans that they were there purely out of Israel's indulgence. This reality was driven home with every visit undertaken by European Middle East Peace Envoy Miguel Moratinos, who performed no more than the role required of him, which was to accompany European officials on their tours of Israel and Gaza, and to smile for the cameras as he confirmed once again that the US is in charge and Europe has no intention of competing with it.
Many parties are responsible for the failure because they never came together to demand that Washington admit that it had failed and that it should, thus, relinquish its tenacious grip on the management of the peace process and admit that the cause of its failure was its unmitigated bias towards one side. The Europeans cannot be solely blamed for failing to secure a more effective role in the conflict, as the EU is still testing its wings in international diplomacy and does not wish at this stage to enter a confrontation with the US over the Middle East. The EU's position is based on, at least in theory, its focus on mobilising all of its energy to confront the US on other more vital issues such as Europe's autonomous deterrent capacity and the race for influence in Eastern and Central Europe.
The Arabs are at fault because of their tendency to overestimate their weakness. They do not believe that they have friends in Europe, Asia and Russia, all of whom have told them that they are not as powerless as they assume and that might in the world of globalisation is no longer an absolute. In the past year alone, the Arabs demonstrated that they had the power to assert themselves with regard to oil, and to setting the pace of normalisation with Israel and standing up against Europe in the Marseille Conference, which aimed at enhancing cooperation between the Arab world and Europe. If Arab states, as a form of protest, had refused to receive the US-Israeli envoy Dennis Ross once they had established his true intentions, they may have been able to redirect the course of the process that Ross and his colleagues were propelling recklessly towards disaster.
But has the peace process actually reached the verge of disaster? In a word, yes. When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak threatens Egypt and Jordan with war, we can say that this process and those that paved the way to it are defunct. The utterance of that threat alone compels Arab countries to resume the arms race -- if they had opted out or decelerated their participation over the past quarter of a century -- because it means that Israel will not refrain from threatening war, even in the event of a final settlement with the Palestinians. After all, the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan were presumably final, yet now these two countries are being threatened with a comprehensive regional war.
The peace process failed because the US presented the Palestinians with proposals that, after all these years of negotiations and reaffirmations of the commitment to UN resolutions, should never have been mooted. The proposals, moreover, constituted a flagrant breach of good faith and a deliberate affront to the adversary's dignity -- something that should have been respected so that it can be tapped at critical moments. The peace process failed because the US made it unequivocally clear that it had been deceiving the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs. The proposals tell us pointedly that the US supports the extermination of the Palestinian people, even though by means other than physical annihilation because the Nazi holocaust had been a sufficient lesson for the US and the Jews about the need to respect human life, rights and dignity.
There remains a final question. Why did Clinton forward his proposals when he was perfectly aware that they were unacceptable? Were they some kind of farewell gift to Israel and American Jews or a reward for Senator Hillary Clinton's Jewish supporters in New York? Were they an embodiment of the outgoing US president's frustration at not being able to crown his presidency with a success in the Middle East and a last-ditch attempt to cast the blame for his failure upon the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs? Or, do they represent a deliberate attempt to escalate tensions in the Middle East as part of a strategy to make things as awkward as possible for the new president who is about to enter the White House in a few days?
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In pursuit of clarity 4 - 10 January 2001
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