Capitol Hill Series   |   Briefing Series   |   Special Forums   Unedited Version For a printable version of this transcript, click here. Middle East Policy Council Twenty-fourth in the Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy   With the 'Process' Dead, What are the Prospects for Peace?   Speakers: W. Patrick Lang Formerly the Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East Shibley Telhami Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, University of Mayrland Christopher Ross Formerly the U.S. Ambassador to Syria Moderator/Discussant: Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., President, Middle East Policy Council Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 562 Washington, D.C. Thursday, March 8, 2001 9:30 – 12:00 P.M. Transcript by: Federal News Service Washington, D.C. MR. FREEMAN: Good morning. I'm Chas Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council, and it's a pleasure to welcome you all here this morning. For those of you who do not know the Middle East Policy Council, and I suspect that is very few of you, we are a small organization, not a membership organization, that does three things. We raise politically awkward, incorrect, difficult or embarrassing questions for public discussion. We have the pleasure of putting the question; we don't have to provide the answers. We try to recruit a diversity of people as discussants to provide the answers. Second, we take the transcript of those discussions, held in premises like this one, and they become the first item in our quarterly, "Middle East Policy." I think there is a Xerox of the next issue, which should be out, actually, in about a day or two -- we had hoped that we would have it for today -- where the last discussion we had, which was on U.S. policy toward Iran, keynotes the issue. And I might say that for those of you who haven't seen this, it is lively and it is, by international survey, the most often-cited publication in the field internationally. And the third thing we do outside Washington and, therefore, invisible and irrelevant, I suppose, is we try to teach high school teachers how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We've taught about 10,000 teachers. We think we reach somewhere between half a million and three-quarters of a million of students, high school students, a year through this program. Confusing a mind or two with facts is, we think, a good thing, and we intend to keep this up, even though the Washington policy community does not give a fig about it. That brings me to the discussion of the day, and the question we have posed for discussion -- and we've now been joined by Shibley Telhami. Welcome, Shibley. The question we have posed for the day is, Now that the peace process appears to be dead -- and in many people's minds, it was a substitute for peace rather than a path to peace, so it is not universally lamented in its passing -- now that the peace process is dead, admittedly in a region where it is said that from time to time, Ted, things are resurrected, is it possible for us to find a path to peace? It is clear that many things have changed, and if there is a renewed American-led search for peace in the parties, as Secretary Powell has said, the United States will not allow ourselves to be in the position of being more eager than the parties for such a peace. We will not again open ourselves thereby to manipulation by parties who are not prepared to make peace, but are prepared to use our eagerness for peace to their advantage. It is also likely that our Lone Ranger role, begun during the time of Henry Kissinger, will not survive into the next phase, and it is very likely that we will have to take account of greatly diminished credibility in the Arab world for the United States. I have just come back from the Gulf where the hospitals are full of wounded children from the Occupied Territories. Most people have focused on the number of deaths. There have been 12,000 wounded; 12,000 Palestinians wounded, and several hundred Israelis wounded over the period of the last five months, and this has taken its toll on attitudes -- this plus the widespread availability of real-time television coverage of atrocities by both sides in this struggle. It is, as I said, fashionable in some quarters to deride the peace process as having been, as I said, a substitute for peace rather than a path to it, and yet it is clear that that process registered a great deal of progress. Not only those things that are obvious -- the Camp David establishment of a relationship, an official relationship between Egypt and Israel and the resolution of border problems between those two countries; subsequent normalization of relations between Amman and Jerusalem, between the Israelis and Jordan; but the erosion of the boycott, the erosion of the barriers to trade and investment in the region which have brought major benefits to many in the region; and the fact that it has become normal, no longer extraordinary, for Palestinians and Israelis to sit down and talk with each other, and even for Israelis to appear in international gatherings with others from the region -- all of these things are now, I think, in jeopardy and none can be taken for granted. In many respects, fear has replaced hope in the region. Israelis now feel as insecure as Palestinians have long felt, and both sides seem to be imbued with a grim determination to inflict pain rather than to negotiate with each other. It appeared to me -- and the panelists may disagree, and I will be interested in their views -- that Mr. Arafat lost his mandate to negotiate; it was withdrawn from him at the end of the summer in the aftermath of the ill-timed and ill-prepared Camp David meetings in June. The Palestinians are not in a mood to negotiate. And it is clear that the Israeli electoral process withdrew Mr. Barak's mandate to negotiate. And it is obvious that both sides are now, if not led by hard-liners officially, led by the spirit of the hard line. There is, in fact, a serious prospect for a further escalation of violence between the two sides in the days to come. There is already the risk that the use of assassination as a tool of political control by the Israeli government will lead to counter-assassinations. And the figures that I cited -- some 350 Palestinians dead, 12,000 wounded, roughly; and it's much smaller figures, about 60 Israeli dead and a couple of hundred wounded -- are, many people fear, just the beginning. What can be done about this by us, as opposed to the parties? What should be done by the United States? Where do our interests lie in this situation? How can Americans preserve and advance those interests? That's what we're here to talk about. And we have a very fine panel to do so, although, as I said at the outset, I deeply regret that an airline strike, or complications with airline travel, held Yossi Shain, who many of you may know is a very thoughtful and articulate visiting professor at Georgetown, a former head of the Political Science Department at Tel Aviv University, and visiting professor at virtually every American well-known university over the years -- someone who would have contributed greatly -- is not able to be with us. I, therefore, am going to rely on those of you in the audience, who have never been reticent about expressing your views, to do so and ensure that we have the balance in the discussion that we always strive for. We have with us three of the panelists, distinguished panelists we had hoped for. Let me just say a word about each of them, and then I will ask them to come, one after the other, to the podium for about 10 or 12 minutes each. Those of you who have been to these sessions before know that I am ruthless and cruel and vicious as a chairman, and I have been known to drag people kicking and screaming from the podium, to deprive them of their microphone if they go on too long. So we'll go about 10 or 12 minutes each, and then that will leave ample time, I hope, for a lively discussion. Pat Lang, I think many of you know. He is president of Future Management Systems, FMS, Incorporated. But for many years he was a very prominent official in the defense intelligence community in charge of human collection. He was the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism. At various points he served abroad as an attache, and he's taught at West Point. And he is a frequent traveler to the region. He's been in the region that we're talking about today, I think three times in the last seven months. And so we're honored to have Pat with us to lead off. The second speaker will be Shibley Telhami, who for a Washington audience really needs no introduction. Shibley is, of course, the Anwar Sadat Professor at the University of Maryland. He's also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He's a frequent contributor to the op ed pages of the American press, and a very highly respected analyst of the issues before us. And finally, Ambassador Christopher Ross. Chris Ross, again, probably needs little introduction; the former ambassador to Algeria and to Syria. Someone who served, actually -- I think probably with Don Rumsfeld -- during the period of American mediation of the Lebanon and Middle Eastern issues at the beginning of the Reagan administration. Chris is an Arabist and an expert on the region whom we're delighted to have with us. With these few words, let me invite the first speaker, Pat Lang, to come up. And it's all yours. MR. LANG: Thank you, Ambassador Freeman. It's a great pleasure to be here today. Actually, as I look out across this group of faces, there are so many of my former colleagues and friends here that I almost feel that we should have met in the coffee shop to discuss this. But those of you who know me know that I always express my inner thoughts on things as directly as possible, and -- because I've been out of the government for six years now. And a combination of business and personal interest has taken me to Palestine and Israel at least three times a year for the last three or four years, and on one occasion, four times a year. I think I could say that I'm fairly current on what's going on there. I came back from there 10 days ago. And I'd just like to prefix what I'm saying that even though I am a retired government official of long service, my remarks represent not only not the United States government, but no government in the world. There are a lot of people here who would say that they never did represent any government's opinion on anything. But in any event, I have to tell you that having just come back from there again that I'm afraid, from my point of view -- and this is strictly my point of view -- there is very little good news. I can't see anything very encouraging over there at all. The last two trips I've been on through the region in -- were in December and then just recently. And in December I was there with a board group from the Council on Foreign Relations, and we went around and visited a lot of the people who actually make a difference on both sides in this mess. And there were -- the people on the board were the kind of people who -- their presence requires folks to open up and talk about what's really going on. I was by far the most junior person in this group. And I would say and in mid-December we were at the point when we visited the Labor people -- and I'm not going to name them. But we visited the Labor people involved. I thought that they divided up basically into two groups: there were the defeated and the semi-defeated. In the defeated group there were prominent names that you're familiar with, some of whom have recently rejoined the government, who clearly deeply believed in the possibility of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians and were willing to make what to other Israelis seemed like enormous concessions in order to get to that point. Those people, in mid-December, were in a kind of total funk, I guess you'd have to say. They had lost all confidence in what they'd been trying to do. They didn't really understand why they had lost. They couldn't quite grasp why it was that Arafat and his people had not been able to accept what they thought was an exceptionally forthcoming deal at Camp David. And they basically had no idea what to do. They were just prostrate, emotionally and psychologically. The other people in the Labor Party, the semi-defeated, were people who mostly were rather like me. They were retired military officers or other kinds of security apparatus-connected officers who were in the more rightward side of the Labor Party. And these guys were still hopeful that a negotiation could be carried on with the Palestinian Authority. But they had come to the conclusion that they couldn't do anything really substantive until they, in fact, managed to convince the Palestinians that the al Aqsa intifada was an unprofitable line of effort. And they were convinced that this was a centrally directed and operated campaign, that it hadn't been set off by Sharon's trip to the Temple Mount or anything like that. When you added those two groups together, what you had was a kind of feeling of hopelessness of stasis. Now, in this last trip, when I went back this time, I went down and talked to some of the same folks, including some people I know who are the monied interest behind the Labor Party. It shouldn't be any great surprise to anybody that Labor, even though it has a socialist agenda, has a lot of very rich Israelis in it. And they're the people who pay for political campaigns and foreign consultants and daily polling and all that stuff. Basically, the people who put Barak in office. And these folks -- this was the week before the Labor Party voted to go into the coalition. They were determined to have that coalition but without Barak, in whom they had lost all confidence whatever. But they wanted to be in the coalition because they had received signals, they told me, from Sharon that in fact he wanted their presence because he didn't want to follow a kind of course of action which would be dictated by an entirely Likud and Shas setup. So they were determined to do that. So I asked them, "What's your program if this works out that way?" And they said basically that what they understood would have to be done would be that sufficient pressure would have to be put on the Palestinian insurgency -- you have to just call it insurgency or insurrection now -- to restrain it within certain geographical bounds that they would find acceptable, and then they would start to treat that area in which the Palestinians were confined as if it were foreign territory, and basically would expect Arafat to administer that properly and to keep it -- keep the lid on there. So I asked them, I said, "Well," I said, "you gentlemen, a lot of you went to the best staff colleges, and you read Clausewitz. And they said, "Sure." So I said, "Well, you know, what about the part about war is a process of opposing wills? You don't seem to have taken their will into consideration in this very much." They said, "No, no, we can handle this. We'll manage it. Don't worry about this." On the same trip, I went down to Gaza with this group to see Chairman Arafat. He, too, seemed to be in a rather prostrate emotional condition. At that point, he had not been to the West Bank in weeks and weeks and months, and I understand he's only now been once back. And my impression is, from sources I have on both sides of this conflict, that he has essentially lost control of the West Bank; that the inherent conflict between the former outside leadership and the former inside leadership in the Tanzim and Fatah organizations has gotten to be so great that there is a real issue as to whether or not he has any control or can ever reestablish control in the West Bank, and whether or not he could do it without Israeli assistance. Now, on the Palestinian side on this trip, I found that one of the features of my activity there was that I decided to go around and visit a lot of villages around Bethlehem that had been really badly shot up. And the way I did that was that I went around with the director of the Catholic Middle East Welfare Association office in Jerusalem. And he and I and a colleague, we went to Beit Sahoor, Beit Jalla and Bethlehem proper and other places around there, went into the houses of people who had literally had their houses torn to pieces by the Israelis. And it was a nasty day in January, February. In Palestine it was snowing and raining, and there were five-foot holes in the walls of people's houses, and the inside of their rooms are blown to pieces with high-explosive tank ammunition, bits of furniture all over the place, smashed appliances, women and kids standing around out in the rain getting wet and cold. And so I looked at these positions from which the activity back and forth is taking place. And I would have to tell you that from the point of view of the villagers, at least in this area where the villages are still predominantly cushioned, I would say, what is occurring that they tell me is that people come into their neighborhoods at night and -- who they don't know -- and they fire at Israeli positions or Israeli towns, and this provokes return Israeli fire. And instead of shooting with AK-47s which are rifles, like the snipers do from the Palestinian side, the Israelis return fire with main tank guns, 40-millimeter anti-aircraft fire, and on occasions, TOW missiles, which do a real job on these houses. I think it's miraculous that more people have not been killed in this process. On the Israeli side, I think what is going on there is that the government and the Ministry of Defense have given these field commanders, who are mostly rather junior officers, instructions to retaliate, and these guys have taken this far beyond what the instructions were, to the extent that they're not just retaliating at night against specific fire, they are, in fact, shooting at houses during the daytime with tank guns, apparently because they're bored or they think they need some target practice or something. That happened twice while I was Beit Sahoor. And you haven't lived till you're standing out in somebody's backyard and a main gun tank round hits a house 50 yards away with an armor-piercing round in the middle of the day. I mean, you know, I think that cannot be excused. And it's evidence of the fact that the Israeli army continues to be rather poorly disciplined. And it has been my experience in the past that, contrary to the legend, they are not very well disciplined. I think they're exceeding their instructions. In any event, it seems to me from talking to everybody on the ground that on the Palestinian side, people have got themselves into a state in which they have become kind of madly self-sacrificial. People are talking about how if they have to sacrifice their grandchildren to the cause, that they will do that. That if, in fact, it takes that in order to get the Israelis to give up and go away, that they're prepared to do that. Well, this is crazy talk. And I did my best to explain that to people, but they're not listening. So I would say that in fact that this is going to go on and on and on and on. And the suicide bombing which we saw in Netanya -- several people told me that -- including one very senior prelate, that he thought that would -- that that kind of thing would start and that it would -- it would be a long campaign, maybe a year long. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you for cheering us up so much. (Laughter.) That was charming. MR. LANG: Glad to help. Glad to help. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. I'd like to ask Shibley Telhami to come up and give us his assessment, not only of the current situation, but any thoughts he has about what, if anything, might be done about it. MR. TELHAMI: Well, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure for me to speak on this forum. And I really want to compliment Chas and Anne Joyce for, I think, turning Middle East Policy into one of the finest journals on the Middle East. And those of you who don't read it regularly should. I think the numbers bear it out. It's been -- it's become the most widely cited journal on Middle East affairs, and I think that's -- really the credit goes to both Chas and Anne Joyce. Let me begin my remarks by telling you at least my interpretations of where we are now. I think you've heard the situation is bad. I think it's worse than you have heard. Let me tell you why, first of all, and what are the real dangers that we're facing, and then I'll sort of make an assessment as to where we go from here. Obviously, there are lot of horrible things going on the ground. We have a collapsed peace process. We have a lot of violence. We have a lot of tragedy. We have a lot of fear. We have a lot of insecurity. All of these add to the story that you've heard, which is that things are bad, which they are. I think that part of the story we've seen before in cycles in the Arab-Israeli conflict. We have seen episodes of ugly violence, episodes of fear, threat, a collapsed peace process. So in that sense, this is not highly unusual in the historical process of the Arab-Israeli conflict. I do think it's worse in the following way. I think we're on the verge of what might be called a major transformation of the nature of the conflict, in a way that may not allow it to be resolved any time in the foreseeable future. I think if you look at the history of the conflict in the past 20 years, to the extent that there has been a major breakthrough, especially on the Palestinian-Israeli front, it has been a breakthrough in the framing of the conflict from an ethnic conflict that seemed to have no solution, where the game between the Palestinians and Israelis seemed zero-sum, where the claims were maximalist, into a nationalist conflict of two national movements that had mutual recognition, as expressed in the Oslo agreements, to have essentially a reconciliation based on the establishment of two states, one Palestinian, one Jewish, side by side, in historic Palestine, to resolve that conflict. That kind of framing of the conflict as a nationalist conflict, not as an ethnic conflict, not as a religious conflict, created room for compromise and was really the basis, provided the basis of the negotiations that have been ongoing for the past seven, eight years. And to the extent that there was hope, it was hope that this would present the basic agreement that you certainly are going to have differences on borders, differences on the nature of security, but the basic outlines of an agreement were defined as a basis for historical reconciliation. What we have seen, I think, in the past few months, especially since the collapse of the Camp David negotiations, is the beginning of the transformation of that conflict from a nationalist conflict into a religious ethnic conflict. And I think if we fall into that, if this transformation is allowed to be completed, we will be back in 1948. We will be back where it might take another generation to fully resolve this conflict. We can argue as to what was responsible for the beginning of this transformation, but I think Jerusalem had a lot to do with it. I think the issue of Jerusalem and the way it was framed in negotiations has helped the beginning of a transformation of this conflict into a religious conflict. I think it's -- there's no question that in the Middle East, the issue of Jerusalem is bigger than the issue of Palestine. We have seen the broadening of the conflict from a Palestinian-Israeli conflict to an Arab-Israeli conflict and to an even Muslim-Jewish conflict. Certainly it's an issue that plays into the hands of opposition movements in the region, most of which are Islamists. And it certainly plays even on differences within Israel itself, among Arab citizens and Jewish citizens. And we have seen more confrontation on that score that has, in a way, evoked the ethnic aspects of the conflict. So I see that as a real danger that is increasing every single day that you don't have a peace process. I think that danger is exacerbated in the short term by the possible collapse of the Palestinian Authority. I think the Palestinian Authority clearly has been a very important component of this nationalist framing. It provided a secular, nationalist framing of the Palestinian movement. The PLO emerged as a nationalist movement intended to fulfill the aspirations of the Palestinians as a people who had a right to self-determination in a state of their own. And if that project collapses, I think it would very quickly accelerate the transformation of the conflict into a religious-ethnic conflict, which will set us back for many years to come. There are two sets of dangers immediately that the Authority faces. The first is a very severe financial threat. The Authority is heavily dependent on outside aid, it's heavily dependent on tax revenues of its own, tax revenues that it would collect from Israel. All of these sources are under threat. It certainly cannot provide for its constituency, which, by the way, has suffered tremendously in terms of numbers; GNP has declined by 50 percent just since September. In some sectors, the decline has been closer to 80 percent, particularly in trade and construction. And certainly the Authority cannot begin to fill the needs of its constituency. But even its immediate bureaucracy -- security services, the broader bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority, the ability to pay salaries, to keep them supported, is decreasing by the day. So there is an immediate crisis that the Authority faces that's strictly financial. The second crisis is political. I think the truth of the matter is that since the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority has never had what might be called a military option of its own; it has had only one option, that is a political option. It can only deliver an agreement. It cannot be an army, it does not have a police force that can serve as a conventional army because the minute it employs its force as a conventional army, Israeli deterrence starts kicking in because Israel has a much higher capacity. The only militant component to the Palestinian -- that Palestinians have today is decentralized and essentially can only be carried out by those who are not directly centralized under the Palestinian Authority. And as a consequence of that, I think they truly do not have a military option, and if they start employing it, they will lose by the day. And, therefore, who's going to pick up this, other than their opponents, especially Hamas, and they will start losing control very quickly. I think that's the one way to understand the rising influence of the Fatah faction, of Barghouti, and seemingly independent from Arafat is that Arafat actually needs that as a way to protect his flank in the back from Hamas, because he has to have some credibility with the public that some of his people have a military option, not just Hamas. I mean, that is one way to interpret that particular relationship. Let me just talk about a third component, which is there is a sense, obviously, of anger in the Palestinian areas because of the losses, but there's also a sense of empowerment that the intifada brings. I think this, in fact, if you look at the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza and their frustrations with the Oslo Accord, was that they have taken away that sense of empowerment that came with the earlier intifada, and in a way they felt helpless, not only in their relations with the outside world, like the U.S. and Israel, but also in facing the Palestinian Authority. And I think there is a sense of empowerment that comes with the intifada that makes it harder for people to want to give up. People thought that was a high price that they paid for it by engaging in the Oslo Accord, and it's going to be harder for them to want to give it up in the short term in exchange for negotiations that they don't trust. They have not trusted the process, so it's hard to imagine what could be put on the table that would persuade them that they have, you know, to put that aside and, therefore, engage in negotiations that are going to be protracted, at best, and not going to pay off in the immediate future. Let me just very quickly -- I know, I was just told I only have three minutes -- MR. FREEMAN: That was two minutes ago. (Laughter.) MR. TELHAMI: Well, I just saw it, so let's put it that way. MR. FREEMAN: (Chuckles.) He does this every time. He gets away with it, too. MR. TELHAMI: Well, but, you know, Yossi Shain isn't here, and I've got to tell you the Israeli picture about what the situation looks like in Israel. I think on the Israeli side, there is clearly also a sense of despair, and I think it's a function of two things. On the one hand, the Israeli public's perception of what happened after Camp David is that their prime minister offered more than he should have even, and the Palestinians rejected it. So there is a sense in Israel of rejection of even the -- you know, the kind of deal that some of them may not even have supported. So there is that psychology of maybe they don't want peace with us after all, if they reject this. There is a sense of psychological insecurity. It's interesting because Israelis are today more powerful than any time in history in conventional and non-conventional terms, vis-a-vis the Arab states. But there is a genuine sense of public insecurity that is, in part, a function of what happened with the intifada, which they don't know how to control, and in part a sense that the Arabs will never accept them because of what happened in -- their interpretation of what happened after the collapse of Camp David; and, in part, I think, because they believe that Arabs don't take them seriously anymore, there is a sense that their deterrence doesn't work. This is tied not only to the intifada, but also to their unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. And as a consequence, there is a sense that Israel has to assert itself in a way that would remind people that it's still powerful, and obviously this tendency and the Palestinian tendency go against each other very much, because they -- they drive a cycle of mistrust and violence. They don't help each other. That's what the politicians face, and I think it doesn't look very good. Is there an opportunity to move forward? Sure. Clearly, Sharon could surprise everyone, turn out to be a de Gaulle. He does have the opportunity. He's a hawk. He's got a National Unity government. If he wants to, he could. Can Arafat extend a hand suddenly in a way that he has not done before? Of course he can. I'm a political scientist. I think if I look at the past, I would have to predict that those are not likely to happen. They could happen, but it will take a miracle. For the U.S., one last word. I don't think that the U.S. -- I agree with the posture that really the U.S. is going to have to wait for the parties before it engages in negotiations. I think ultimately the biggest mistake that Barak made was to come to Clinton and rely on him too much. They had to make a deal on their own; there had to be bilateral negotiations. This an existential issue for both parties. They needed to resolve it. On the other hand, the U.S. can be instrumental in breaking some of the stalemate in the short term, particularly in terms of creating conditions for them to come back to a meaningful negotiation. They need an interlocutor. The U.S. cannot stay out, not only in order to -- because they need somebody to mediate, but frankly, if you have an escalation, which is the likely outcome if we don't have any negotiation, it's going to impact U.S. interests in the region very rapidly, and the U.S. can't sit on the sidelines. Thank you very much. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you, Shibley. Before I invite Chris to come up, I'd like to ask him to ponder briefly and maybe address the related -- the question that Shibley just raised, really, and that is, you know, there are an enormous number of people in this country who care very deeply about the deplorable situation that we have just heard described -- 6 million American Jews, 8 million American Muslims; many of us who are neither who are deeply distressed to see this situation. So there is a cost in humanitarian terms in our hearts that is very high, but there are other costs, and this is what I would like Chris to speak of a bit from his experience elsewhere in the region. And I mentioned these, and that is the alienation from the United States, the reduced credibility and acceptability of the United States elsewhere in the region -- I would say, accelerating unacceptability of the United States as a partner, whether in political, military or in commercial terms, elsewhere in the region -- because of our perceived complicity in this situation that has been described. I think we have gone well past the point when we can deny that there is a connection between what happens in the Holy Land and what happens in the broader region, but what is the nature of that connection, and how seriously should we take it? Perhaps if Chris doesn't want to address this, we can get into it immediately following him, when we will turn to an open discussion. Chris? MR. ROSS: Good morning. Chas, thank you for asking me to join this very distinguished panel. I must say that Pat and Shibley have painted a very gloomy picture. I have no silver lining to bring you. It is a very difficult, tragic situation in the region today, and Chas is quite right to ask, What can we, as concerned members of the international community, do in this phase? One thing I would say right up front is that in some respects, the immediate task has changed. For the last almost 10 years since Madrid we have been engaged in a process of building peace, of making peace. I think what's happened between Palestinians and Israelis has taken us far behind that, if you will. We've taken several steps backward. About two weeks ago, the organization that I've been working for, Search for Common Ground, held a meeting in Prague that brought together Israelis, Palestinians, other Arabs, Turks, Iranians, ostensibly to look at the regional implications of what was going on between Israelis and Palestinians. What happened, of course, was that the entire first day was spent inventing. Between Palestinians and Israelis, the situation was such that the Palestinians couldn't come to Prague, so they were there by speakerphone -- quite an innovation in this kind of meeting, but it worked quite well. The fact is that as the two sides spoke, it became very clear that they are operating from completely different realities. Each side sees what is going on in a diametrically opposed way. It is an issue of we -- us and them; we and they. We are right, they are wrong. And there has been a very sad retreat into the grossest kinds of stereotypes about each other. All of this to say that it's not very fruitful at this point to try to get people together to talk and to negotiate. We need to do something before that. What is that thing? In this meeting in Prague, the one thing that everyone could agree on was that there had to be a mutual reduction and, if possible, cessation of violence. And the operable word there was "mutual." It would do no good for us, as an outside party, to call on one party or another to reduce or end the violence. If it is not done in a balanced, mutual way, violence is going to continue and, indeed, to escalate. There was a sense at this meeting that the way things are going, the risk of what one person called "full-scale war" was growing. And, of course, every party at the table decried that; nobody wants war. And yet, people said to each other, "Nobody wants war, but leaders aren't prepared to take the kinds of decisions that will turn us away from that eventuality." It was a very discouraging meeting, which illustrated that there is a lot preparatory work to be done before we can even conceive of a resumption of negotiations. Since I was ambassador Syria for a number of years, let me address briefly what comes out once in a while in the press: Is there some other option here to continue the peace process? Is there a Syrian and Lebanese option, given that the Palestinian track is in such difficulty? The straight answer is no, there isn't. The Syrians are in a wait-and-see mode. They are prepared to talk about peace, but it's on the same terms as it was when father Assad was in power, now that the son is in power: Full peace for full withdrawal to the line of June 4. That has not changed. But one thing has changed. You'll recall that the peace process began with the Arab parties at least nominally committed to coordination among each other. After Oslo, President Assad decided that since the Palestinians had taken their own way, Syria would take its own way in pursuing international objectives. In a recent statement, son Bashar has reestablished the linkage between the tracks, and the formulation now is there can never be peace between Syria and Israel as long as the Palestinian problem remains in crisis. So the Arab linkage is reestablished. That's inevitable, given the prominence that the crisis on the Palestinian track has acquired in both the Arab and Muslim world as a whole. Chas touched on the loss of credibility that we have suffered. I think it's genuine, and over time, very corrosive to the full range of our interests in the countries concerned. But as a first step, a determined effort to get both sides to cease -- to scale down and hopefully to end the violence would be, I think, a very salutary step, one that would begin the process of restoring our credibility, on condition that the appeal was balanced and that we were not seen as somehow condoning one side's resort to violence while condemning that of the other. I think I'll leave it there for the moment and we can continue in discussion. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Brevity is as appreciated as wisdom in this gathering, and you provided a bit of both. I'm going to lead off with questions. Let me ask those of you -- with "a" question, I should say, or two linked questions. Let me ask those of you who want to make a comment or ask a question, if you would be kind enough to do so at the microphone so that we can do full justice to your comment or question in the transcript. And please identify yourselves, if you would, as you do so. I want to ask the panel as a whole if they would comment on a couple of points. Just now, Ambassador Ross -- Chris, you very, I think, sagely argued for a mutual reduction of violence. How realistic is this, I would like to ask people, given a mindset on the Israeli side that the Palestinians must be thoroughly punished and cowed into renewed submission, and on the Palestinian side, as I read it, that the fighting will continue until the settlers withdraw. How realistic is it to argue this -- this is, in fact, quite close to the administration's position, which was very tempered. Colin Powell did not call for a cessation of violence; he seemed to recognize that violence is inherent in the situation. He called for a reduction in violence. How realistic is this? And second, a related question: Since it's an article of faith, Pat Lang mentioned, among many in Israel, and some here, that somehow or other all of this is manipulated by Yasser Arafat, whereas others in the Arab world see Mr. Arafat as running around to the head of the parade in order to appear to lead it, is there anyone with whom you could negotiate such a reduction of violence on the Palestinian side at present? Is Mr. Arafat in charge? And if he is not, how do you negotiate with an anarchic group of very angry people? Let me ask Pat, perhaps, to start off on this and -- [TAPE CHANGE.] MR. TELHAMI: -- It's an expression of -- that's what I see -- empowerment; the sense of empowerment through this intifada is there. And therefore it's hard to imagine that anybody could persuade every segment of the Palestinian public to put that down, unless you actually have something really concrete, like real withdrawal or real agreement imminent, or something of that sort, but not in exchange for a process that has no certainty of succeeding, because they've tried that many times before, and they felt that the Oslo accords really neutralized that power. Palestinians' strategic interpretation of Israel's ultimately entering into an agreement with them at Oslo was that it was it was really the power of the intifada, the Israelis essentially saying, "We cannot control the West Bank and Gaza." And therefore there is a sense of empowerment that comes with that. So it's hard to do strategically. Now the Israelis have the exact opposite situation, where they believe that they are not going to be manipulated by force into an agreement. This has been a kind of an axiom of Israeli strategic thinking in the region, that they will never sign an agreement under duress, that they will wait until power favors them, and they will sign it only on their terms. And therefore it's very hard to see how the Israelis are going to just suddenly accept, at least in the short term, Palestinian demands under what may be seen as duress. And they were going to send a message that they can inflict even higher pain than the Palestinians have accepted. So I see that as a real major problem. Let me just say, about Arafat, obviously, the major issue is whether Arafat himself is in control or not. I mean, this has been an issue that has been debated. I can give you my interpretation. I believe, first of all, that much of the intifada was spontaneous. I do not believe, despite what one of his assistants said recently, that that was the case. For one thing, look at what happened in the Arab world. You had several hundred thousand people, you know, demonstrating in Morocco, thousands of people demonstrating in Yemen, Oman, Cairo, or within Israel itself, the Arabs who went to the streets, some of whom got killed in confrontations with the police. Clearly, those were not manipulated by Arafat directly. So you can imagine that the people who care most deeply about this issues in the West Bank and Gaza are going to revolt on their own. But that's not to say that Arafat himself has not seen the violence as tactically useful in the negotiations and has manipulated it on occasions. But those people who died, like the teenagers who are being killed, are not dying for him. In fact, many of them don't like him, and some of them may be even willing to do a lot more about it. So they're not direct soldiers of his cause; they're doing it on their own. What can he do to, therefore, control the violence? I think he can do the following. He can certainly stop attacks by the Tanzim. I do not believe -- my interpretation is, Barghouti is not independent. I think Arafat has the capacity to question him tomorrow if he wants to. He is not an independent player on the ground. I think Arafat needs him, and he needs him for credibility, because, as I said, if he doesn't have him, he's going to lose to Hamas tomorrow, as long as you don't have negotiations. He needs to allude to the fact that there is a Palestinian option that is separate from the negotiations, and only Barghouti can provide it, because Arafat himself cannot provide it. So you have to see it in that strategic calculus. In order for him to crack down, though, he would have to pay a very heavy price. And the next time around, it'll be harder for him to crack down, and he's not going to do it unless he has something concrete to offer to the Palestinian people, and it would have to be a lot more than "Let's start the negotiations." So it's very tough. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Chris, you've started something. MR. ROSS: (Chuckles.) One of the advantages of being last is that there's not much to add. Is it realistic to call for an end to violence? I'm afraid that violence is fated to continue, for the reasons that Pat and Shibley have elucidated. Nonetheless, for the future, I think it's important for the United States to take a position against violence on a balanced basis. One of these days, something is going to happen that permits a resumption of negotiations. At that time, I think it will be important for us to be seen as a true, honest broker and true mediator. MR. FREEMAN: This is Insha'Allah bukra mumkes (ph) as a policy. (Laughter.) MR. ROSS: Inevitably, though, yes; violence continues. The short-term issue is how to make sure it does not erupt into full-scale war, either by miscalculation or provocation, and here southern Lebanon, among other things, is a case in point. But the fact that violence isn't going to stop doesn't mean that we shouldn't be calling for it to be reduced or stopped. As to whether there is somebody to negotiate an end to violence, too, I'm not sure that, at least on the Palestinian side, the issue is so much one of negotiating with someone. Much of the Palestinian violence is the result of the daily conditions of life -- the blockades, the closures, the shellings, et cetera. One thing that would make violence much less likely would be an improvement in those conditions, and an improvement of those conditions would also feed into the political process that the Palestinian leadership must consider. But under current circumstances, going to the Palestinian leadership of any sort and trying to negotiate an end to violence isn't going to work. MR. FREEMAN: Would you go to the microphone, please? Q Jerome Siegel from University of Maryland. Let's say we take it as a given that the violence is going to continue and will accelerate. It seems to me that there's a tremendous difference between two possible contexts in which that would occur. One of those contexts is in which there is a clear sense, especially to Israelis, or to some Israelis, and to people in the United States and the rest of the world that there is, in fact, a Palestinian proposal, a Palestinian desire to end the conflict on specific terms -- that is, a situation in which there would in fact be a Palestinian proposal for what would be an acceptable settlement -- versus another context in which in fact there is no offer that's clearly out there. Right now, what we've got is largely the second context, and certainly from a perceptual point of view, which is really the important one, we've got the second context. What that means is that, especially on the Israeli side, as the dynamic of the violence starts to accelerate, what you're going to have is greater unification; that is, unification is already the expression of that sense that there is no Palestinian proposal, and as the violence accelerates, there's going to be more of unification. Even from a Palestinian point of view of trying to teach the Israelis and to teach Sharon that there is no Sharon alternative, there is no right-wing alternative, that itself only makes sense within the context in which there is also a perception that there's some other alternative, so that Israelis can break away from that. And they say that the price is too high to -- let's say, in other words, you believe that the negotiations broke down over this about refugees or that about the Temple Mount and so on, but you believe it's still possible. At some point, if it turns out that the Palestinians were prepared to pay a higher price than the Israelis, in fact, that strategy is possible. It could work. Israelis could back off, but only if there's a perception on the Israeli side that there really is a Palestinian offer out there. MR. FREEMAN: So, your -- Q And so it seems to me that two things have happened that are tremendous setbacks. One has to do with American policy, which is that we had, I think, mistakenly but understandably, the Clinton administration with its proposals coming off the table. Those proposals were a great step forward, and the Bush administration has essentially embraced that. In terms of American policy, it seems to me the direction that we should go in, in terms of -- is the reinstatement, basically, of an American plan for ending the conflict that'll be out there, that people can react to. And secondly, I think anybody talking to the Palestinians, whether it's Peres or Beilin outside the government or people in Prague through speakerphone or elsewhere, I think should be giving them the message that what we need right now coming from the Palestinians, whether it's Arafat or a group of intellectuals, is in fact a Palestinian proposal with all the details, all the provisos that they want, that will give the Israelis on the left something to say; "There is an alternative." MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much. I think it's a very interesting and valuable comment to make and, in fact, as I listened to you, you were saying that it is entirely natural for Israelis to interpret the conflict as open-ended, if there is no "yessable" proposition put to them about how to end it. I'd like to ask all of the panel to comment on that and maybe comment on whether the same doesn't apply the other way, in terms of persuading those who feel empowered by the intifada to end it, that there needs to be some sort of vision out there that is remotely acceptable to Palestinians. And as a final comment, maybe people would like to address the question of whether at this stage, given our -- given the terrible divisions in our own country, I suspect, about these issues, whether we are capable of formulating an American plan, useful as it might be. I mean, I think it's a very valuable suggestion, but we have politics, too. Who would like to lead? Shibley? MR. TELHAMI: Yeah. On -- first of all, on sort of what was put on the table, if you recall, the Palestinian public's interpretation of what happened at Camp David is very different from the Israeli public's interpretation of what happened at Camp David. The Palestinians don't believe there was a very clear offer, and the Israelis certainly don't believe there was a clear Palestinian offer. In fact, in historical perspective, we have a very strange interpretation, even here in the U.S., or even we, as analysts, of what happened in the past year. In a normal negotiation, you would have to say there's been unbelievable progress made. I mean, you know, there has been more progress made in this past year than in 50 years of Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The gaps were narrowed on all of the important issues. Taboos were broken. Debates began. The differences on some of the issues were relatively small. They continued negotiating until a week before the Israeli elections, at Taba, bilaterally, without American mediation. Why should we have to break it off? What is it about these negotiations that says it's over? Why are we saying it's over? We have to start beginning with that question. Is this a take-it-or-leave-it deal by one side or the other, or is it strictly a function of the changed Israeli politics? Why are we interpreting the negotiations to have collapsed? Why? I mean, that's a question that we have to ask ourselves, because the answer to that question may give us insight into where we stand today. And in normal circumstances, in a normal negotiation, you would say no one side is going to impose the solution on the other. This is an existential issue for Israelis and Palestinians. They're going to have to come to understand it. You've made progress, so why dump it and say it's a take-it-or-leave-it; let's start over? That's a very strange negotiation. So that's where I would start on it, and I don't think it's a question of putting forth a Palestinian plan, because the Palestinians actually counter-offered the Israelis at Taba and at Camp David. There were counteroffers about, you know, percentages. The one issue in which the Palestinians have not yet come forth is the right of return question, which they're going to have to put a proposal on the table that's compatible with Israel's core interest. That's an issue clearly where they would have to do it in the context of a comprehensive deal. As for a U.S. proposal, you know, I'm not sure it's ripe for that. I'm not sure it's ripe for that. I think, I believe the administration should take a position or set of positions on the parameters for settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, including, for example, reiterating some of the very important principles the U.S. has been committed to historically, including U.N. resolutions, and perhaps mention progress made. I think it's very important for it to do it not strictly in terms of advancing the peace process, but also, frankly, they're going to be on the defensive. They were already yesterday. As soon as Powell testifies in Congress, they're going to be on the defensive on the issue. And if they don't have their own positions, they're going to be defending one side or the other, or they're going to be reflecting a congressional position on it. So they really need to stake out a position that they can defend as an American position, both domestically and abroad. So they cannot be seen to be taking positions. That they have to do, but I'm not sure it adds up to a full proposal at this point. MR. FREEMAN: Chris? MR. ROSS: No, I think on both counts I agree with Shibley. What strikes me about the proposals of the various sides and whether they are "yessable" or not is how little authoritative information we end up having about precisely what was said by whom to whom in all these various summits and other meetings. I think all of us are reacting on the basis of partial and, in some cases, managed information, and it's hard to judge the veracity of what's said sometimes. So I take a great deal of what is said about these exchanges behind closed doors with a grain of salt. U.S. plan? I think at this point it is too early for anything terribly elaborate. I think, at a minimum, though, we could go back and reiterate the foundations upon which we and others collaborated in building this peace process, which is to say the principles that underlay the Madrid conference. That's a beginning. MR. LANG: On this trip I was on in December, we went around, and we talked to the rulers of five Arab countries, and then we ended up talking to the Israelis, and we talked to Chairman Arafat. And from each of them, we heard an unending refrain that "here are the terms of the putative deal," and they would run through their terms. And you know what? They were all the same, everywhere. That should have made me deeply suspicious in itself, and recently, in traveling around in Palestine -- you know, I'm fortunate enough to speak the language, and so I've gone around, and I talked to lots of ordinary Palestinians. And one of the questions I always asked them along the way was, "Well, okay, what is it that you would actually settle for? You know, what is your deal for the ultimate settlement here now?" And they didn't have that list of points that the leaders had everywhere. As a matter of fact, they had a very hard time formulating what it is they would settle for. But there's a kind of an inchoate desire for a total resolution of the situation in such a way that they no longer feel wounded in their national psyche. And that is under the impact of the transformation of the conflict into the ethno-religious struggle we were talking about. That is generating larger and larger ambitions, in my view. So I tell you, I think there's a basic division here between the leaders, who in all the years after Madrid and Oslo, came to the position of knowing each other, working on a deal that they could have made, and the ordinary people of Palestine and the Arab world as a whole, who have an entirely different sense of what would be a satisfactory outcome. And that disconnection is probably accelerating in some ways, and is dragging the leaders with them and is a recipe for many more years of what we're seeing right now. MR. FREEMAN: Shibley, I think if Professor Siegel was engaged in a debate with you, he wouldn't let you off quite as easily as you tried to get off. And I apologize to those who are waiting, but let me come back at you with a question, if I may. Why should Israelis believe that there is anything that can appease Palestinian anger and hatred now? What is it that Palestinians might say that would address that very real problem? And why should Israelis believe that anyone -- any spokesperson for the Palestinians has the moral, legal authority to bind all Palestinians to whatever deal is being proposed? I mean, I think Professor Siegel raises a very fundamental issue, and I'd like to hear you address it a little more frontally than I think you did. MR. TELHAMI: Yes, I think it's a very important question. And I think Jerry would agree, could not have asked it any better than you did. I agree that there is a major problem in terms of the way the Israelis perceive Palestinian instinct. I personally think that one of the biggest issues -- there are two problems that have raised concerns in the Israeli public about the way Barak was handling it. It was, one, the beginning of the intifada and the violence, which created a sense that, you know, the Palestinians are still intent on using force, and number two, the insistence on the right of return question, because that seemed to go against the idea of a two-state solution, one of which would have to be Jewish, and therefore the insistence seemed to go against that. And that was not played and, you know, the Palestinians did not make any serious compromise on it, at least until the last minute. So those two clearly raised concerns that the Palestinians intend this more as a tactical end to a broader objective. And I think that's very important to address. How might the Palestinians address that is a very, very important issue. There are two ways. One, I do think that Arafat has a chance, in the same way that Ariel Sharon does, of now unleashing a diplomatic initiative, of saying the right things about historic reconciliations, about reiterating the acceptance of a two-state solution, restating the willingness of the Palestinians to live side by side with a peaceful Israel, based on the U.N. resolutions. And I think, in private, he probably also ought to say something about the right of return as an issue that will have to be resolved in a way that's compatible with Israel's core interest. Now those are things that are within his capacity. I think he can do it. If I were to advise him, I'd advise him to launch a diplomatic initiative of this sort. I don't know that he's capable of it. MR. FREEMAN: I think we probably should move on. Sir, you're next, and then there are quite a number of others in line. Q I'm Gene Bird from the Council for the National Interest and the Washington Report. The rule of thumb for me, on judging the crises in the Middle East, the level of crises in the Middle East at any particular time, is the number of policy and Middle East seminars here in Washington squared, divided by the number of visits by the secretary of State to the area. Having said that, I think the one thing that's missing from all of this, of course, is a really dedicated Israeli or Jewish American on the panel. I realize you tried to get one. We are talking a little bit a in a vacuum here, having to depend on our own interpretation of where the Israelis are. My question is much shorter than my comment. I would like to see what you have to say about the regionalization of the problem, because this has no religious -- also means regionalization, in a much different sense than the United States and the secretary of State and, I believe, Dick Cheney said last week. I have been saying -- and I'm Arab-peninsula-oriented, as you probably know -- I've been saying that the price at the pump is the most important reason for America's involvement in the Middle East, along with concern for the existence of the state of Israel. I don't think that Israel has ever really been under a serious threat of disappearing. And the fact that you have in the government of Sharon at this point Shimon Peres, who was, after all, the one who argued and persuaded Rabin to recognize the PLO, and that was the beginning of a real land-for-peace problem. If you look at Arafat today, you'd say his PA is the equivalent of Amal, and Hamas if the equivalent of Hezbollah. Can you find -- can each of you give us a little understanding of how you see the regionalization work out in terms of American policy? MR. FREEMAN: Chris, do you want to start with that? MR. ROSS: Gene raises a good point. It's clear that this particular Palestinian-Israeli crisis, unlike previous ones, is very directly felt throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and we all know why. It is the emergence of satellite television, live coverage of the various things that happen. This phenomenon has made it possible for wide publics, from Morocco all the way to Indonesia and beyond, to follow things in a much more immediate way than was the case in the past. And this has heightened the dilemma in which governments find themselves. In the old days, governments could take whatever position suited their narrow definition of their interests and get away with it. Now, because of this impact, direct impact of the media, governments are having to answer to a much larger constituency, and we've seen the effects, as Shibley mentioned, demonstrations as far away from the center of the problem as Morocco. But in all of this there is a growing anti-American sentiment because of the way in which we are perceived as favoring one side over another. This is a real dilemma and one that needs to be addressed directly. MR. FREEMAN: Well, Chris, I would say it's more than that. I mean, others will comment. But I think we are about to experience some very serious policy dilemmas we've been able to avoid. When we have a government to whom we are supplying weapons openly proclaiming that it is using those weapons for political assassinations, this causes some real problems in terms of American law and practice. The fact that so far no one has raised this politically is testimony to the great strength of U.S.-Israeli affection, but that affection is not endless, and it cannot in the end avoid these questions being raised. Pat? MR. LANG: Well, I think that's right. You know, in all these wrecked houses I visited, people kept bringing me bits and pieces of expended ordnance. And, guess what, folks? It was all made in the United States, every bit of it. Most of it had lot numbers on it, model numbers and things like this. And I brought a lot of it back with me just to check out to see exactly what it was for. But I think one of the flaws in the way we're approaching the situation in the region is there's a kind of illusion that wants to equate these various Arab countries to European nation states in their purest form and to believe that issues can be detached one from the other. For example, there seems to be a belief that what we do in Iraq has no effect in other places, as in Palestine, and that's not true. All you have to go around and talk to people on the ground, and you'll find that in their minds and hearts, they are emotionally stirred by the other aspects of our policy. And even though in a lot of places like Egypt, ordinary folks may not care about the Palestinian people personally at all, the idea of the collective wrong inflicted on Islam and the Arab world by the action of the Israelis, and us as their sponsors, in their view, is something that is resented deeply. And the issue of Jerusalem cannot be over-emphasized, in my opinion. In fact, you know, you hear people sometimes airily say, "Well, after all, this is a symbolic thing." Yeah, that's true, it's symbolic right. Well, I think someone once said that not by bread alone do men live. And that is particularly true in this case. People feel that very deeply, the fact that the Haram is not in Islamic hands. And they're willing to settle for it to be in Palestinian hands, but they're not willing to settle for it being in Israeli hands. And I've raised this in Saudi Arabia and Riyadh, among very rich people who you'd think wouldn't care about it at all. And one of my colleagues back here, I think, was present when I did that. And there was a virtual explosion when I suggested that maybe Saudi Arabians didn't really care about what happened to the Haram, because I wanted to see their reaction. It is not true. These things are, in fact, all linked. MR. FREEMAN: Shibley? Briefly. MR. TELHAMI: Yeah, I just want to add two broad points. One is that, you know, in the past seven, eight years, one can argue there's been a psychology in the region toward the U.S. Certainly there's been mixed feelings about the U.S., but an assessment that Pax Americana is working in the Middle East, that there's an order that's in place, there's a peace process that's going to end up in peace and people are just going to have to reconcile themselves to that; they're going to have to, therefore, try to be friendly to the U.S., try to position themselves for post-peace, try to reap some of the benefits of that. That's been a psychology that has sort of, you know, balanced a lot of frustrations that people had and put a lot of the hard-liners on the defensive and the moderates on the forefront. And I think right now we have a collapse of that. We have a sense that Pax Americana itself is collapsing and that we have a peace process that has collapsed and people are going to be preparing themselves for conflict. So the psychology changes, the calculations change, assessment of interest of changed, the relationship with the U.S. will change. The second point is also broad. In the past decade, I think, American foreign policy has been largely based on employing power as the main instrument of policy, with minimal regard to public opinion. The assessment has been that Arab governments are authoritarian, we have a lot of incentives and threats that we can employ to get them to behave along the lines that we would like them to behave, and public opinion, yes, is important on the margins, but ultimately they can bring it along when they do. Well, the problem with that policy is sometimes it can work, as it has; however, what you do is you don't build any goodwill whatever for times of crisis. And so what you have in the foundation of the relationship between the U.S. and even friendly countries like Egypt, there's very little goodwill. I mean, there is a certainly public assessment, congressional assessment of Egypt is different from the official relationship, a public assessment in Egypt that's very different from the government-to-government relations. And that ill will and the lack of trust becomes at a time of crisis a very, very hard -- very important issue for the behavior of a government. So we're facing both of these changes that are important. MR. FREEMAN: This, I should note, is not a hypothetical consideration or an abstraction, because at present we have a crisis in the form of a policy that has come to a dead end vis-a-vis Iraq, and a policy toward Iran that has no support anywhere, none internationally. And the administration, to its credit, has put very high on the list of its priorities an effort to find a viable basis for a refocused policy in the Gulf. And the complication of this that is introduced by the sort of public animosity to which all of the panelists have referred is considerable. Q Wallace Sanders, Kuwait Information Office. Jesse Jackson purportedly said that the Democratic Party needed its left and right wing in order to fly. And my question for the panel is whether you have any preliminary thoughts on this enormous 27-minister national unity government in terms of what constraints will it place on Sharon's decision-making, what will be its assets and liabilities for the foreseeable future. MR. FREEMAN: Pat, do you want to start? Briefly, I think. MR. LANG: Yeah. I guess I'm the guy who talks to the Israelis. The impression I had from the Labor Party people was that they believed that if Sharon could not broaden his cabinet beyond the Shas-Likud base, it would last six or eight months and then would collapse, probably due to the stupidity of their actions, and there would be new elections. But conversely, they said that if people thought that the wider the coalition, the more stable it would likely prove over a long period of time, the less extreme it would likely be, and that it might last 2-1/2, three years, or even longer. That's the opinion in the Labor Party. Now, some of these characters are people who are there occupying posts just so that -- they're like political marriages, you know. They're not really going to have a great deal of authority. As I'm sure you know, Wallace, you know, the Israeli government functions on the basis of the big cabinet and then the inner cabinet. And the inner cabinet is the one that really makes a difference. It's interesting to notice who's in this government from the old government and who is not. For example, Ephraim Sneh, somebody I've known for a long time, who was deputy minister of defense in the last government and who was effectively running the show, is in this one as transportation minister. I wasn't aware that he was an expert on transportation matters, but I think that as a member of the right side of the Labor Party, he was wanted there. The guy who is not there, was very interesting, is Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who is former chief of staff, who was transport minister in the last government but never really did much about that. He thought that was kind of a joke, almost. He was the guy, in fact, that Arafat liked to negotiate with, and the other senior people in the PA, and who negotiated with them continuously throughout the bad times of this intifada. And he's not there, and I think that probably says something about the general cast of things. MR. FREEMAN: Shibley? MR. TELHAMI: I think that the most important feature of this government is that it really gives Sharon a lot of leeway. If he wants to be a de Gaulle, he can. If he wants to crack down harder, he can. The first part, I think, would be obvious because, you know, he would certainly have Labor support and he can bring in a lot of his own Likud support for any possible initiative. On the military side, frankly, I think the issue will be driven mostly by the military establishment. The fact that the defense ministry went to Labor is not a coincidence, because if you look at Barak's reaction to the intifida, it's been very, very much driven by military calculations, not political calculations, because of the way Israelis view the issue of security and deterrence. It has a, you know, sort of -- against whom do you retaliate and how do you retaliate? That kind of calculation is driven by tactical military strategy, not by political strategy. And in that sense, if there is an escalation on the Palestinian side, there will be an escalation on the Israeli side, and Labor is going to have to take the fall for it and it will justify whatever Sharon is doing. So I think, really, the critical feature is it's going to give him a lot of options; the question is, how is he going to use these options? MR. FREEMAN: Chris? MR. ROSS: Very hard to answer the question directly. I think anyone who ventures a guess as to what may happen is doing just that, guessing, because there are so many imponderables in the situation. I must say on the Arab side there is obviously the hope that this government will be led by someone who turns out to be like de Gaulle. The Syrians were always fascinated, for instance, with Begin. They remember that Prime Minister Begin is the one who was strong enough to make peace with Egypt, to bring the evacuation of the Amit (sp) settlement, et cetera, et cetera. And they imagine that someday a similar strong leader from the right can reproduce that kind of agreement on other fronts. But, going back to where I started, I think it's impossible to know with any certainty what is going to happen under this government. Q Dick Holmes, National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce. My question is stimulated by Professor Telhami's observation that this conflict has moved from a political process to a conflict between ethnic and religious issues. We know it's starting to have an effect on American business. We've read reports of young people boycotting Burger King and McDonald's. My question is really, when does this process and when does the Arab street start to impact on Arab government purchase decisions, particularly in the area of technology? I mean, that's a market that's now at about $35 billion a year. Arab governments are almost inelastically demanding close to $10 billion a year in telecommunications technology. So, when does this start to hurt American business's competitive position? Is it happening now? We know that Lebanon is now considering -- spent the last year organizing for studying the partial privatization of their telecommunications industry. We know that Saudi Arabia is looking for strategic partners. So that's my question. MR. TELHAMI: Yeah. You know, you heard me say that Arab governments should not be ignored, because I do think it's very important, but I also want to sort of alert people that one shouldn't go to the other extreme. I think people have exaggerated their importance in the past, they have exaggerated the weaknesses of Arab governments in the past. Arab governments have pretty much proven to be robust under very difficult circumstances. They've survived the Gulf War and clearly have managed in many ways to, in some instances repress, in some instances bypass, in some instances affect public opinion, in their behavior. So I don't think one should conclude from all of what happened in the past six months that revolution is about to happen in much of the Arab world. I think that's unlikely. However, I think it's very important to know that it does have a consequence on the policies. Now, it's certainly not going to push Egypt into war with Israel. I think the Egyptian elites in the government understand that short of a real attack on Egypt, the Egyptian Army will not go to war with Israel, no matter what happens with Syria and the Palestinian areas. That's gone. However, I think, short of that, there are a lot of different things that they are willing to do because of pressure that is going to mount every day, clearly. They've recalled their ambassador from Israel. If there is an escalation, there will be public pressure for them to do some other step, and the commerce will be one of those areas that will be affected very quickly. MR. LANG: Well, my impression is, is that although the governments are affected by mass public opinion and are somewhat apprehensive about it and are doing things, such as the thing we just referred to, in order to conciliate the public opinion, that the likelihood of anything happening very soon in the area of large-scale business is not very great, in fact. I mean, it is true that although Arabs probably prefer Italian suits, they also prefer American aircraft. There is a disconnect between different kinds of goods for various things, between luxury goods on the one hand and things of basic usefulness as capital goods and things of that sort. In the case of most of those things, in the Gulf, certainly, and in a lot of other places, people would rather buy American goods. And I think that in fact that it'll take quite a while before there would be much of a large-scale effect on American business, no matter what happens, really. MR. FREEMAN: Chris, as a comment, I would just say that, having just been out in the Gulf region, it is my sense that there is a draw-down in the American business presence in progress, in response to attitudinal change at the consumer level. Retail operations with a strong American identification are suffering. I also believe that Arab leaders in the region will find it difficult to see the enticement of a photo op with an American leader in connection with a large transaction. So while I think people in the region will continue to behave, in many ways, as rational economic decision-makers and they will buy the best products -- which are, by definition, American -- they will also be affected over time if, as everyone seems to expect, this unfortunate situation, tragic situation, continues to unfold in the bloody way that you have predicted. Chris? MR. ROSS: Just very quickly, obviously, the first effects of the situation on us are political, and we see it in the lack of support for certain other policies that we want to pursue in the region. But on the economic and commercial front, a great deal depends on the alternatives that are available, especially with the big-ticket items -- aircraft, telecommunications, et cetera. I think we will find over time that where there is a European or Japanese alternative, whatever that means in this day of the multinational corporation, things will move away from us. But I wouldn't go so far as to predict the old '73 scenario of an oil embargo, because it would not work at this point. MR. FREEMAN: Sir? Q Please forgive me. I am not an expert in the Middle East peace process. So as somebody is coming perhaps from the outside of the paradigm, I may offer an intuitive insight into the process so that all these debates which so much into detail will -- you know, time will resolve that. One major issue is that as a result of sanctions, American interests in energy and the Gulf policy have been definitely overshadowed by the Israeli and Arab conflict. In the last 20 years, 39 percent of proven oil reserves have been taken away from American oil companies, and therefore, in the long term it's a well-known fact that the U.S. interests in the region, national interest, is in jeopardy. That's one thing. Secondly is that, yes, U.S. should reassert its commitment of security of Israel. That's taken. Fine. And thirdly is that it seems to me that while the time is going to play a major factor in formulation of the new administration policy towards Israelis and Palestinians, why wouldn't, with the strong assertion of support for Israel, United States unilaterally indicate and reassert its equivalent, or equal, support for the Palestinians in terms of not only massive financial and economic support to the Palestinians in the Palestinian area, but also in terms of people-to-people contacts, in terms of creation of civil and support of civil associations, in terms of getting regular American people into those regions in order to slow down that process that Mr. Lang was talking about, the public opinion, improve the public opinion's vision of what Americans really are into vis-a-vis Israel. Yes, you are committed to Israel; show us your real commitment. And it does not have to cost anything in terms of jeopardizing U.S. support for the Israelis. MR. FREEMAN: Chris, would you like to comment on that proposition? MR. ROSS: I think there are a great many private Americans working in the fields that you describe. Right now work is not easy, if you're talking about various forms of humanitarian work, to build society, et cetera. It takes a calm mind to benefit from those kinds of activities. There aren't many calm minds in the region right now. But as many private Americans as wish to go out and work, the fact is that populations in the region tend to make a very clear distinction between the U.S. people and the U.S. government. The U.S. people, they love them. "Come, please, let's break bread" and all the rest. But the U.S. government, "Huh, let's not talk about it." And so I'm not sure that the good works of various American organizations and individuals in the Middle East would really, at this point, reverse the image that is held of the U.S. government and its policies. MR. FREEMAN: Jim. Tell us who you are, please. Q Jim Anderson, DPA, the German Press Agency. There seems to be an underlying assumption here that only the United States could serve as an interlocutor. At least I haven't heard anybody mention either the European Union or the United Nations. Is there a role for another party as an interlocutor? Specifically, Chris Ross, did not the European Union mediator play a useful role in opening up the Syrian track? MR. ROSS: He says he did. But from my experience in Damascus and reading the cable traffic at the time from Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Jerusalem, the critical question was always the standing of any given potential mediator with the parties. And the European Union, despite its efforts, Russia, despite its efforts, the U.N, despite its efforts, did not have enough standing, particularly with the Israelis, to play that essential mediating role that we took on. For the Arabs, they recognized that we had very close relations with Israel, but they recognized that that made us potentially quite useful as the only party with significant influence with the Israeli government. So I'm afraid the short answer is, the way the world is structured today, there is no alternative mediator. MR. FREEMAN: Well, that remains to be seen, I think, in the new era. Certainly it's an accurate description of the way things have been. But enough has changed, Chris, that I'm not as confident as you are that the American monopoly is either workable or sustainable in this area. Pat has a comment, then Shibley. And, you know, I think in fairness to Professor Siegel, who can't speak for himself and doesn't mean me to impersonate him, we should let him have at Shibley again. But, Pat? MR. LANG: About four or five years ago, the Council on Foreign Relations Middle East Project started a process in which people from the American government and people from the EU and the various European governments would get together once a year in various parts of the world to discuss what role there might be for the EU or the various European governments in this very way that the questioner asked about. And what has emerged over the years is a couple things. First of all, this is doomed, really, to go nowhere because the Israelis simply will not accept another mediator than the United States. If one of the two interested parties will not accept the mediation of someone else, then there are not going to be mediators. And the other thing is, it's very clear to me that the United States government is also not particularly interested in having other major players in this thing -- as a non-government person, I guess I can say this -- and that the general idea of what the Europeans should contribute to this process is very simple, and that's money, in order to support the institutions of the emerging Palestinian statehood. MR. FREEMAN: Shibley. MR. TELHAMI: Yeah. I think I agree generally with Chris, but just with a couple of, you know, twists. If you look, first of all, at the role of the Europeans, if, in fact, it is true, as I have argued, that at this stage the breakthrough is not going to come through a third party, it's going to have to come through the parties themselves, the third party is going to be a facilitator, in fact Europeans are very well-placed to be a facilitator because if the negotiation is bilateral and you're not bringing the influence of the U.S. -- it happened at Oslo, it was not held in Washington -- for them to conclude their agreement. So that's one. Number two, I think the option for the U.S. is not between intervening actively in the negotiations and sitting out completely. The U.S. has its own interest in the region. It has to take positions. Even if it's not engaged directly in the negotiations, it doesn't mean the U.S. is not going to have to protect its own interests by taking particular positions out there. And I think that's the option that's available. MR. FREEMAN: I would, before we turn to the next topic, just say that I yield to no one in my pessimism about the capacity of the European Union to act decisively or on a sustained basis on any issue, still less one as difficult as this. But I think the point about facilitation needs to be amended. If indeed we are now in a situation in which mediation as such is not what we are going to be doing, but we are going to be facilitating direct deals between the parties, then the Europeans emerge as a viable guarantor, along with the United States, of the outcome. And it's more than money, I think; more than money that might be involved. A second point is that we have yet to see quite how low the credibility of the United States among Arabs can fall. And it may very well be that we will end up acceptable as a conciliator to the Israelis but not to the Arabs, in which case we may need a partner. And so I have a somewhat more open mind about this than I think many of you who, I think correctly, characterize the situation to date and give very good reasons for our not welcoming the Europeans in in the past; that we may find ourselves in the future reconsidering. Professor Siegel. Q Yeah. Let me pick up the debate that we had about the two proposals that I was putting forward. The two proposals are, first, that what we need is a very detailed, specific Palestinian proposal to end the conflict that touches on all the issues; and secondly, that we should focus attention on the U.S. government and try to get the Bush administration, in fact, to reinstate as U.S. policy the Clinton proposals. On the first of these, the starting point, I think, is to answer the question that Shibley asked, which is, why do we say that the conflict -- why do we say that the peace process is over? And what ended it? And I think what ended it, very clearly, is the Israeli elections. Yossi Beilin was saying that we needed a few more weeks, given what was happening at Taba, and they would have reached an agreement, and surely if Barak had won, the process would be going on right now. It was closed down by the Israeli public and it was closed down because there developed too large a gap in perception as to what was possible between the Barak government and the Israeli public. The Israeli public, basically, believed it wasn't a real peace process and that they were being taken for suckers because basically they were making concessions and the Palestinians really weren't interested in ending the conflict. Now, the question about a Palestinian proposal -- MR. FREEMAN: I think that, by the way, is actually a very good description of the Palestinian view of the process. I mean, there was a mirror image involved here, each one thinking they were being taken for a ride to nowhere. Q Yeah. I happen to think that the levers for change actually are primarily on the Israeli side. I think there won't be any future peace process until we have a new government in Israel. I think it's total fantasy to believe that the kind of issues that have to be engaged, the kind of concessions that have to be made will ever be made by Ariel Sharon. He simply doesn't believe it. He doesn't see it as in Israel's interest. It's completely antithetical to his view as to what his whole life and what the Zionist project is about. It's just not going to happen. So the real question is -- it's a necessary condition -- how do you change that government? And to me, the key thing is to reestablish the belief that potentially, in fact, the conflict can be ended, because Barak was quite right; it's only in exchange for seriously, truly, permanently ending the conflict that the Israeli public is prepared to make those concessions. Now I think that it's completely inadequate -- I mean, it's true there were Palestinian counterproposals; it's not the case that everything was dead in the water, the Palestinians were recalcitrant, and so on. The issue isn't really what was made in secret at Taba; the issue is the public perception of it. And the public perception of it is that there really was no Palestinian general offer that covered the whole thing to end the conflict. And I do not think that it's adequate to that to have Arafat launch a diplomatic initiative in which he talks about the two-state solution or one or another thing. The lack of credibility has gone so far, I would say, that about the only thing that would speak to it would be a Palestinian proposal that was sufficiently detailed that it could actually be signed, and that the criteria for its adequacy would be something like, could Yossi Beilin sign it? Could you put it forward, and could he -- without changing it, could he and the other people who stayed out of the government in fact say, "Yes, we can agree to that"? So that's on the first one. And related to that is the second issue of the U.S. proposal. The critical thing about the U.S. proposal, when you step back from the negotiations, and you view it as speaking to the Israeli public, is that the U.S. basically reinforced the Barak move of basically saying, "The emperor has no clothes," for instance, on issues like Jerusalem, on issues like territorial withdrawal, and even going beyond Barak on the Temple Mount. The amount of progress that was made in terms American policy on the Middle East and on these issues is staggering. We tend to underestimate it because we were caught up in the negotiations, but the movement that the Clinton administration made on all of these issues, and going beyond the Israelis, talking about Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount -- in the context of American policy, if it hadn't happened, no one would believe that it could have happened. And what it does, what it did, was essentially say to the Israeli people, "Look, these are the specifics that constitute the reality on these issues. If you really want peace, this is the price that you're going to have to pay." Now by saying that this can come off the table, Clinton undermined himself, what he was trying to do, by linking it superficially to tactics having to do with the negotiations, rather than casting it as permanent features of the reality. Barak, in his pique at Arafat, and saying, again, to Sharon and the Israelis, "Yes, this comes off the table," reinforced this confusion. And the Bush administration went one better by, as it were, changing it from being American policy to being Clinton's druthers, again reinforced the idea that you can have peace without in fact establishing these things. So if you want to speak to the Israeli public, I think what we've got to do is take our role as a great power and speak again truth to those who need to hear it, as to what the basics are for a solution. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you for your very eloquent statement, which I'll allow Shibley briefly to respond to, because -- MR. TELHAMI: You know, I'm sympathetic to a lot of what Jerry said, and I agree with a lot of it. I do have several points on which I think we do disagree. One is what the outcome of the Israeli election means. I do not believe it was a rejection of the peace process or even the concessions that Barak put forth. I think it was a rejection of Barak personally. He managed to alienate everyone, from left to right. And it's obvious. It's obvious to me in three indicators. Let me give you those three indicators. Number one, throughout the entire election campaign, 70 percent of the Israelis continued to support the peace process, even as they were rejecting Barak in large numbers. Number two, when Mr. Peres was put against Sharon in the polls, he was even. He had a good shot at winning, and certainly he's not to the right of Barak on the question of peacemaking. Number three, in part, the result of the Israeli election was in part a result of the Israeli Arabs' completely boycotting the election. Less than 20 percent of them voted. Ninety-five percent of them voted for Barak in the previous election. Certainly their sitting out, despite the Palestinian Authority asking them to support Mr. Barak, was not a function of their rejection of the concessions that Barak made. And they constitute 12 1/2 percent of the electorate. Barak would have lost anyway, but clearly there were lots of different segments of the public who rejected him. This was not a rejection of the peace process. This was not a rejection of the concessions. It was a rejection of Barak's tactics and the fact that he also alienated all his allies. Number two, in terms of Palestinian incentives in the short term, if in fact you begin with your assumption, which is Mr. Sharon will never make peace, which is very plausible, obviously. That's likely. That's probably the conventional interpretation, which may turn out to be right. If you take that interpretation, then the following is true. First, you don't want to hand him a peace, because if you do, that is in terms of absence of violence, because, presumably, if his argument holds that his toughness stopped the peace -- the violence on the ground, then he'll be reelected. So therefore, your incentive is actually to escalate, and therefore he's going to escalate. And forget about what you say or what you don't say in the public, because everything you say is irrelevant, because the reality on the ground is going to change the dynamics for you; it's going to create a psychology that it will disregard anything that you put on the table. And number three, in terms of sort of putting a detailed proposal on the table, you know, I'm a student of negotiations. I have never seen anyone in the history of negotiations start with a complete outline of a position that's acceptable to the other side. It just doesn't happen. The breakthrough that happened at Camp David was a psychological breakthrough. Sadat went to Jerusalem, and he was a gutsy guy who managed to break taboos and get the Israelis to accept him. If you read his speech at the Knesset, it was the same position that Egypt had the day before he announced he was going to -- he didn't change it one little bit; it was the insistence on the same thing. When they negotiated, they had a different outcome. When Barak came to Camp David, he had a different position, and he never, even at Camp David, ever put a proposal on the table that was written. In fact, it was the strangest set of negotiations we've ever seen. That's one reason why we don't know what happened, because there were no documents. There was not an American proposal. There was not an Israeli proposal. There was not a Palestinian proposal. When the Israeli proposal was conveyed to Arafat, it was conveyed to Arafat through Clinton orally, and it was hard to tell sometimes whether it was really a Clinton idea or a Barak idea. So we have a sense that there was a proposal on the table, but we don't know quite what it was. So I don't know, you know, how you start a negotiation like that. So we certainly agree on what needs to be done, that something has to be done to win the Israeli public for the Palestinians and vice versa. We all agree on that; but how you go about it, we obviously have disagreements because we have a different interpretation of how the political processes work. MR. FREEMAN: Pat? MR. LANG: Well, there's just not going to be a detailed Palestinian proposal. I mean, that's a very elegant construct in your argument, but there's not going to be a detailed Palestinian proposal. In fact, the Palestinian polity is disintegrating steadily into more and more factions, more and more competing forces, and as a result, the possibility of putting together something which makes detailed concessions, which are, of course, necessary in any negotiating process, it would just be beyond the power or the ability to withstand the risk of any of the players in this thing. In fact, now we have more and more players all the time. A new phenomenon is the fact that Hezbollah is now active politically and organizing various nefarious deeds in central Palestine as well as in Galilee. The more players there are like this, the less likely it is that there will be such a proposal. I just don't believe it's going to happen. So although I would like to see the world develop in the way you say, Professor, I just don't think that's possible. Q Hi. My name is Barry Bogage with the Maryland Israel Development Center. My question is about Jordan. In the past -- it also had included Egypt, but you touched on that. Sharon, in the past, has said that Jordan is the only thing between Israel and Iraq. He also said that Jordan is Palestine. What is the stability of Jordan, the stability of the peace treaty with Israel? Any small spark in Israel or the West Bank can bring huge demonstrations and riots? Is King Abdullah stable, and so forth? MR. FREEMAN: Who would like to start on that? MR. LANG: Well, I'm a long associate of the Jordanian government army and monarchy, so I guess I'd say something about that. I've been listening to Israelis say things like that for 35 years now, or something. They used to predict that King Hussein would die at any time and then the whole thing would disintegrate into the mish-mash of tribes and dispossessed Palestinians that it really is. And, you know, it just goes on and on. It never seems to really -- never seems to happen. You go over and look at Jordan; they're poor, but they're sort of elegantly poor, in a way. They handle their poverty extremely well. The young king I've seen twice in the last three or four months, and contrary to all the stuff that you hear, the same kind of things you used to hear about his father, that he seems to me to be very cognizant of the issues, to be working the issues, to be very progressive in his thinking. And I know a lot of people in the military there who are -- of course, they're pretty important in Jordan -- and I've gone around and talked to them. And it appears to me that his father's decision to make him his heir instead of Prince Hassan was an extremely sound decision, in that it ensured the loyalty of the military. MR. FREEMAN: Chris? MR. ROSS: As Pat suggested, there is an element of deja vu in the current situation in Jordan. At the same time, there are growing stresses and strains. Certainly the anti-normalization movement has picked up steam. There are now formal lists of the normalizers. The lists, I'm told, has just gone regional. Up to now it's been Jordanian normalizers; now it's being widened to exclude all kinds of normalizers with Israel all around the Arab world, and that's one element. There is a continuing strain between Jordanians of Palestinian origin and Jordanians of trans-Jordanian origin, and many Palestinians in Jordan will tell you that the palace is circling the wagons against them. I mean, these are all things that don't play out immediately, but they're there as strains. MR. FREEMAN: Shibley, very briefly, please. I know you have to go soon, and we have three more people who want to make comments or questions. MR. TELHAMI: Just briefly, I would say Jordan clearly is going to be the most difficult place facing the dilemmas in part, also, because of the economic crisis there. It's not just the political; they have a very serious economic crisis they're going to be facing. And I also would not be surprised if you might have some voices within Israel, if there's escalation, for rethinking the Jordanian option. Ephraim Enbar of Barawan (ph) University has just written a piece in which he said chaos may be good in the West Bank and Gaza because it will just prove to the people the Palestinian Authority is distrustful and maybe you might have the West Bankers start saying, you know, "We'll go back to Jordan," and the Gazans saying, "Go back to Egypt." Now, you know, that obviously is something that is far-fetched. But the fact that some people in the academy are thinking about it is quite remarkable. MR. FREEMAN: John Duke Anthony. Q National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. The question about the boycott and the erosion of goodwill of the atmospheric receptivity for continuing business as usual is empirically validated in this particular case two different ways from any previous boycott, both in terms of enhancers as well as hindrances. Because of the strategic aim of these countries to have good standing in the World Trade Organization -- and Saudi Arabia, of course, not in it yet -- there's hardly a way that either it or Jordan or Egypt could publicly come out for a boycott without taking a significant hit at the bilateral relationship with the United States. So there's a constraint there. On the other hand, it's into the schools and it's into the mosques on a weekly basis to a far more massive and pervasive degree than was ever the case previously, and this is having an impact that the previous intifada or previous boycotts did not register. And in terms of the consumer aspect, places like Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Baskin Robbins, Toys R Us, four or five others, are massively hurt, not in each country the same -- Kuwait perhaps less than elsewhere for their love-fest with the United States; Bahrain not massive, either; but in Saudi Arabia, quite persuasively there, and I've seen it empirically on a day-to-day basis in the last five months, living in five of these countries. It's real, but whether it can be orchestrated and choreographed remains to be seen when you cannot have the government behind it in this case, as you'd had in '73 or '74. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you for that insight. Ambassador Ransom. Q David Ransom. This group is unrelievedly pessimistic, and so I'd like to invite you to speculate about some very difficult outcomes. Sharon is a man who is identified with sending divisions across the border into Lebanon all the way to Beirut; sending divisions in across the Canal into Egypt, and building settlements on a massive scale. And in all of these things, he acted despite government injunctions of his government, and on his own, and with use of military power on a sort of passing scale. And it was not just to punish enemies, but to create a new frame of reference in which negotiations would be shifted. And I just wonder if there is a military option of this sort; that is he might think to use Israeli strength to changes the terms of negotiation, displacement of population, strikes against Syrian WMD facilities, unilateral changes of the border, occupation of Jerusalem. I'm not sure what it is, but there is an overwhelming power now in Israel which many Israelis feel is not being put to good use. Is there a military option of this sort for Israel? MR. FREEMAN: The classic answer to your question, David, would be ethnic cleansing. But, Pat? MR. LANG: Well, you know, Jerusalem is occupied by the Israelis, and he is very unlikely to give that up. And the fact that there is a large Arab population in the walled city of Jerusalem and some of the other neighborhoods does not change the fact that Jerusalem is under Israeli occupation. I mean, their authority and power there is absolute. Everybody I talk to in Israel indicates to me that when they get through consolidating their position, they will have changed the borders with regard -- not with regard to the international situation, but with regard to what the Palestinians have had in their grasp up till now. The idea that he would launch a major operation against a neighboring Arab state, I think is probably unlikely, unless there is some severe provocation in the northern Galilee, in which case there might be there. But there are a lot of people around him who are going to try to keep him from doing that kind of thing. But with regard to the Palestinians, there'll be a lot of pressure, there's going to be a lot of use of force, but he doesn't shrink from that in the least; he relishes it, actually. MR. FREEMAN: Shibley? MR. TELHAMI: Yeah, I imagine two scenarios. One cannot underestimate the extent to which the Israeli psychology now is that Arabs think Israel is weak, and that the Israeli military believes that Israeli deterrence is no longer effective, and the Israeli military establishment wants to assert, you know, remind people that Israel remains powerful. And I could imagine two scenarios where that could be heavily consequential. One is if there is an attack across the Lebanese border, not just by Hezbollah, but it could be from radical Palestinian groups, which clearly are, you know, apparently preparing for such attacks, then you an imagine, clearly, Syrian forces in Lebanon being held responsible through massive attacks, and you don't know where that will take. The Syrians will not be looking for a war with Israel, but no one can tell -- you know, that's an escalation on a new magnitude that could result in something different. The second one is that you could imagine that Hamas has a lot of bombings in many cities in the next, you know, few weeks, which will clearly create a psychology in Israel that would require some major retaliation by the Israeli government. And Sharon wants to differentiate himself from Barak in some way. The stated policy that is emerging on this retaliation is to retaliate against those who give orders, against groups' headquarters, not collective punishment, a very different policy from Barak's policy. And I can imagine that ultimately accelerating the demise of the Palestinian Authority and, therefore, not having a real negotiation going on, and, therefore, chaos that will be consequential and would open completely new options that are now closed by virtue of the fact that you do have someone to negotiate with. MR. FREEMAN: Ma'am. Q A couple weeks ago there was a -- MR. FREEMAN: I'm sorry. Would you let us know -- Q Oh, I'm Corinne Whitlach from Churches for Middle East Peace. A couple of weeks ago there was an op-ed in the New York Times, I believe by Bossin Eid (sp), in which he threw out the idea that perhaps there was a readiness growing among the Palestinians for the exercise of nonviolence, or at least an active resistance movement. And last week the World Council of Churches discussed this in a meeting at The Hague, and with the experience that they had had in working with the South African nonviolent movement, which did not take place in an absence of violence by the ANC itself too. I'd be interested in whether the panel feels there is any ground on which an alternative movement of active resistance might be built among the Palestinian people. MR. TELHAMI: This is, you know, not a new idea, as you know. During the first intifida, there were people like Mubarak Al-Wahd (sp), who went back and tried to have a resistant movement of that sort. And in fact, by and large one can argue that the first intifada was not militarized. I mean, certainly there were stones, but the amount of use of arms was minimal in the early days, and later when Hamas got involved, it became much more militarized. I personally think that the use of force undermines the Palestinians' hand. I think that the Palestinians have a moral position, which is they are people under occupation whose situation is horrible. And there they not only command a great deal of public support, international support for that moral position, but they also command support from Israel, Israelis who don't want -- it goes against their sense of identity or self when that happens. And I think it increases, by virtue of having an acknowledged moral position, it increases your will to continue to resist for an indefinite period of time. So I think the minute you start using violence, especially against civilians, you lose the moral ground, it weakens you, and there is no question in my mind that, you know, that's a sensible way to think when you're resisting. Now, a real question is whether it's possible. I mean, the dynamics would allow it to happen. And I think -- it's interesting. I was on Al Jezira TV recently from Washington. There were two others on that TV. There was a representative of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and there was another one who was a representative of Hamas from Gaza speaking at the same time. And one of the questioners asked how international public opinion, particularly American public opinion, is affected by the intifada. Is it more sympathetic or is it less sympathetic? That was the question to me. And I gave a nuanced answer to this, part of which was, "Look, when Americans see tanks leveling off neighborhoods in Ramallah, the Palestinians gain support. When the American public or the international community sees bombs blowing up civilians in Tel Aviv, they clearly go against the Palestinians." And the Hamas person jumped very quickly. He said, "Are you suggesting that we should allow our kids to get killed without killing some of theirs?" You have a lot of momentum of that sort on the ground. And I think, you know, the funerals and pain and so forth that goes on day after day will generate that kind of reaction from some people. And because there is no political option, at least in the short term, I don't know whether that's where the momentum is going to go. It's unfortunate, but I see that as almost automatic. MR. FREEMAN: Chris, very briefly. MR. ROSS: I have to agree with Shibley. Non-violence is a noble objective. The existence of that option is known and understood among Palestinians but, by and large, it's rejected as a sign of weakness, a gratuitous concession to an occupier who is being extremely nasty. And therefore, I don't think the ground is well-prepared at all for pursuing it. MR. FREEMAN: Sir, you have been very patient, and you have the last question. Q -- Foreign Service officer. In a sense, I've been interested in this for a long, long time. But also I'm partly representing -- I was greatly impressed with the convocation last September -- no, October -- of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, and since that time -- that was a broad thing for all kinds of Christians. And since that time, the new Cardinal of Washington has -- he was the main speaker, the keynote speaker, at that time. There is another one coming up in Detroit, in March, where another archbishop there will be -- but it isn't confined to Catholics. I'm distinctly a Protestant. But people are getting a bit tired of making sacrifices for Israel, and I think what we have to do, and we should have done a long time ago, is to demonstrate that we are not to be identified with Israel. That's where we've gone wrong for a long, long time. And we've been making sacrifices; the latest one is the USS Cole. I can give you another instance. In 1967, it wasn't the only thing, the USS Liberty, which was savaged, but over 30,000 Americans, from Morocco to Riyadh and Basra had to leave their homes and be evacuated because they were in danger of being identified with Israel. Now, we've got to -- one thing it would help stop that if -- and we're getting a sense that Americans may be getting tired of having our gunships shooting up Bethlehem and Nazareth and places like that where Christians are involved. I think, furthermore -- that's on the religious side, that you've mentioned. And then also, I think possibly it's becoming very obvious that Israel, the modern Israel, is a second South Africa, depending on apartheid and abominable torture that they admit themselves. Now, when that becomes more evident, I think many, many Americans will be turned against that. And we don't have to be so afraid; politicians don't have to be so afraid of being termed anti-Semitic. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Well, thank you very much for your clear statement of your views. I think that it is very hard to argue with the thesis that what is happening in the Holy Land now will take its toll not only on the American position more widely in the Middle East, as you suggest, but also on Israel's image and the willingness of Americans to stand by it. Q May I make just one more statement? MR. FREEMAN: I think we've come, really, to the end of the program, sir, so I would -- Q I'd just say possibly the Israelis need a bit of a shock at this point. It will help them over their paranoia -- MR. FREEMAN: Well, I think you are correct to caution the Israelis that not everyone will stand by them through all of this. But I would not underestimate the capacity of the American public to stand with Israel, and I don't believe that the U.S. tie with Israel is being questioned or will likely be questioned by anyone in American politics at any serious level, almost regardless of what happens. Now, whether that is good or bad I leave to each of you to judge. But I would like to close this by thanking the three panelists who came and, I think, gave us a very enlightening discussion, and to say to the absent Yossi Shain, who should have been here and wanted to be here, that he missed a very good discussion. Thanks also to the audience, those of you in particular who put forward constructive ideas. They are always welcome. [APPLAUSE AND END OF EVENT.]

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