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| Volume VII, October 1999, Number 1 |
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| Book Review |
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For a printable version of this review, click here.
Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy, by Kathleen Christison. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. 293 pages. $40.00, hardcover.
Philip C. Wilcox, Jr.
U.S. Foreign Service officer (ret.); consul general, Jerusalem, 1988-91
In half a century of Middle East diplomacy, the Palestinian issue has been Washington's most intractable problem. At last, final-status talks between Israel and the Palestinians are at hand. But a mutually acceptable outcome is far from certain, and the United States may well be forced to take an active role again, given the tough unresolved issues of settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. Will the United States be able to serve as an honest broker when the crunch comes, pressing Israel for concessions that will be needed for an acceptable deal? Or will America's special relationship with Israel and its influence in U.S. domestic politics prevent this?
Kathleen Christison's "Perceptions of Palestine," which traces in detail U.S. attitudes toward the Palestinian problem over many decades, offers little encouragement that the United States will succeed in this role. The thesis of this provocative and literate analysis is that American policy has always been dominated by an Israel-centered "frame of reference" that has led the United States to misunderstand or devalue Palestinian equities. She believes that the United States has often not been an honest broker and that even in the post-Oslo era, its Israel-centered perspective persists, notwithstanding deepening U.S. relations with Arafat and the Palestinians.
This theme of one-sided U.S. policy is hardly new. But Christison, a former CIA analyst, supports it systematically, without polemics, and breaks some new ground by concentrating on the U.S.- Palestinian dimension. Christison is right that over the decades Washington has at times missed opportunities to intervene more effectively when it might have prevailed, yielding instead to Israeli and domestic pressures. Some examples: (1) the prolonged boycott of contacts with the PLO that denied U.S. policy makers understanding of and influence over a central protagonist; (2) Reagan's abandonment of the previous U.S. view that settlements violated international law and the Clinton Administration's muting, for the most part, of objections to settlements on policy grounds, failures that encouraged the massive settlement growth that now looms as a serious obstacle to a final settlement; (3) Washington's unwillingness in recent years to maintain U.S. declaratory policy that East Jerusalem is occupied territory; (4) consistent U.S. vetoes of U.N. resolutions that might have had helped influence Israeli policy; (5) and a frequent reluctance to speak candidly to the Israeli government privately, and to Israelis publicly, about U.S. concerns.
But Christison readily acknowledges the domestic and congressional political constraints that have discouraged more activist, even-handed policies. She recognizes that the United States has always faced hard choices in the region and that options were seldom clear. It took years for the Palestinian issue to come into focus, and there were many periods when even greater U.S. efforts would still have been blocked by Israeli, Arab and Palestinian stubbornness. Moreover, Washington faced other international challenges that discouraged the kind of consuming, sustained effort that the Middle East demanded.
Christison traces the evolution of America's Israel-centered frame of reference from views of the Holy Land in the nineteenth century, to Woodrow Wilson's support of the Balfour Declaration and U.S. policies from FDR to Bush. American policy makers and citizens alike, raised in a Judeo-Christian culture, sympathized with Zionism and Israel from the beginning. This emotional, cultural and religious predisposition was galvanized when the horrors of the Holocaust and America's own failure to give refuge to Jews fleeing Hitler became clear to the American public. Grass-roots support for Israel was reinforced by dedicated American Jewish organizations, skilled Israeli diplomats and a sympathetic media. Israel's narrative of the 1948 conflict, including mythology that blamed all on the Arabs, has been corrected in recent years by younger Israeli historians, but it was the common wisdom in the United States. It stressed the tragedy of the Jews and ignored the dispersal of 750,000 Palestinians, often under threat of force, from their homes and land. This narrative obscured the core issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Palestinian problem was regarded simply as a refugee issue.
For years after 1948, other factors cemented this pro-Israel perspective. The 1947 U.N. partition resolution was stillborn and could hardly have been implemented, even if the United States had pressed hard. Arab rejection of Israel and unwillingness to compromise presented Washington with a zero-sum choice. The Palestinians had no voice, and although Palestinian nationalism had emerged in the early part of the century, it was set back by the failed revolt of the 1930s. The 1948 war and exodus of the Palestinians shattered what remained of their political society.
Palestinian identity and nationalism were further obscured by Nasserism and pan-Arabism. And while Arab states paid lip service to the Palestinian cause, none seriously questioned Jordan's control over the West Bank and Egypt's over Gaza. It was hard, therefore, for the United States to identify and engage the Palestinian issue as the key to conflict at that time. It is not surprising, therefore, as Christison points out, that Washington viewed the problem as a conflict between Israel and the Arab states, not Palestinian grievances. It was not until the 1980s and early 1990s that events in the region, including the intifada and the Gulf War, and U.S. diplomacy produced a ripening of practical options that would bring both Israel and the United States to recognize the Palestinian core of the conflict and begin to come to terms with it.
Many have argued that the Palestinians, lacking friends and means to pursue their cause, used terrorism effectively to draw attention. But the impact of terrorism on U.S. attitudes was devastating. It alienated the United States, further obscuring genuine Palestinian grievances, played into the hands of Israeli ideology and propaganda that demonized Palestinians and the PLO, and treated terrorism as the cause rather than a symptom of the conflict. Terrorism pushed Washington further toward viewing the PLO as an illegitimate group intent on destroying Israel and any prospect of peace. The murder of two American diplomats in Khartoum in 1971 by a radical PLO faction confirmed this view and shocked their State Department colleagues.
PLO terrorism also intensified Washington's determination to exclude the PLO from the peace process. It also led to President Ford's commitment to Israel in 1975 to shun dialogue with the PLO until it accepted Israel's right to exist and met other conditions. This anti-PLO stance became central to U.S. policy for the next 15 years, even as the Arabs were recognizing the PLO's exclusive right to represent the Palestinian people. It was a mistake. As Christison points out, it foreclosed the use of American diplomacy to encourage more realism and moderation in the PLO, and it prolonged the illusion, fostered by Israel, that a non-PLO leadership could emerge to represent the Palestinians. Anti-terrorism and opposition to the PLO became an obsession for most of the Reagan-Shultz years, although by then Arafat's Fatah had agreed, through third-party contacts, to cease attacks against Americans, and was sending signals of moderation and compromise. U.S. opposition to the PLO was so deeply entrenched that these signals, which Christison thinks held promise, were either ignored or misunderstood.
Christison also illuminates how Palestinian-American estrangement was also reinforced by the Cold War and the tendency of Washington to view the Arab-Israeli conflict in a global perspective and to reject the "regionalist" view which held, correctly, that the Arab-Israeli conflict had its own dynamic quite apart from the Cold War. The idea of Israel as a democratic ally and strategic asset in a region threatened by Soviet and radical Arab minions was a popular U.S. concept from the beginning, and "strategic cooperation" with Israel took a quantum jump during the Reagan years.
Christison credits Jimmy Carter as the first president to empathize with the Palestinians, to the point of advocating a Palestinian "homeland," although he favored Jordanian sovereignty in the West Bank. She also praises Carter for trying to graft Israeli-Palestinian negotiations onto the Camp David process and for condemning Israeli settlements as illegal in an opinion by the State Department's legal advisor. But Carter's autonomy initiative foundered under the pressures of Israeli rejection, erosion of his domestic political base, and the weight of the traditional U.S. frame of reference stressing the primacy of Israeli interests.
The author also acknowledges that George Shultz, who earlier had been a passionate foe of the PLO, was responsible for opening a dialogue with the PLO at the end of Reagan's term, although she gives him too little credit for this. She also credits George Bush and James Baker for the energetic and unprecedented initiative that engaged Palestinians in an intensive dialogue for the first time, launched the historic Madrid conference, helped bring down Shamir's government in the process, and curtailed, at least for a time, Israeli settlement growth. But Christison still faults Bush and Baker for failing to push harder and to sustain the Madrid process, a judgment that seems severe in view of the obstacles they faced and overcame.
Christison portrays Washington's opposition to a Palestinian state and its preference for Jordan's return to the West Bank as another example of pro-Israel myopia. But the "Jordan option," played out in a series of initiatives after 1967, was based not just on Israel's opposition to a Palestinian state, but on plausible U.S. fears of Palestinian radicalism and Jordan's opposition as well. In the late 1980s, this seemed the only possible solution, even to experienced U.S. diplomats, who were desperate to try any workable formula. In retrospect, it seems evident that Palestinians would never have accepted Jordanian rule, but the failure of this option did not become clear until King Hussein himself renounced Jordan's claim to the leadership of the Palestinians in 1988.
Jordan's withdrawal moved the United States to take a more neutral stance on Palestinian statehood. But although the United States continued to demand, and ultimately received, PLO acceptance of Israel's right to exist as a condition to dialogue, Washington would not agree, in turn, to support Palestinian self-determination. Looking back, a more forthcoming U.S. position on Palestinian statehood, albeit to be realized through negotiations, could have accelerated the process and moved both Israel and the Palestinians to earlier compromises. The logic of this outcome has been clear for a decade. Yet even today, when most Israelis and Americans accept the inevitability of a Palestinian state, the United States, in deference to Israeli policy and U.S. domestic politics, still refuses to endorse this, even in principle.
"Perceptions of Palestine "offers a valuable refresher course and new insights as well for U.S. policy makers as the long-awaited process, negotiated in August 1999, for implementing the Wye agreement and early final-status talks unfolds. Ehud Barak has made it clear – and the United States has agreed – that he does not want American mediation of final-status issues and that Israel and the Palestinians must resolve these themselves. Madelaine Albright has defined the U.S. role obliquely as "facilitation." But Christison thinks the traditional U.S. preference to "leave it to the parties" and to focus on process, not policy, is a sure recipe for deadlock, and gives the advantage to the Israelis, who have most of the power and leverage. Since Arafat has few cards left to bargain with, most of the concessions must now come from Israel to create a deal that is minimally satisfactory to Palestinians. The Palestinians will want U.S. support, and Washington will feel compelled to intervene if the process starts to founder. This will require greater American activism than the United States or Barak now envisage, and hard choices for Washington.
Christison's analysis suggests the United States will not be able to meet this challenge, given its predisposition toward Israel. Yet U.S. relations with the Palestinians have changed for the better. The old rancor is gone, Washington has a far better sense of Palestinian needs and views, and there is a growing rapport. This offers hope for more creative, bold diplomacy. The task is not to take sides, but to help shape a compromise that meets the basic needs of both sides on all the vital issues, including settlements, Jerusalem and refugees, and to convince Israelis, Palestinians and Americans that this is good for all sides and the only way to ensure a permanent peace.
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