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| Volume IX, September 2002, Number 3 |
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| Editor's Note |
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This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of this journal. The first issue appeared in June 1982 just before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a war of choice that was billed as an effort to bring "peace to Galilee." Now another Sharon-led war is visiting devastation on Arabs without garnering any security for Israelis or friends for Americans. Predictably, it has spawned a bitter and vengeful resistance among the Palestinians and a great deal of outrage throughout the world. The 1982 campaign shocked even many American Jews who identified with Israel. It also cost the lives of 20,000 Lebanese. It even prompted President Reagan to propose a peace initiative three months later ("Fresh Start"). The Europeans put forth the Venice Declaration; Crown Prince Fahd offered a Saudi plan at the meeting of the Arab League in Fez. All of these constructive suggestions foundered on the rock of that Arcadia called Greater Israel.
Compared with the Middle East speech President Bush gave two decades later, the Reagan message of September 1982 could pass for the wisdom of Solomon. No one at the time commented that the Israeli Foreign Ministry could have penned Reagan's words. The Bush "vision" was pure Sharon, except for lip service to some elements of the international consensus regarding the occupation and 1967. The American president seems hamstrung by his fear of the new Republican electoral "base," a combination of the foot soldiers of the Christian Right and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Bitter memories of the truncated presidency of his father obviously play a key role in the Bush psychodrama. George, Sr., ignored the base, dissed the lobby, and watched the economy go south -- a trifecta to be avoided at any cost.
Not all members of the administration, however, are singing from the same sheet, it seems. In a perceptive take on the joint statement released after the meeting of the Quartet in New York on July 16, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy detected "subtle but meaningful backtracking" to the pre-June 24 period of history. The group (the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia) had been organized by the U.S. secretary of state for four reasons: (1) to do something about the Israel-Palestine issue in order to dampen anti-U.S. fervor, (2) to get help in influencing Arabs and Muslims, (3) to neutralize criticism of the "axis of evil" rhetoric by showing that Washington can cooperate with others and (4) to gain allies for the Bush Iraq strategy.
According to Satloff, the other members of the Quartet have not yet "entered the post-Arafat era" that Bush inaugurated in his June 24 speech. The Quartet has a document it likes better, the so-called Madrid Declaration of April 10 calling for an immediate cessation of Israeli military activity in the occupied territories and for a renewed political process. This sequence is out of whack with the Bush demand: security for Israel as a prerequisite for progress toward a "provisional" state for the Palestinians. The Quartet ignored this new term the Bush team has coined. They also exhorted Israel to return the Palestinians' frozen tax revenues unconditionally and forthwith. The Quartet's July 16 statement also failed to condemn Arab assistance to Palestinian "terrorists," did not mention Syria's support for "terror," and -- most egregiously -- did not allude to Palestinian leadership at all.
To the apologists for the current Israeli government, it is "worrisome" that Colin Powell could not influence this international gang of four enough to prevent it from contradicting, on the record, the Bush "vision." This is being interpreted by pro-Israel commentators like Satloff as a lack of policy unity inside the administration, for which the rest of us can breathe a sigh of profound relief.
But don't get comfortable. Just when you thought it had been superseded by private entrepreneurs like Al Qaeda, state terrorism has come roaring back. Of course, since it is being perpetrated by the state of Israel rather than "evildoers," its return was met initially with almost complete silence from the punditocracy. In a major break with precedent, however, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on July 24 did warn of "consequences" if Israel continued to "improperly" use American-made weapons on Palestinians. This came in response to the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh by means of a half-ton bomb dropped on a residential neighborhood in Gaza from an American-made F-16, killing 15 and injuring 130. The Arms Export Control Act, which stipulates that military equipment provided by the United States can only be used for "internal security and legitimate self-defense," is unequivocal -- except, heretofore, for Israel.
This official public rebuke is a significant move, the image of its so-called "purity of arms" being crucial to Israel's public relations in America. The rest of the world knows the plain truth -- that disproportionate response has been a keystone of Israeli strategy from the founding of the state. Back in 1982, President Reagan suspended the delivery of cluster bombs to Israel "after concluding that the military had used them improperly" in Lebanon to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- just as in the Gaza operation. Plus ça change . . . .
In his extraordinary criticism of Israel, Boucher responded to queries about potential consequences that might follow from violation of the arms-control act: "The chief issue . . . is whether an action that harms civilians like this is right, whether it's wise, whether it actually brings anybody closer to peace." Although at first Ariel Sharon had crowed about the Gaza attack being "one of our greatest successes," Israeli leaders reversed themselves immediately under fire from the Bush administration and called the loss of life "a grave error." They also promised to withdraw their soldiers from some West Bank cities and released 10 percent of the tax revenues they had been illegally withholding from the Palestinian Authority. The power of Washington's displeasure is very great, something its Israeli client had lost sight of. No wonder; it is so rarely on view.
Anne Joyce, May 2002
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