The Mideast: Wages of Weakness - Brief Article

The Oslo peace process was doomed by its structural flaw. Israelis and Palestinians were to do the easy things first, and leave to the end the hard issues. Two of these revolved around the sovereignty of Jerusalem, and the right of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to return. A two-stage process was like asking the parties to jump across a wide abyss by taking an extra stride in midair. It was an open invitation to extremists to raise their demands in the final stages of settlement, in the certainty that they could sabotage trust and kill the idea of peace. This is exactly what has happened, and the parties now lie bleeding at the bottom of the abyss.

At the recent Camp David meeting, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat concessions which went far beyond those originally envisaged by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Unlike his predecessors or his political rivals, Barak believes that peace in the region depends upon appeasement and retreat by Israel. Previously he had almost begged Syria to come to terms. Soon after, in a scrambled evacuation at the expense of his local allies, he handed the so-called security zone in southern Lebanon over to Hezbollah, a group that believes that Muslims have a duty to kill Jews. Finally, in this humbling the Israelis have inflicted on themselves, Arafat was offered almost the whole West Bank, a degree of sovereignty in Jerusalem, and an agreement that large numbers of refugees would be allowed to return.

A statesman would have accepted such gifts as quickly as was decent. Instead Arafat concluded that Israel was on the run, and that violence would bring him yet greater rewards. Violence has in fact produced the opposite of everything Arafat expected. Palestinians stand before the world as religious fanatics, self-deluding opportunists, irrational, and, in some cases, bestial. Among other horrors, a young Palestinian was photographed gleefully holding up to an ecstatic mob the bloody hands with which he had just killed a stray Israeli. Such a scene, understandably, discredits the peace movement in Israel.

Yet another summit conference convened by Westerners, with yet another Arab summit to follow, is a display of moral and political bankruptcy. None of the outside parties can bring much meaningful pressure to bear, for good or ill. Militarily, the Arab countries are in a position to bang drums, not to wage cross-border war. But hatred is loose in the land, and it will be enough if this is contained for the time being. Israelis and Palestinians are in a position to do one another terrible damage. Among possible nightmares are Islamic suicide bombers, kidnappings, and hijackings-and in reprisal, the death of many Palestinians and the flight, perhaps, of even more from large parts of the West Bank in a repeat of 1948.

Appeasement and retreat have brought Israel to this pass. Now it has to take the very different course of finding the courage to be true to itself. Israeli society is open and democratic. The Israeli army can easily beat back any challenges on the battlefield, but real victory in this endless conflict means refusing to go down the path blazed by primitive and tribalistic hatred. That is the true mark of strength. Yesterday's man, Arafat perpetuates the self-defeating hatred that has become the legacy of his unfortunate people, handed down the generations in the blood stream. Not strength at all, this is weakness, and a guarantee of defeat in the end. Only an Israel standing firm on its values can persuade some future Palestinian leadership that hatred is not the way to peace. There is no other hope.