Testimony of Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) before the Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

11 March 1998

Thank you, Chairman Brownback, Senator Robb, and members of the subcommittee for the
opportunity to share with you my views on the Middle East peace process.

I strongly favor a true peace process. But the negotiating process is not an end in itself. It
is
valuable only if it moves the parties in the proper direction. It is not constructive if it creates
unrealistic expectations, for example, that the Arab side can re-divide Jerusalem. Nor is it
constructive if it results in bitter recriminations by Washington against Jerusalem’s efforts to
preserve Israeli security. A process that damages the U.S.-Israeli relationship does not encourage
Arab compromise and is not conducive to peace. Rather it rewards Arab inflexibility and signals
to Arab rejectionists that they may ultimately prevail if they work hard enough to weaken Israel
by fraying its ties to the United States.

Is It Real?

The key question in the Arab-Israeli negotiating process is whether the Palestinian
Authority intends to end the conflict or instead to obtain concessions that can be exploited
against Israel in the future. U.S. officials often talk and act as if the mere fact of
Arafat’s
participation in the process establishes that his intentions are peaceful. This is unwise and ignores
the history of our century in which Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Brezhnev, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein
and Slobodan Milosevic have all participated in peace processes.

A premise of the Oslo process is that the Oslo Accords reflected a profound
transformation
of Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea is that the conflict is no longer about Israel’s right to exist,
which is assumed to be recognized sincerely by the Palestinian side. The conflict is now supposed
to be about discrete issues such as boundaries, arms control and security arrangements, rights in
Jerusalem and the like, issues that negotiators can nibble away at until the whole conflict is
resolved.

Along with almost everyone else, I had hopes that this idea was valid and the Oslo process
would
work. But after four-and-a-half years of reading and hearing what Palestinian political,
religious, and intellectual leaders write and say, I have sadly concluded that the
Arab-Israeli conflict has yet to undergo a fundamental transformation. We must look
beyond the dishonest propaganda dished out to Western journalists and officials and examine the
voluminous declarations made by Palestinian Authority leaders to their own people in their own
Arabic tongue. The record is depressing. It does not support the notion that the
Palestinian
leadership or the Palestinian community in general has moved beyond its inveterate and
passionately held conviction that Israel is illegitimate and that it should be attacked,
damaged and, eventually destroyed. Vehement opposition to Israel’s right to exist is
still the
theme of most of the discourse on Israel of the Palestinian community’s leadership. They
do not
as a rule condemn violence against Israel, but praise and encourage it. These leaders do
not
hold terrorists responsible for their crimes, but give them refuge and honor the suicide bombers as
“martyrs and heroes.”

A principal sign of the lack of integrity of the Oslo Process is that the Palestinian Authority
systematically violates its obligations in the Accords, even though Israel’s record on compliance is
good.

Given Arafat’s long record as an ideologue, a terrorist, a breaker of promises and fount of
untruth, it should not really surprise anyone that Arafat remains what he has always been. And it
should not surprise anyone, though it is deeply disappointing, that the Oslo Process that has been
constructed, as it were, on Arafat’s shoulders, is an unsound exercise. We ignore at our
peril,
and at Israel’s peril, the hostile messages that Arafat and his Palestinian Authority
colleagues continually deliver to their own people. As Daniel Pipes observed in a recent
issue
of Commentary, we should heed the rejectionist rhetoric that continues to
predominate in
Palestinian Authority controlled areas.

Under the circumstances, the United States should not be urging, much less pressuring,
Israel to
make unreciprocated concessions to the Palestinian Authority in the hopes that this will keep the
peace process on track. Rather, we should direct our diplomatic energies toward
bringing
about constructive changes in the policies of the Palestinian Authority. In particular, we
should inform the Palestinian Authority that the negotiating process cannot survive, and
will not continue to command U.S. attention and assistance, unless the Palestinian
Authority begins to honor its promises, especially regarding the disarming of terrorists and
the delivery of wanted terrorists to Israel for prosecution. Organizations such as the
Zionist
Organization of America have been very helpful in keeping Congress informed about compliance
issues in the Oslo process.

Substance, Not Process

The Administration’s fixation on process rather than substance — its overvaluation of the
negotiations as such — is an impediment to sensible policymaking. It diverts attention from the
big picture. The key feature of that big picture is the persistence of Arab
rejectionism.
Emphasis on the process constrains us to focus on technicalities and day-to-day “signals.” When
this happens we forget that the goal of Oslo was to consolidate the presumed fundamental
transformation of the nature of the conflict. The goal was to change the hearts and minds of the
Arabs so that there could be peace, not just a change in the tactics of those who continue to aspire
to destroy Israel. Oslo has not succeeded in moving the region toward that goal. Its premises
have not been vindicated by the actions of the Palestinian Authority since September 1993, the
date of the first stunning handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

If Israel’s enemies renounce their ideological rejection of the Jewish state and develop stable,
trustworthy democratic political institutions — run by worthy leaders, there could be peace.
Douglas Feith expressed this point in an article in Commentary: “A stable peace [is]
possible
… only if the Palestinians first evolved responsible administrative institutions and leadership that
enjoyed legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, refrained from murdering its political opponents,
operated within and not above the law, and practiced moderation and compromise at home and
abroad.” There is, of course, an important place for negotiations in our policy toward the
Arab-Israeli conflict. If there is any chance of resolving this conflict through diplomacy, it must
be grasped. But we should be clear-eyed about the current negotiations. We should not
let
them obscure the basic realities of the conflict or crack the bedrock of our national interest
in the region, which is our support for the rights and the security of our democratic allies in
Israel. The key to our diplomatic effectiveness is our power and the justness of our
actions. We
should never lose sight of the fact that peace can be built only on a foundation of Israeli strength,
a key element of which is the close relationship between the United States and Israel, we cannot
serve the interests of peace by undermining that relationship.

— End of Testimony —