THE ENEMY WITHIN

(Washington, D.C.): Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s desperate — and apparently failed — attempt to restart the so-called Mideast “peace process” with a conclave in Paris involving Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has only served to underscore the utter bankruptcy of the Clinton Administration’s approach to the region and its sources of conflict.

The problem is not the parties’ temporary departure from what Mrs. Albright calls “the psychology of peacemaking.” Rather it is the failure of the U.S. and Israeli peacemakers to recognize that they are victims of a far more real phenomenon: “cognitive dissonance” — the refusal to see what one does not want to see.¹

The unwanted reality is — as this week’s Palestinian uprising, fomented by “partner for peace” Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority’s official organs, makes clear — Israel has been induced by successive American administration to pursue peace with irreconcilable Arab adversaries and, in the process, to put itself in mortal peril. In particular, there is a metastasizing threat posed by the Fifth Column that broke out into the open over the past few days, comprised of Israel’s Arab citizenry and capable of operating in league with residents of an incipient or actual Palestinian state and/or Syria, Iraq, Iran and other enemies. The Center warned of precisely this danger in a Decision Brief issued last March, which seems as relevant today as when it was first published.

¹President Clinton joked last June with Russian President Putin at Mrs. Albright’s expense when he described “her foreign policy” as one of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Whose Foreign Policy, Mr. President? (No. 00-D 55, 8 June 2000).