Clinton Legacy Watch #34: A Sovereign Palestinian State, A Weakened U.S.-Israeli Relationship, A Greater Danger of War

(Washington, D.C.): For many Americans, Bill Clinton’s latest foray into Middle East
diplomacy
may amount to little more than a distraction from the crisis enveloping his presidency at home.
For the United States’ most reliable friends and most important allies in the region — the Israelis —
however, Mr. Clinton’s conduct in the Gaza Strip today casts an ominous shadow over their
security and the prospects for a real and durable peace.

A Fraud By Any Other Name

That state of affairs is ironic, even surreal, given the day’s carefully choreographed effort to
conjure up the appearance of peace. Yasser Arafat talked of peace incessantly during his address
to the Palestinian National Council and representatives of other organizations (including, among
the audience, known murderers of American citizens). Those present even stood on his command
and raised their arms in what was interpreted — in accordance with the script — by President
Clinton, by the press and even by the Israeli government as, in Mr. Clinton’s words, “fully, finally
and forever” disposing of the thorny problem of the Palestinian Charter.

In fact, this amounts to one of the greatest diplomatic frauds in history.
Without striking one
word, without adopting a single phrase of alternative text, the Palestinians have “reaffirmed”
earlier, equally vacuous declarations that the provisions of their 1964 Covenant that call for the
destruction of Israel have been “revoked.” Since 30 out of the 33 provisions of this Charter
espouse the elimination of the Jewish State and/or attacks on its people, such a step would, if
genuine, seem to necessitate that a new Covenant be drafted and formally adopted to take its
place.

Now, imagine if Hitler’s National Socialist Party had, part way through the Holocaust,
proclaimed
that unspecified sections of Mein Kampf that blamed the Jews for Germany’s troubles
no longer
represented its guiding philosophy. Would people of the Jewish faith or extraction living in
Nazi-controlled Germany have been wise to accept this pronouncement at face value — without
the promulgation of any revised text or statutes, to say nothing of a wholesale redirection of
Hitler’s policies?

Is it reasonable to ask a people who have repeatedly been the victims of state-sponsored
genocide
and who are confronted with much evidence aside from the Covenant that the new Palestinian
state will be equally committed to the destruction of the Jews and their nation, to settle for less
than a clear-cut, formal and unbegrudging rejection of the PLO’s hateful Charter? Obviously not.

Yet, Israel’s American allies insist that much less is needed. And so, we have the spectacle of
President Clinton lending the moral authority of the United States with his presence and his words
to a subterfuge. There was no roll call vote, there were no concrete measures taken to strike
offending passages or to replace them with commitments to peaceful coexistence with Israel.
Worse yet, as the Associated Press reported before the event, “Palestinian negotiator
Hassan
Asfour said, ‘We will raise our hands and stand up and applaud’….Despite the show of
hands, this should not be considered a formal vote, he added.”

The U.S. role in perpetrating this fraud is made no less reprehensible by the fact that the
Israeli
government felt it must accept what the President has legitimated. The unalterable reality,
however, is that irrespective of what Prime Minister Netanyahu chooses to say about today’s
version of Palestinian theater-of-the-absurd, the PLO has not amended — let
alone stricken —
the offensive passages.

This takes on particular import when there is so much evidence that the reason is not
Palestinian sensibilities about being tutored on parliamentary procedures. Rather, it is an
abiding determination on the part of both Arafat’s faction and most of his opponents to
achieve the goal defined by the 1964 Covenant: the destruction of the State of Israel. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

Encouraging a Palestinian State

Mr. Clinton’s trip to Gaza and the West Bank also is regrettable in that it amounts to the first
state visit by a foreign leader to the incipient Palestinian nation. Despite Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright’s absurd efforts to dismiss the unmistakable symbolic import of the
President’s itinerary, the flames of Palestinian nationalism are being enormously
fanned by:
his arrival and ribbon-cutting ceremony at the newly opened “Gaza International Airport”; the
photo opportunity during his meeting with Arafat in his headquarters under a picture of the city
the Palestinians claim will be their capital, Jerusalem; and his address to the proto-legislature in
the Gaza Strip.

Even Mr. Clinton’s public rhetoric is deliberately inflating Palestinian aspirations. Today, Mr.
Clinton actually announced that “the Palestinian people now have a chance to determine their own
destiny on their own land.” He has complained with approximately the same fervor about Israeli
and Palestinian failures to fulfill their commitments — declaring that “neither has a monopoly on
pain or virtue.”

Such expressions amount to acts of moral equivalence that are not only unjustified
on their
face; they serve further to distance the United States from its most reliable friend and
important ally in the region. Steps like these can only embolden Israel’s enemies.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton is doing a fair amount of damage in her own right. At this writing,
the
First Lady is still scheduled to visit a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, an action in
keeping with — though even more incendiary than — her earlier public call for a Palestinian state.
After all, it will not only serve as a propaganda field-day for those who blame Israel for the
deplorable condition of the residents of such camps throughout the Arab world. It will also
directly insert the United States into the explosive issue of what the Palestinians call the “right of
return of refugees,” the millions of people (many of whom have never set foot in “Palestine”)
who may be interested in populating a new Palestinian state and willing to help liberate what they
see as the rest of its territory, namely Israel.

The Bottom Line

This is not the path of a genuine and durable peace. It may produce “progress,” all right, but
the
movement is in a direction that will not result in security for Israel or serve U.S. interests in the
region. In the words of a preeminent analyst of Middle East affairs, Douglas J. Feith, in the
January 1999 issue of Commentary Magazine: “The Administration’s current policy
— increasing
U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority while winking at its violations of Oslo and its human rights
abuses — simply reinforces the [Palestinian] regime’s most dangerous traits. Down that road lies
further misery for the Palestinians and, for Israel, war.”⁽²⁾

– 30 –

1. See Center Decision Briefs entitled Bibi’s Choice:
Allow The Palestinians To Acquire A Real
— And Threatening — State Or Just A ‘State Of Mind’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_126″>No. 98-D 126, 9 July 1998); and
Clinton Legacy Watch #24: An Odious Ultimatum To Israel ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_78″>No. 98-D 78, 6 May 1998).

2. For additional excerpts from Mr. Feith’s essay, see Center
Decision Brief entitled Clinton,
Stay Home! President’s Ill-Advised Trip To Mideast Will Contribute To
Conflict — Not A
Durable Peace (No. 98-D 198, 11 December
1998).