How Not To Forge A Peace Agreement

(Washington, D.C.): If the repercussions likely to ensue from President Clinton’s Wye
Plantation
conference on the Middle East were not so deadly serious, the week-long thrash now evidently
nearing a conclusion would be comical in the extreme. After all, it is transparently clear that
this
exercise is strictly about improving the domestic political situation of the Clinton
presidency — not about promoting conditions conducive to a genuine and durable peace.

A Bill of Particulars

Along the trail, the U.S. government appears to have made a number of grave mistakes:

• The U.S. as PLO Advocate: The American delegation has clearly aligned
  itself with the
  Palestinians and against the Israelis. It has systematically briefed reporters that the U.S. and
  PLO agree and that Israel is the obstacle to agreement. As the New York Times
  paraphrased
  the official American line today: “U.S. officials make it clear that they’ll blame Israel for
  a
  failure.”

These pronouncements offer proof positive that Yasir Arafat’s stratagem of driving a
wedge between Israel and its most important friend is succeeding. Such a perception
will only encourage the PLO to be still more intractable. Worse, it may induce the
Arabs to perceive an opportunity that has eluded them since 1973: a chance to wage
war once again against Israel, with a view to retaking territory essential to the defense
of the Jewish State and inflicting terrible casualties on the Israeli people — if not
accomplishing the outright destruction of their country.

• Compromising the CIA and the Special U.S.-Israeli Relationship:
  According to press
  reports, the Clinton Administration has once again offered a deus ex machina to try to
  get
  beyond an impasse arising from the Israelis’ legitimate security concerns. Evidently, CIA
  personnel will be assigned to work with the secret services of both Israel and the Palestinian
  Authority as an “honest broker,” capable of objectively monitoring and reporting on the PA’s
  actual compliance in combating terror in the areas under its control.

As the Center for Security Policy noted in August 1997, however, when Special Envoy
Dennis Ross tabled a similar initiative:

“…When it comes to dangerous notions of intelligence-sharing and -politicization, the
present idea arguably has the dubious distinction of being in a class of its own. How else to
describe an initiative that would: transform the chief CIA agent operating from one of the most
sensitive outposts of freedom in a dangerous region into a kind of diplomatic bureaucrat; make
him responsible for cooperating on an ongoing basis in politically supercharged interactions; and
require him to do so not only with an allied government but also with an entity that has been —
and must remain — an object of U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorist operations?”

It is extremely ill-advised for the United States, for Israel and for their important
bilateral relationship to put American personnel — and interests — in such jeopardy.
“Sources and methods” of intelligence collection will inevitably be compromised; U.S.
efforts to penetrate and counteract PLO-affiliated terrorist organizations will be
impaired; and Israel’s confidence in America’s reliability when it comes to safeguarding
sensitive Israeli information and supporting its anti-terrorist and other defensive
operations can only suffer.

Even in the absence of such a hopelessly compromised position, the United States
has repeatedly failed to honor its security commitments to Israel. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ Most recently,
the Clinton Administration had promised, in connection with the Hebron
agreement, to secure Palestinian compliance with its obligations under the Oslo
accords and to ensure that the timing and extent of the next stages of withdrawals
were up to Israel. The present negotiation bears witness to the fact that — despite
these American assurances and representations to the contrary — the Palestinian
Charter has not been revised to eliminate its 30-odd sections calling for the
destruction of Israel and murder of Jews. Similarly, the agreement now being
extorted from Prime Minister Netanyahu demonstrates that the United States, not
the government of Israel, is deciding what the Jewish State can live with.

• One Step Closer to a Palestinian State: No matter what else comes of
  this agreement, the
  surrender of additional territory will transform the non-contiguous areas presently under
  Palestinian control — what Middle East expert Douglas J. Feith has called “a state of mind” —
  into a real and threatening ministate. Whether the declaration of the sovereignty of such an
  entity is made later or sooner, with Israeli consent or unilaterally, the end result is
  predictable⁽²⁾: Israel will be unable to limit the sovereignty a
  state of Palestine enjoys, will find
  itself threatened by that state and will be obliged to go to war across internationally recognized
  boundaries when it comes time to deal with that threat. These developments will not be
  conducive to peace. Rather, they will prove to be catalysts to a conflict that may consume
  much of the Middle East, cause incalculable harm to the people of Israel and seriously
  jeopardize U.S. interests in the region.

The Bottom Line

In short, it is fatuous to claim that the Wye Summit has “resolved” the security problem
arising
for Israel from the Oslo “peace process.” If anything, the agreement being torturously hammered
out on Maryland’s Eastern Shore may — like so many agreements brokered by the Clinton
Administration — produce expedient, if fleeting, benefits for the President. It will, however, entail
grave and long-term costs for the Nation, its friends and regional concerns. The results of what
has been called Mr. Clinton’s “Wag the Dove” gambit at Wye will prove worse than no agreement
at all, by ensuring that Israel is denied the peace with security to which it is entitled.

– 30 –

1. For a comprehensive treatment of the sorry history of America’s
broken promises to Israel, see
the excellent study by Dr. Irving Moskowitz entitled Should America Guarantee Israel’s
Security? published in 1993 by Americans for a Safe Israel.

2. In fact, the Center has issued repeated warnings about the dangers
associated with a Palestinian
state. See, for example, the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled
Bibi’s Choice: Allow the
Palestinians to Acquire a Real — and Threatening — State or Just a ‘State of Mind’
(No. 98-D
126, 9 July 1998) and The Road to a Palestinian State ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_10″>No. 97-D 10, 20 January 1997).