Summit Postmortem: If Only Clinton Were Half As Resolute As Netanyahu In Safeguarding U.S. Interests In The Mideast

(Washington, D.C.): The clear winner
in the aftermath of the just-concluded
Middle East summit was the interest the
United States shares with Israel and —
one would hope — the entire civilized
world in upholding the principle
that Palestinian Arab violence will not
be condoned, let alone rewarded.
Regrettably, it fell virtually
exclusively to Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu to produce that
result. Mr. Netanyahu’s courage and
determination were sorely tried as not
only the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and Jordan’s
King Hussein but also President
Clinton hammered Israel’s premier to
make concessions on one or more fronts in
the name of appeasing Palestinian Arab
nationalists.

Where Was Bill Clinton?

Particularly appalling was Mr.
Clinton’s failure to use the summit as a
bully pulpit for establishing that
Arafat’s incitement of rock throwing and
automatic weapons fire was utterly
unacceptable. Even inviting
Arafat to the White House under the
circumstances can reasonably be
interpreted as a success of sorts for the
PLO chairman’s “war card”
strategy so brilliantly dissected by
Charles Krauthammer in today’s Washington
Post (see attached).
If the Palestinian Arabs opt to resume
mob action and lethal attacks against
Israelis, a contributing factor may be
the belief that such steps will, at a
minimum, entitle Arafat to the
international attention and influence
that goes along with obtaining a
practically immediate audience with the
President of the United States.

This danger is only compounded by the
fact that President Clinton apparently
did not make clear to Arafat that,
hereafter, Palestinian Arab demands can
only be addressed through negotiations,
that further violence in the future would
preclude relations between the
United States and the Palestinian leader
— with implications for future aid
flows, official visits to Washington,
etc.

To the contrary, Mr. Clinton dedcided
to abstain rather than veto a U.N.
Security Council resolution that was, in
its sympathetic treatment of the PLO’s
grievances, all too reminiscent of that
organization’s rabidly anti-Israeli past.
He also declined to use his post-summit
press conference to condemn the practice
of violence as a negoiating technique.
Instead, he offered the appearance of
moral equivalence between the parties, a
posture that may or may not be conducive
to mediation but that surely signals an
American indifference toward the security
needs of a key ally that can only invite
new efforts to divide the U.S. and
Israel.

In this regard, it is instructive to
consider the message sent by Egypt’s
refusal to participate in the Washington
summit meeting. Egypt is, after all, a
country that receives some $2 billion per
year in U.S. taxpayer funds. Since
neither this affront nor a host of other
invidious actions⁽¹⁾
appear to change Washington’s attitude of
moral equivalence between Israel and
Egypt or otherwise entail any costs
for Cairo, more such behavior must
be expected.

To be sure, President Clinton did not
engage in the sort of Israel-bashing that
characterized the Carter and Bush
Administrations’ policy toward the Jewish
State. Mr. Clinton and his subordinates
reserved their pressure on Israel for
private sessions; although the backbiting
backgrounding has begun, the President’s
refusal to find public fault with Prime
Minister Netanyahu’s stance was
refreshing. Unfortunately, it is unclear
whether this relatively supportive
conduct will survive the U.S.
presidential election season.

The Bottom Line

Prime Minister Netanyahu deserves
kudos for his refusal to accomodate those
demanding his appeasement of Yasser
Arafat. He conducted himself in a
statesmanlike manner that puts his
government in a strong position to deal
with the turmoil that lies ahead. It can
only be hoped that Mr. Netanyahu’s own
statements about the summit having
“increased the degree of mutual
trust” between himself and Arafat
and his description of the latter as his
“partner and friend” will not
come back to haunt him as the PLO
chairman is shown yet again to be utterly
untrustworthy, a most unreliable partner
and no friend of Israel.

It behooves the United States to use
the negotiations it will broker starting
next Sunday in Erez to communicate the
message Mr. Clinton failed to convey in
Washington. If Arafat and his followers
harbor any illusions that those
negotiatoins will be made more productive
or can be circumvented by renewed armed
action against Israel, these talks are
certain to prove futile at best. At
worst, they will advance the very
peace-without-security-for-Israel agenda
that has come to characterize the
so-called “peace process” and
that Mr. Netanyahu so ably resisted in
Washington. These outcomes would be in
neither America’s interest nor Israel’s.

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1. These include,
notably: the virulently anti-Netanyahu
propaganda issued in recent weeks by
Egyptian state media; Cairo’s pursuit of
improving relations with Qaggafi’s Libya
— including its apologizing for the
Libyan chemical weapons program; and
Egypt’s importing of Scud missiles,
threatening military movements and
efforts to sabotage U.S.-led efforts to
extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty.