From the Editor

And When the Policy Fails?

In this issue, Jacob Miller points out the weaknesses in President Bush's much-praised speech calling for a new leadership as prelude to establishing a Palestinian state. Bush seeks to implement the failed policy of the Clinton administration with a utopian twist as precondition -- the Palestinian Authority is told to transform itself into a democratic, peace-loving government free of corruption, all this to be accomplished in a three year period.

This is as likely as the New Middle East of Shimon's fantasies. For one thing, the Palestinian Authority cannot be separated from the rest of the Arab world with which it is deeply interdependent politically and culturally: there would have to be vast changes in the broader Arab world before the kind of government Bush envisions could have any chance of emerging among Palestinian Arabs.

Yet today the popular pressures on Arab governments are for even less accomodation with Israel than those regimes currently practice. In his 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, Fouad Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins but also a Muslim who grew up in Lebanon and understands and sympathizes with the dilemmas of the Arab world, warns of Western misreading of that world. "Made from above, by autocratic regimes, and made in stealth, the peace [with Sadat, Arafat, King Hussein] found its most determined opponents in the pockets of the 'civil society' that the Arab regimes did not fully control: the professional syndicates, the assemblies of engineers, physicians, and journalists, the literary guilds, and so forth. The freest and most independent, as it were, took up the cause of the old enmity. In the romance with 'civil society' that sprang up in the twilight of communism and the triumph of democratic capitalism, we have come to see the institutions of 'civil society' as instruments of redemption, the building blocks of a new democratic order of nations at peace. This was a view that the landscape of Eastern European lands under communist regimes spawned. However, we cannot extend this kind of confidence in 'civil society' to the Arab political and intellectual class and its encounter with Israel."

So what happens when the kind of benign government Bush hopes to see replacing Arafat's regime fails to come into being? Will President Bush tell the Arab world the Palestinian Arabs have missed their opportunity? Is it not far more likely that the President will find sufficient "progress" being made to focus on the second half of his speech (Secretary of State Powell, making the TV talk show rounds on June 30, already said there had been excessive emphasis on the first part of the President's address) -- driving Israel back to lines approximating the borders of 1949 and creating a Palestinian state. Already Tel Aviv attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has sent letters to administration and Congressional leaders warning that former Gaza secur- ity service chief Mohammed Dahlan, being promoted by some in the Bush administration as Arafat's successor, was responsible for the bombing of an Israeli school bus on November 20, 2000 in which several Israeli teachers were killed and many schoolchildren seriously wounded. Then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon had called for Dahlan's immediate assassination.

It will be no stretch for the State Department to redefine terrrorist attacks as "isolated incidents" or "hate crimes," the "new" Palestinian Authority to be held blameless. After all, the State Department report on terror only found "6-8" terror incidents in Israel last year when, in the real world, there were over ten times its upper estimate.

Looking down the road, we anticipate little good for Israel to come from the President's policy speech.

Jewels in Folly's Crown

In the last few months, Shimon Peres has not disappointed, jewels of idiocy falling trippingly from his perennially wagging tongue. On July 2, Peres adapted the famous saying of Ben-Gurion who called for fighting the British White Paper outlawing Jewish immigration as if there were no war against Hitler and fighting the Nazis as if there were no White Paper. Peres announced Israel must "enter into negotiations with the Palestinian Authority as if there were no war against terrorism and fight terrorism as if there were no negotiations." The trouble with this is that the Palestinian Authority is the source of most of the terrorism. Our own suggestion: Sharon should conduct policy as if he had no Foreign Minister.

On May 30, the Wall Street Journal Europe reported yet another penetrating insight from Peres: the great statesman declared there was agreement that there is a window of opportunity for progress but "we haven't yet made a decision about what exactly the window is and what exactly the opportunity is."

At a March 16 press conference, Israel's profound Foreign Minister praised Saudi Prince Abdullah's "peace

(Continued on p.11)

Outpost               - 2 -               July-August 2002