Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has just returned from the Middle East. Declaring her first foray into Arab-Israeli peacemaking a qualified failure, her tone was one of impatience and frustration. Her parting message was a kind of "Call me when you fellows get serious."
Or as Tom Friedman of the New York Times put it, "as long as they just want to fight in their little sandbox . . . if they want to play out their tribal thing," don't bother the United States.This attitude toward both Israelis and Palestinians is not just patronizing. It completely misconstrues the current situation. The Middle East peace process is at a standstill not because the issues are trivial but precisely because we have finally arrived at the most vital issues.
This is not an impasse created by the peculiar obstinacy of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat. It is created by the very structure of the Oslo peace process. Oslo was built on hopes and dreams. It could not solve the core issues. So it punted them into the future. Well, the future is now.
We have arrived finally at the core of the core. Jerusalem: Will Israelis give up their holiest and most important city - not their third holiest, but their Mecca and Medina - having just reclaimed it after 2,000 years? And Palestine: What kind and what size of hostile Palestinian entity will be established on Israel's borders?
That is what this administration seems either unable to understand or unwilling to admit: The breakdown of talks has come because this is the endgame - and in the endgame even pawn moves can be fatal.
Henry Kissinger once suggested a novel peace process for Israel and Syria. Since President Assad had no real interest in peace, there was no real possibility of land-for-peace. Instead, the Israelis should aim for land-for-time: a little sliver here for a few years of breathing room, until the next sliver had to be given away, or until, after some Constantinian change of heart, the Syrians were finally prepared for peace.
The Oslo peace process has turned out to be exactly that: land-for-time. For four years Israelis have given up land and received not only no peace but more deaths from terrorism than in their entire previous history. Each Israeli withdrawal won for them not peace but time: for Gaza and Jericho, a few month's respite; for Nablus and Jenin, a few more; and so on - until Arafat was back on the warpath demanding more.
Things are at a boil now because Netanyahu has finally called an end to land-for-time. Contrary to many Western media (especially Reuters) that continue to characterize him as opposed to land-for-peace, Netanyahu has himself proposed a partition formula. But he refuses to give up land just so that the Palestinians will cease fire for a few months until the next round of blackmail.
That is why the Palestinians are so frustrated. No more freebies. That is why we have Hamas bombs. That is why we have Arafat threats. That is why, reports the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli army is beginning to contemplate and even train for armed conflict with the Palestinian "police," the euphemism for the PLO army that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres invited onto their doorstep.
Israel is demanding that the Palestinians show their cards: Offer compromise, make real peace. In other words, play the final moves.
This is hard for the Palestinians. Their dreams still far exceed their grasp. And their leadership keeps inflaming these impossible expectations. And now that things have gotten hard, what does the secretary of state do? Swoop in on her jet, throw up her hands and swoop out.
Throwing up her hands won her points for frankness. It turned what otherwise would have been a public relations disaster into something of a muted victory for candor. But let's remember that the Clinton administration is no innocent bystander here. It was Clinton who had the Oslo treaty signed not in Oslo or the Middle East but on the White House lawn. It was Clinton who put the weight and power of the United States behind Oslo, even to the point of trying to affect the outcome of an Israeli election lest Netanyahu, the Oslo skeptic, win.
If the secretary of state really wants to be known for her candor, she might say that she is absenting herself from the peace process that we have so slavishly supported - that she profusely praised during her very visit - because it was a mirage, a means of temporizing, a success only insofar as it dealt with the small. It fatally put off the large, and offered no real way to get there.
Candor? Let Albright admit that the reason the Middle East is ready to explode is because too many - including the Clinton administration - put full faith in a process that, built on hope and avoidance, has now reached a dead end.