Helena Cobban is the author of the Justworldnews.org blog, and writes a regular column on global affairs for The Christian Science Monitor.
President George W. Bush says it is unacceptable to return to the status quo that preceded the recent war between Israel and Lebanon and that the "root causes" of that conflict need to be addressed. I agree—on both counts! But having studied the dynamics in the area for some 30 years longer than the president, I'd describe, quite differently, what was wrong before July 12 not to mention how the "root causes" need to be addressed.
What was wrong was the disgraceful failure of the United States to complete the task that it has monopolized for 32 years—peacemaking betweens Arabs and Israelis. What was wrong, too, was the intense partisanship that successive U.S. administrations have shown—with the constant connivance of Congress—in favor of an Israel that over the past 39 years has illegally settled its own people onto large chunks of occupied territory and used disproportionate force to suppress, kill and threaten its neighbors.
So yes, let us please address these root causes! Let us speedily reconvene an international, all-party summit meeting committed to the conclusion of a sustainable final peace between Israel and, respectively, the Palestinians, Syria, and Lebanon. I would hope the U.S. would be part of this peacemaking, but it can no longer legitimately seek to dominate it.
A sustainable final peace would require, certainly, "painful compromises" from all sides. But today's diplomats are in a much better situation than their predecessors were the last time such an ambitious Arab-Israeli peacemaking effort was launched—at the Madrid conference in 1991. Since 1991, Israel and Jordan have made peace, radically changing the situation to Israel's east. Since 1991, too, negotiators working on both the Syrian-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli tracks have come within a hair's-breadth of reaching a final agreement. On both those tracks, the outline of a sustainable peace has now been well delineated: it would look very close indeed to the exchange on all fronts of land for solid peace agreements that the Security Council called for back in 1967. In 2002, all the Arab governments and the Palestinian Authority approved a Saudi-proposed plan that would give Israel a full peace and normal relations in return for Israel's full withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. Hamas has now signaled its concurrence with this approach. Hezbollah and Iran say they will respect any peace agreement that the Palestinians subscribe to.
The international community has its own huge interest in seeing a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace realized—and quickly. The world's peoples were horrified to see how rapidly and dangerously a small incident along the Lebanese-Israeli border ballooned into mass carnage and devastation. In Lebanon, more than 800 civilians were killed in the 33 days of war, while in Gaza, the killing also continued: Israeli forces killed 163 Palestinians there in July, more than in any month since April 2002. Israelis in the north and south have spent terrifying weeks huddled in shelters; and in the north, Hezbollah's rockets killed 39 Israeli civilians.
Meanwhile, in the Persian/Arabian Gulf—a region linked to the Arab-Israeli theater by numerous ties of politics, religion and sentiment—the U.S. forces and their allies are dangerously spread out throughout Iraq, while the U.S. government still looks eager to pursue a risky standoff with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program. Surely, today more than ever, securing the kind of sustainable peace between the Arabs and Israel that the diplomats already know is doable looks like not only the right but also the prudent thing to do.
But most diplomats understand too that, to be sustainable, this peace must involve Israel's withdrawal from just about all of the Arab lands its armies brought under military occupation in 1967. That includes all of the occupied Syrian Golan (which Israel tried to annex in 1981), and all or very nearly all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem—a city that Israel tried to annex in 1967. No significant governments anywhere in the world ever recognized those two acts of Anschluss, but successive U.S. governments have been notably tolerant both of the annexations and of Israel's continuing settler-implantation project in those areas and in many other portions of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem.
It is good and noteworthy that clause 18 of the Security Council's latest cease-fire resolution for Lebanon, resolution 1701, stressed "the need to achieve, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East" based on the relevant U.N. resolutions. Inside Israel, too, calls for reconvening a Madrid-type peace effort have come from Yossi Beilin and other Labor Party leftists.
These Israelis understand that their country stands at a critical crossroads. The peacemaking (or rather, the quiet-imposing) approach pursued by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and before him Ariel Sharon, relied on partial, unilateral withdrawals of Israeli troops and settlers to within more easily defensible, Israel-defined perimeters. That approach relied on the efficacy of strong wall systems, backed up by a massive projection of Israeli military deterrence. But the outcome of the recent war shows that neither that deterrence nor any wall system, however heavy and intrusive, can be foolproof in an era of easily assembled, wall-hopping rockets and determined, well-trained opponents.
Israel's strategic analysts have already announced the demise of the Sharon-Olmert project of "unilateralism"—and indeed, Olmert himself has also announced its indefinite postponement. The battle over what should replace it has been joined. In the left corner are Beilin, Uri Avnery and a few other level-headed visionaries who advocate an intensified search for a sustainable, comprehensive regional peace. In the right are the Likud leader former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other supporters (American as well as Israeli) of Israel's colonial aggrandizement: They urge a rapidly-accelerated military build-up and the use of ever-greater Israeli military force.
Decision-makers and concerned citizens here in the U.S. have, whether we want it or not (and many do), enormous influence over how battle of ideas inside Israel will play out. This past week, Israel's internal politics have shown themselves to be uniquely fractured, uniquely vulnerable—and therefore, uniquely open to influence from America. Will the political forces in our country line up strongly behind the neocon-Likud vision of Israel as an ever better-armed and trigger-happy bastion of colonial expansionism? Or will they, in this moment of unique opportunity, line up behind Yossi Beilin's vision of working for a regional peace?
We Americans must know that our tax dollars, our government's political support, and our munitions all combined to make Israel's recent military actions possible. Now, we have a responsibility before the whole world for the political choices we make regarding the chance the region has for a viable post-war peace.
