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Responses to Prediction and the Middle East Peace Process

David E. Spiro

The Mershon Center

February 1997

Introduction

Several interesting observations came out of our first conference. We realized that the mainstream academic view on the Middle East peace process has changed dramatically—from a belief that there would never be a peace to confidence that the peace process would not be derailed. In trying to make predictions that are not driven by newspaper headlines, we used a fairly uncontroversial laundry list of systemic variables, but we could not agree on which way they would effect the outcome.

My aim in this memorandum is to review my past views on the Middle East peace process as an exercise in exploring what changed—both in the Middle East, and in my own implicit assumptions. I will amend my conclusions about the past by examining what has happened since the Oslo Accords. Finally, I will suggest, by way of conclusion, what driving forces will affect the future.

The Israeli Willingness to Negotiate

I did not understand, in the past, why Israel did not pursue negotiations with the PLO. Since almost every Israeli does mandatory military service, Israel was becoming a nation of occupiers. The ideology of the Jewish State arose in the 1890s in the context of European anti-Semitism. Since then, the stated purpose of political Zionism has been to provide a refuge for Jews within the context of the Westphalian system. This ideology was reinforced by the holocaust. From 1948 until the mid-1970s, universal and mandatory army service was seen as a heroic act in the defense of this refuge's borders against hostile enemies. By the late 1970s, the primary goal of the military was occupation of the territories. Israel became an occupying state that trained an entire generation of 18-year-olds to use weapons against civilians. The formerly heroic role of the army, to defend the Jewish homeland against foreign invasion, had shifted to quelling street riots by teenaged Palestinians. This, I thought, would tear apart the social fabric of the Israeli state, and change its ideological character.

The calculus of the peace has always been to maximize security while continuing Israel's role as a Jewish state. If returning Gaza and the West Bank would compromise Israel's security more than it would reinforce its ideological goals, then negotiations were out of the question. In my own calculus, I thought that returning the occupied territories was obviously to Israel's benefit, and I did not understand why the government did not do so earlier. Clearly, there were questions about the stability of an autonomous Palestinian state. But the territories were captured from Jordan, and although returning them to Jordan would not have been a very happy solution for the Palestinians, that was never one of Israel's concerns.

The calculus of peace was, I believe, a constant background providing an incentive for Israel to exchange land for security. What brought about the agreement, from Israel's side, was the unique constellation of the governing coalition. Labor had not had a dominant governing coalition since 1974. Within the Ma'arach, there had long been a struggle between Rabin and Peres. Rabin was a war-hero, and he was known to be more of a hard-liner than Peres. Thus, Peres as Foreign Minister was able to negotiate a peace, and Rabin (like Nixon in China) was able to get Cabinet approval. With another Cabinet, a weaker coalition, or (most certainly) had the Likud been in power, no agreement would have been possible.

Within the Zionist movement, political Zionism has been challenged by religious Zionism since its inception in the 1880s. The Likud party came to represent this more expansionist, religiously motivated form of Zionism. The first act of the Labor government in 1948 was to destroy a Likud ship bringing arms to the new Israeli state. The Likud represents those Israelis and religious Jews who have an extraordinary emotional attachment to the West Bank. For them, it is nearly unthinkable that Jews should not live in areas such as Hebron, where the forefathers of the Jewish religion are buried. They might be willing to live there under an Arab government, but if an Arab government seems likely to ban them from the region, they would see it as a religious mission to prevent such a government from taking power. (Horowitz and Lissak, p. 241 et passim.)

Regional politics did not play much of a role in bringing about the peace, except in so far as a different configuration might have prevented it. Israel and Egypt are in a hostile peace, but Egypt is unlikely to attack. Jordan had stayed out of the 1973 war, and the king was (apparently) meeting with Israeli leaders in secret on a regular basis. Lebanon has been returning to stability, and does not seem to be sponsoring attacks on Israel (though it can do little to prevent them). Syria always been unstable, but the army is funding itself with drugs and counterfeiting in the Lebanese Beka' Valley, and that has taken pressure off of Hafez al-Assad. Assad has consistently responded to challenges to his rule by attacking Israel as a legitimizing strategy. p> Palestinian Willingness to Negotiate

The PLO was weak by the end of the 1970s, and many thought it a good time for Israel to begin negotiations. Menachem Begin and Arik Sharon took the opposite tack. They ordered the invasion of Lebanon, which militarized the conflict with the PLO, and destroyed the credibility of Palestinians willing to negotiate a solution. As exiles in Tunis, the PLO was in no position to negotiate, but it was well-funded by the Gulf states and the leadership did not seem to be in any great hurry to regain their lost homeland.

What changed their position was the Gulf War. Palestinians have been known as the doctors, engineers, and teachers of the Middle East. Many of them have lived in Kuwait for generations, and know no other country (before the war, as much as 90 percent of the work-force in Kuwait was considered resident aliens). While they helped to build and maintain Kuwait, were born there, and had no claim on citizenship elsewhere, Palestinians in Kuwait were consistently treated like dirt and denied Kuwaiti citizenship.

It was little wonder, then, that when Iraq invaded Kuwait the Palestinians were delighted. Their public siding with Iraq earned them the enmity of the Gulf states, and the PLO's funding was cut off.

At the same time, fundamentalist sentiment had been rising within the West Bank. No opinion surveys are conducted there, but elections in Bir Zeit University began to favor Islamicist parties in the 1980s, and women were increasingly seen in modest traditional dress. Hamas, a fundamentalist organization funded by Iran, had little trouble gaining adherents in the West Bank. While the PLO was without funding, Hamas began to take its place as a social services provider.

Arafat had always had a tenuous hold on the various Palestinian factions, but the challenge for Hamas was the greatest threat to his leadership he had ever faced. He had no choice but to accept a partial compromise if he and Fatah were to stay in power. Little wonder then, that Arafat promised to recognize the State of Israel, change the National Charter to reflect the reality of a two-state solution, and accept a postage stamp sized area of both land and autonomy with the promise of future talks.

What Happened Afterwards?

National elections were to be a referendum on the peace for the Israeli public, and Labor held a commanding lead in the polls. At a campaign rally in Tel-Aviv, Rabin (a normally taciturn man) surprised the audience by singing "A Song of Peace." Moments later he was assassinated by an Israeli member of the religious right. The Israeli Internal Security Service (shituakh bitakhon, or Shin-Bet) was held responsible. In an effort to redeem himself, the head of the Shin-Bet authorized the assassination of "the Engineer," a Palestinian the Israelis held responsible for making bombs that had claimed several innocent victims. Most analysts have argued with hindsight that it was foreseeable the assassination would lead to retaliatory strikes by Palestinians (especially Hamas). And indeed, the result was a particularly disturbing series of bombings in Dizengoff Center (disturbing because a very large proportion of Israelis visits this downtown Tel-Aviv shopping complex on a regular basis). Labor lost its lead, and Netanyahu was elected.

Thus, the result of Israeli insecurity was a return to the hard-line. The calculus of peace meant that Israel might give up land it had great attachment to, but the quid pro quo was always security. The pandemic of insecurity that followed the Tel-Aviv bombings, according to this calculus, meant that it no longer made sense for Israel to give up the land.

This has been reinforced by Palestinian actions since Netanyahu took over. Arafat has been unable (and perhaps unwilling) to control Hamas. Both Israeli intelligence and the CIA have accused Arafat of giving a tacit go-ahead to Hamas activists. Bombings have continued (the most recent in a crowded market frequented by religious Jews in Jerusalem), and they have made Israel less secure.

Arafat has deemed it a capital offense to sell land to Jews, and Israel claims that the Palestinian police took part in a series of killings that claimed the lives of Palestinians who had sold land to Jews. As the rhetoric has gone up several notches, Arafat has called the Palestinian people to defend themselves "by any means possible," which is not leaving the Israeli populace in a mood to trust him in the future. Shortly before this conference, he publicly greeted the leader of Hamas (which involved the traditional hug and kiss Arab men give each other).

For his part, Arafat is despised on nearly every side in the Palestinian and Arab communities. He has been decried as a traitor to his cause because he accepted a partial compromise rather than waiting for one grand settlement. Palestinians have criticized his autocratic rule, decried human rights abuses and censorship of the press, and accused him of corruption. It is more than likely that all of these accusations have a grounding in truth.

A destructive spiral of misperception has set in, whereby Israel moves more slowly the less secure its people feel, and Palestine becomes more violent and radicalized the slower the peace process unfolds.

The Future

Both Palestinians and religious Jews have a fanatical and fetishistic attachment to the West Bank. (No one seems to care very much about Gaza. The British once offered it to Theodor Herzl for a Jewish State, but it had no viable water supply and Egypt's king refused to grant it permanent water rights.) When Israel gave up the Sinai as a result of the Camp David Treaty, a few settlers lost their homes, and a few environmentalists were upset at what Egypt might do to the coral reefs in the Gulf of Aqaba, but otherwise no one really cared that much about the land. It was obvious that giving up the captured Sinai was worth the non-belligerence of Egypt. The West Bank is not like the Sinai. There has to be a very good reason to give up this land.

As Edward Said has pointed out, "For Zionism, the Palestinians have now become the equivalent of a past experience reincarnated in the form of a present threat." The security dilemma will continue to loom large over the peace process. I cannot believe that regional politics will play a large role, unless it indirectly leads to a quantum change in perceptions of security on either side. For Israel, the peace process has not yielded a tangible increase in domestic security, and this will continue to bolster the position of the hard-liners in Israel.

For Palestine, it seems that a move toward the radical fringe is also likely. The rise of Hamas to challenge Arafat after the Gulf War made Arafat more willing to negotiate, but now Arafat's basis of support is not the Gulf States. His funding comes from Israeli tax authorities and international aid donors. He cannot respond to a withdrawal of those funding sources by negotiating with Israel. If Arafat responds to Hamas by clamping down on violence against Israel, he will make Israel more secure (but he may alienate liberal Palestinians who expect to see democracy and human rights—what Etel called the liberalizing elite). More likely, Arafat will continue moving toward the Hamas position, and that will not increase Israel's willingness to trade land for peace.

What I have called the calculus of peace in Israel assumes that a Palestinian state will act in the routinized fashion of a member of the world community of nation-states. Bombings, killing people who sell land to Jews, and calling for Palestinians to defend themselves by any means possible—these are not actions that instill great confidence in Israelis.

Israel, on the other hand, is not likely to return to the unique political configuration that allowed the peace. Labor may retake power, but it would face a daunting prospect in putting together a coalition that could trade territory for security. No one in Israel will be likely to support giving up territory, so long as Palestine continues to move toward a radical fringe that advocates the destruction of the Jewish State.

Three additional points should be emphasized for future discussion by our working group. First, we need to keep in mind that Israel is not at all dependent on Palestine, but Palestine is dependent on Israel. It is simply incorrect to say that the Russian immigration and Likud's desire for foreign investment would keep Israel on a negotiating track. Whenever it wants to, Israel can make life in Palestine very difficult by cutting off access for Palestinian labor and goods, and by stopping the flow of tax revenues to the Palestine National Authority. Secondly, no matter what happens with the occupied territories, there is no viable solution for Jerusalem in sight. Even those Israelis who are most far to the left would not cede Jerusalem to Palestine. Some issues in International Relations are simply not amenable to non-violent solutions, and I think that the final status of Jerusalem belongs in that category.

Finally, it is interesting to observe that both states are relatively new entities, and both evolved from mass movements that had a heavy component of the charismatic ideal-type of authority. In both mass movements, there was extreme tension between the mainstream (which ended up being the parties that signed the Oslo Accords) and religious extremists (which ended up threatening the peace process on both sides). The domestic conflicts over foreign policy in both states are a routinization of the conflicts between the mainstream nationalist movements and their religious opponents.

My prediction for the Middle East peace is protracted low-level conflict that benefits no one and results in nothing but the possibility of war between an Israeli army well-trained in counter-insurgency, and a group of poorly-armed Palestinian teenagers. The Oslo Accords came from a set of events that were so stochastic, it is unlikely anyone could have predicted them. "Noise" in the system will continue to be impossible to predict, but for the foreseeable future it will lead to disharmony rather than peace.

Some sources I found useful: