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 efore the Israeli
election this week, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek was on Don
Imus whining about what the election of Ariel Sharon would mean
for the peace process. Alter's
verdict was that the election of Sharon would spell certain doom
for any prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Alter, like many in America and around the world, has it backwards:
Israelis elected Sharon because the peace process has been shown
up for the false El Dorado that it is. But the most notable fact
about yesterday's Israeli election is not the sweeping 25 point
victory for Ariel Sharon — and that was significant
— but the fact that the Israeli Arabs decided not to vote at
all. They wouldn't vote for Ehud Barak, a man who offered the Palestinians
more than any Israeli in history, including shared control of Jerusalem.
The Arab decision to refrain from voting altogether in an election
that seemed to offer such a distinct choice in Israeli approaches
does not augur well. The vote boycott is as much a signal of coming
violence in the Middle East as anything. The Arabs didn't vote for
fear of lending any legitimacy to the state of Israel.
By not voting, the Israeli Arabs, many of whom are now demanding
to be called Israeli Palestinians to mark their identification with
those in the Palestinian Authority, fell into line with the broader
Palestinian plan devised by Chairman Yasser Arafat. For Arafat,
whether the Israeli prime minister is Sharon or Barak is purely
academic. Abu Ammar, Arafat's nomme de guerre, knows only one path
— jihad. Just listen to him in Arabic.
Arafat couldn't agree to Barak's generous give-away at Camp David
last summer and called out the dogs of war
| “The
Arab decision to refrain from voting altogether in an
election that seemed to offer such a distinct choice in
Israeli approaches does not augur well.” |
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instead. Now with his people even more radicalized, Arafat will
keep the pressure on. Remember, the Palestinians refer to the current
spate of hostilities not as "Sharon's War," but as the "al-Aksa
intifada." For the Arabs, the ongoing violence is not about garnering
increased percentages of West Bank land or gaining more access to
the Gaza seaport, but about the holy places in Jerusalem. Arafat
wants his Palestinian state to be born amid the blood of a battle
with the ultimate Israeli foe — Sharon. This, Arafat seems
to believe, will raise his standing in the Arab world, and will
boost his credibility in the international arena.
Arafat's plans for war can be foiled by U.S. foreign policy. President
Bush seems to have learned some of the right lessons from the mistakes
of the Clinton era. All of Clinton's vaunted involvement in the
minutiae of the "peace process" helped embolden Arafat, enticing
him to grow more brazen in his demands. Clinton's desperate desire
for a Nobel Peace Prize led inexorably to the current Middle East
crisis. Last night, Bush calmly congratulated Sharon on the telephone
and told him he "looked forward to working with him, especially
with regard to advancing peace and stability in the region." Bush's
approach, unlike Clinton's, is to delegate Middle East matters to
underlings and let the parties work things out between themselves.
Well and good.
What the Bush administration can't do, however, is expect events
in the Middle East to unfold in as orderly a fashion as the president's
education plan, faith-based institutions agenda and tax cut initiative.
Undoubtedly, Arafat will soon test Sharon. Things may remain quiet
for a while, but then violence will flare up. The Palestinians will
provoke Sharon and wait for retaliation. Once the new spate of violence
erupts, Arafat will plead for help from the Russians, the "moderate"
Arab states, and the European Union. After the new alignment, Arafat
will try to inject his international allies into the process.
Will the Bush administration invite these new parties to the table?
Bush's hands-off approach needs to be coupled with a warning to
the international mischief makers, such as the French, to stay away
from the Middle East. With the Middle East at the brink of war,
a U.S. vacuum in the region could be almost as dangerous as Clinton's
officious meddling.
Already, the stage is set for Israel to get hammered. The headline
of today's Toronto Star story on the Israeli election sniped,
"'Bulldozer' Takes Charge in Israel ... Sharon Gets Green Light
to Crush Arab Uprising." Agence-Free-Press reported that the peace
process "faced an uncertain future after [the election of] arch-hawk
Ariel Sharon." What the hand-wringers miss is that the "peace process"
has been dead for quite some time, long before the election of Ariel
Sharon. That the Arabs didn't vote proves exactly that.
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