7/12/00 3:25 p.m.
Clinton's Dreamscape
The positions of Israelis and Palestinians remain irreconcilable.

By NR Editors

e may dream, as President Clinton evidently does, that Camp David will be the latest, and even the final, scene of much busy signing by Israelis and Palestinians of documents on paper of the highest quality, adorned with seals of state, and all in a festival of handshakes and photo-ops, sweetness and light. A "peace process" is by definition a dreamscape of the highest order; it may or may not be related to peace itself.

For almost a decade now, carefully crafted documents have emerged from the Madrid conference, the accords known as Oslo I and Oslo II, and the Wye River talks, to mention only the most notable stations on this road to Calvary. But whatever the prior intentions may have been, neither party so far has been able to deliver on its commitments and agreements.

Israelis and Palestinians alike want peace, sincerely and even with anguish. But their conceptions of peace have nothing in common. Israelis ask for security, which means a continuing presence on the West Bank, and the maintenance of most of their settlements there, involving the fate of perhaps 150,000 people who live in them. They also ask for a Jerusalem of their own. Palestinians ask for the return of all their land, settlements included, and for a Jerusalem of their own. Even if a miracle of Clintonian fudging and dollars were to produce yet another round of signatures, these positions remain irreconcilable, continuing to generate hate and conflict.

According to a wise old proverb, a man should swallow a toad every day as a reminder of worse evils. Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat for the Palestinians invite each other to swallow huge and indigestible toads. They are locked in a "fearful symmetry," to adapt a phrase from a great poet. Neither can deliver his constituency with any certainty. Barak's coalition government is collapsing around him. Should he swallow his toad and give the Palestinians what they seek, then half of Israel will turn against him implacably, in civil disobedience and worse. As a result of his regime of tyranny and corruption, Arafat has lost standing and relies increasingly on his police and security forces. Every day Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, his Islamic-fundamentalist rival, grows angrier and more intransigent. Should Arafat swallow his toad and give the Israelis what they seek, then half the Palestinians will turn against him in what might well prove to be civil war.

Edward Said has already given an example of what both Barak and Arafat can expect. This distinguished professor from Columbia University is widely considered the leading spokesman for the Palestinian cause. On a trip to Lebanon, he visited the chicken-wire fence erected to mark the frontier after Israel's recent withdrawal from its Lebanese security zone. And there he picked up a stone and hurled it at the Israelis on the far side. The terrorist movement Hezbollah, he also declared, had won "a military and moral victory" by driving the Israelis out. Years ago he was dubbed "the Professor of Terror," and he does nothing to repudiate that title.

Hoping no doubt to leave a legacy, President Clinton is playing with fire. To hustle with existential issues as profound as these has every potential to precipitate the violence that a "peace process" is designed to avoid. Professor Said's stone-throwing outburst restores the reality of hate and conflict so conspicuously missing from the Camp David dreamscape.