May
19, 2003, 9:40 a.m.
Road Rage
Maps aren’t
much help if you can’t agree on the destination.
sraeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was to meet with President Bush on
Tuesday to take a hard look at the "roadmap" to Middle East
peace, to decide if it's really possible to get there from here. But after
another attack over the weekend — a Hamas terrorist wearing a yarmulke
and a prayer shawl blew up a bus — Sharon postponed the trip.
The roadmap is
based on President Bush's June 24th 2002 speech on the Middle East —
in the same sense that The
Great Gatsbystarring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow was based on
the book by
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The president's speech was a landmark — the first real change in US
Middle East policy in decades. In essence, it said to the Palestinians:
"You can have terrorism or you can have a state. But you can't have
both."
Mr. Bush's speech also was an attempt to integrate American peace efforts
with the post-9/11 Bush Doctrine. That doctrine extends a welcoming hand
to moderate Muslims who choose to join the Free world; it offers a mailed
fist to extremists who choose to wage a terrorist war against America and
its allies.
The speech's transformation into the roadmap fell short partly because it
was prepared by the "Quartet," which brings in as America's partners
the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. The problem is that the
U.N., the EU, and Russia do not share the president's vision or subscribe
to the Bush Doctrine — as we learned, painfully, in the days leading
up to the liberation of Iraq.
In addition, the U.S. contribution to the roadmap was led by the same long-serving
State Department officials who constructed the Oslo Accords and who still
appear to believe that the Oslo approach (essentially, the belief that the
promise of a Palestinian state will be sufficient incentive to end Palestinian
terrorism ) is superior to anything President Bush could possibly imagine.
Deeply ingrained within the culture of the State Department is the conviction
that it would be wasteful to discard a policy just because it has failed
(17,000 terrorist attacks including 251 suicide bombings since Oslo) or
just because it does not happen to represent the views of the temporary
occupant of the Oval Office.
As now drawn, the roadmap contains two major flaws, one in the text, one
a matter of interpretation.
Start with the second: The roadmap's first requirement is that the Palestinians
"immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence."
That obviously hasn't happened — this week's bombing being just the
latest examples. Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Authority prime minister,
has so far made no effort to challenge such terrorist groups as Hamas or
even to rein in such terrorist groups as the al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades,
Fatah, and Tanzim — groups that, theoretically, report to him.
You might expect Abbas's refusal even to try to stop terrorism to be cited
as the reason the roadmap has hit a road block. But the sophisticated diplomats
and the sophisticated reporters who cover them instead blame Mr. Sharon.
That's because they think everyone should be sophisticated enough to recognize
that demands for "an unconditional cessation of violence" on the
Palestinian side are unrealistic, especially while Yasser Arafat remains
in command, which he does, especially while Arafat is still encouraging
terrorism, which he is.
So, they figure, the sophisticated solution is to ignore that and instead
pressure the Israelis to make concessions in the hope that will somehow
jump-start the "peace process." In their view, Mr. Sharon's reluctance
to go along with this approach proves once again that he's a "hard-liner."
There's also the curious fact that many sophisticated types don't regard
terrorism directed against Israelis the way they regard terrorism directed
against other victims. They may not even believe that slaughtering Israeli
civilians is terrorism. For proof of that, you need go no further
than the pages of the New York Times. As HonestReporting.com
has noted, a Times special section on May 15 listed terrorist attacks
around the world — from Saudi Arabia to Chechnya to the Philippines.
Conspicuously absent from the "complete coverage" were any mentions
of terrorist attacks in Israel. (It's not just under Jayson Blair's byline
where you can read distortions of reality.)
The second flaw in the roadmap is that it leaves the question of "refugees"
to the third phase of the process. That may sound like small potatoes but
what it really means is that Palestinians can say publicly that they recognize
Israel's right to exist — but with a wink and a nudge. As Abbas made
clear in his inaugural speech, he intends to demand that Palestinians who
left Israel in 1948 — when Israel was invaded by five Arab neighbors
— should have the right to return to Israel (not just to the West Bank
and Gaza), along with their children and grandchildren. Were that to happen,
it would mean the destruction of Israel by demographic means. Israelis would
become a minority in their own country; in other words Israel would cease
to be Israel.
All this does not necessarily imply that the roadmap has become road kill.
It does imply that everyone — the U.N., the EU, Russia, the State Department,
even the Palestinians — needs to finally accept that post-9/11 a new
Palestinian state can not be born as a terrorist state. It does imply that
the Palestinians need to accept the fact that Arafat's dream of fatah,
the conquest of Israel, has failed, and that the best deal the Palestinians
can now get will be something like the deal Arafat turned down in 2000.
And it implies one more thing that should have been obvious all along: A
roadmap is of little value until and unless the travelers agree on the destination.
—
Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent,
is president of the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank on terrorism, and an
NRO contributor.
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sraeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was to meet with President Bush on
Tuesday to take a hard look at the "roadmap" to Middle East
peace, to decide if it's really possible to get there from here. But after
another attack over the weekend — a Hamas terrorist wearing a yarmulke
and a prayer shawl blew up a bus — Sharon postponed the trip.
