WASHINGTON, June 15 (UPI) -- With U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's summer conference on peace in Israel, the "peace process" may start up again. That is not a hopeful fact. The process as it stands now is not a means to peace. By making Palestinian terrorism, specifically suicide bombing, nearly impossible to prevent, it hampers effort to bring an end to the violence.
If the "peace process" flaws aren't fixed, we can expect more failure and more violence to come.
It started out as good rhetoric and has become lousy policy. U.S. officials invented the term in 1978 and 1979, mostly at Camp David, for a rhetorical purpose: to overcome Palestinian representatives' bias for sweeping agreements or none at all.
Conventional wisdom treats the peace process as a natural thing. The policy means the conflict's solution will be political, not military, and will be found through ongoing negotiations leading to agreements both sides can accept.
Set aside that mutually acceptable outcomes might not exist. What counts here is that process policy commits U.S. and Israeli leaders to addressing the interests of Palestinians -- since successful negotiations require Palestinian agreement -- and to retaliating minimally if at all against suicide bombings so as not to derail negotiations.
Those commitments undermine deterrence, which requires plausible threats that inspire enough fear to dissuade action. Could anything scare the terrorists that much? Yes. Suicide bombing reflects hope, not hopelessness: those who kill themselves and those who help believe that by doing so they will further their cause. And it is revealing that most suicide bombers are young and unattached; most others love something in this world too much to die or risk death.
Where there is hope and love there is usually the capacity for threats that work. What threats could scare the terrorists out of acting? Primarily a future without realistic hope for anything but a strong, aggressive Israel and suffering, stateless Palestinians; secondarily, the destruction of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the agents, in the terrorists' view, of a brighter future.
So long as U.S. and Israeli leaders commit themselves to political solutions, Palestinian-approved negotiations and minimal retaliation, terrorists have nothing to fear; neither threat can be realized. Perhaps that's kind-hearted. Realizing the first threat might well be immoral. But effective deterrence, which is necessary for peace when hostile forces can't find a settlement, commonly requires cruel threats to have real possibility -- as a glance at Cold War nuclear deterrence shows. And the second threat is just. Peace process policy protects Palestinian terrorists against the worst consequences of their actions.
Without deterrence, what might prevent suicide bombing? There are two options. First, actually destroying Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which would not be a "peace process" at all but a war process -- or, rather, war -- requiring sustained military and intelligence engagement.
Second, removing the causes of Palestinian grievance so that potential terrorists cease to be violently hostile -- in a word, accommodationist negotiation. Peace process policy is entirely invested in that second option.
This puts all our eggs in one very unpromising basket. Since the cause of grievance for the highly militant is Israel's existence, peace process policy depends on apparently moderate Palestinian decision-makers negotiating a settlement while restraining militants -- depends, in short, on Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat. Letting the fates of three nations, the United States in the Middle East, Israel and the Palestinians, all hinge on the hidden intentions and capabilities of one mysterious man with a dubious past is unwise.
Peace process policy also undermines negotiations. As long as the United States and Israel are dedicated to finding a deal he will accept, Arafat has no reason to compromise. Offers will keep coming; he can afford to wait. He has no inventive to restrain militants. Quite the opposite: when it won't provoke retaliation, terrorism is an effective negotiating tool for compelling better and better deals.
By removing the worst consequences from the worst choices, peace process policy corrupts negotiation in just the way it corrupts deterrence -- but there are no avenues for peace left.
It is not in America's interests for Arafat to continue to believe he can always get a better deal then the one currently on the table. The terrorists remain unappeased as the peace process policy kept them from being deterred or destroyed; no surprise then that suicide bombing grew intolerable. And it should be no surprise that Israel responded by trying to destroy the terrorist organizations; that was the only option left.
We should have given deterrence a chance. Much of the violence on both sides might have been prevented. But at least Israel's military campaign, if it does not destroy Palestinian terrorism outright, has shown Israel's willingness to fight. It has established a credible deterrent to terrorism and an incentive for Palestinian negotiators to settle.
U.S. President George Bush should seize the opportunity. He can fashion a new peace process that is not like the last one, that doesn't gamble again on accommodation alone and has teeth. He should affirm Israel's right to wage war on terrorism. He should not treat a cease-fire as sacred -- if anything, Israel should be able to fight terrorism simultaneously with negotiating a future Palestinian state. And he should not treat negotiations, nor the Palestinian state they might bring about, as inviolate, but rather hold out the possibility of Israel aggressively pursuing terrorists while otherwise maintaining status quo. Real peace, in hostile situations, requires that no party be too publicly, nor too sincerely, committed to gentleness.
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(Joshua Kleinfeld, author of the forthcoming book "Experience and Choice: A Theory of Judgment," graduated from Yale University in May 2001.)
