WASHINGTON, June 3 (UPI) -- By some appearances, the chances for peace between Israelis and Palestinians seemed brighter this week than in a very long time.
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called the presence of his troops in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, an "occupation," and added that Israeli forces could not stay in this area indefinitely. His Army's Chief of Staff, Moshe Ya'alon, told the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Ahrohnot that Israel needed to give Mohammed Dahlan, the new Palestinian chief of security, time to put together a viable force to begin cracking down on terror, a sign that the Israelis are willing to trust a Palestinian interim authority with the vital task of stopping suicide bombers.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has claimed to reach a ceasefire with Hamas, perhaps the deadliest militants operating in the Palestinian territories, to at least end attacks on Israelis inside the Green Line, or the area that comprises the borders of the pre-1967 state.
And President George W. Bush himself will visit both Sharon and Abbas in Aqaba, in Jordan on Wednesday to extract solemn pledges to begin preparing their peoples for negotiations over a future Palestinian State. Before this meeting he is due in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, to cajole Arab leaders to recognize Abbas as the head of the Palestinian Authority and withdraw such diplomatic recognition for President Yasser Arafat.
But appearances can be deceiving.
The most looming obstacle to peace in the Holy Land are two very uncomfortable truths -- suicide bombs are so inexpensive and easy to produce that almost anyone can make them, and the most effective way to prevent their devastating effect is through measures that punish almost all Palestinians unlucky enough to live in the communities from which the bombers flow.
Since Operation Defensive Shield, the Israeli incursions into the West Bank in March 2002, the number of suicide attacks in Israel have allegedly declined precipitously. As Bruce Hoffman reports in the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly, only six such attacks took place in April 2002, five in June, six in July and two in August, compared with 108 such attacks in March. Indeed, the latest round of suicide attacks last month occurred after Israel lifted key roadblocks in the Palestinian territories.
The fact that roadblocks, collective curfews, home demolitions and targeted assassinations have actually prevented terror attacks punctures the cycle of violence argument favored by European and American peace processors. This theory posits that Israel's response to terror in fact increases it, by fueling the rage of Palestinians living under occupation.
And while it is certainly true that a suicide bomber is driven in part by anger, many other angry Palestinians do not choose to take their own lives to kill Jews. In order to believe there is a cycle of violence, one must believe terror floats in the ether turning otherwise peaceful civilians into human smart bombs.
In the past year, the Israelis have prevented terror plots by arresting or killing the plotters. For the Israelis, terrorism is too particular to be prevented in the abstract.
The "road map" that Sharon forced his cabinet to endorse last month calls for Israel to end unilateral prevention of attacks, even though these brutal tactics have sadly proven so effective in stopping these explosions in busses, party halls and open markets.
However, successful as they may be, these retaliatory measures only work in the short term -- in preventing some, and not all suicide terror attacks. And Israel has incurred a steep diplomatic penalty for its active occupation -- its academics are barred from international conferences, its neighbors refrain from most trade, and the United Nations has become so hostile that much of the General Assembly has proposed the barring of Israeli diplomats from almost all of that body's committees.
In the end, short of a lasting peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, there is also the moral price to pay as well, that of continued suffering by innocent Palestinians.
The "road map" also makes demands of the Palestinians. At the same time that Israel is expected to withdraw its forces, open roads and hand over governing to a Palestinian Authority, that reformed authority is expected to take steps to arrest terrorists, denounce terror and share information with the Israeli military. But these steps are only required after the international community helps rebuild the police stations, jails and compounds destroyed by Israeli missiles in the first months of the intifada.
At the heart of the plan is a rather old idea to restart regular meetings between Israel's internal security services, Palestinian preventative security services and the CIA. This process was first codified in the 1998 Wye River Accords as trilateral committees that often met in the U.S. ambassador's residence in Tel Aviv to share real-time intelligence to prevent terrorism. While there were successes when the political leaders were negotiating the final status of a Palestinian state, these talks failed miserably once the Palestinian Intifada began at the end of September in 2000.
At one point, Dahlan's car was riddled with bullets by Israeli troops at a roadblock on his way back from one of these meetings -- with a CIA escort, no less. "Many people thought this was not just an accident at the time," Ambassador Edward Walker, who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs at the time, said in an interview Monday. And the Israelis often complained that information that could have prevented attacks was dismissed by the Palestinians and the CIA.
Such incidents have eroded trust in the old process that essentially deputized Palestinians in the service of preventing terrorism against Israel. "Politically the Palestinians will have an awesomely difficult time in cracking down on violence and not appearing to be the Israeli occupation forces in Palestinian uniforms," Jonathan Alterman, the head of the Center for Strategic International Studies' Middle East program said in an interview Monday. An opinion study to be released this week by the Pew Center finds that 80 percent of Palestinians support the suicide bombers, a rebuilt authority is supposed to prevent.
Under the road map, there would be no regular meetings until the Palestinian security services were actually rebuilt under supervision of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and United States. After that happened, the meetings would be expanded to include representatives from the Jordanian and Egyptian intelligence services, two countries that while technically at peace with Israel have also provided aid at times for the Palestinians during the intifada. Indeed, Israeli officials last year claimed that tunnels from Egypt had been dug to funnel arms to Palestinian agents in Gaza.
Another problem with the security meetings was that the intelligence agents became at times de facto negotiators when their political superiors had reached deadlock. CIA director George Tenet personally negotiated a work plan in June 2001 to get the sides talking again. Many observers on all sides believed that the CIA had become too invested in the political outcome of talks to provide an honest assessment of Palestinian intentions during the first months of the intifada.
Last spring Israel's army uncovered and made public documents from Arafat's compound that showed his authority's funding some terrorist cells while simultaneously pledging to find and arrest others.
The conventional wisdom in Washington now says that all of the bad faith engendered since the intifada can be erased if Arafat is sidelined. But Arafat is the most potent symbol of the Palestinian national movement. As the Americans attempt to shunt him aside, it's unlikely the Palestinian people will necessarily go along with it, unless they believe it is there choice to do the shunting.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe Palestinians should feel particularly invested in the political deals that are affecting them. Arafat chose Abbas under considerable pressure from the Americans and Europeans in February. And for this reason perhaps, Abbas chose for his ministers many of the same people who once and still do pledge their loyalty to Arafat.
If Arafat emerges as the power broker in this new Palestinian Authority, the Israelis will likely walk away from the negotiating table. If he does not, who knows if Abbas can sell a deal to the Palestinians?
