26 dec 1994
U.S. Economic Assistance and Compliance with the Terms of Peace
While the PLO is expected to jump through hoops to qualify for limited U.S. assistance and support in the peace process, Israel receives unconditional aid in an amount that far exceeds the paltry Palestinian sum.
In addition to the annual Congressional appropriation of $3 billion (and hundreds of millions more in other defense-related contracts), this year Israeli received an outright add-on grant of $80 million to support Russian Jewish resettlement projects. This last amount is larger than the total U.S. appropriation for fiscal year 1995 to the Palestinians.
While U.S. aid to the Palestinians is conditional on the PLO’s compliance with “terms of the peace process” as defined by the U.S. Congress (which literally translates to commitments demanded by the pro-Israel lobby in Congress), U.S. aid to Israel is exempt from political conditions and is even exempt from any Congressional or bureaucratic oversight. In other words, the “accountability and transparency” requirements that apply to the PLO and every other U.S. aid recipient do not apply to the government of Israel.
In order to certify that the PLO has met the conditions of U.S. aid, the State Department earlier this month issued a report on PLO performance (combating terrorism, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, ending the Arab boycott of Israel, etc.). The report was generally favorable and so next week, the President will almost certainly declare that the PLO is qualified to receive its 1995 aid allotment.
What is troubling, however, is not only the fact that the burden of compliance falls exclusively and unfairly on only the Palestinians, but that the U.S. assistance once granted is so bureaucratically encumbered that the Palestinian do not really receive the full benefits of this aid.
Unlike the $3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, the $75 million to the Palestinian is not given directly to the Palestinian national authority. In fact, Israel is the only country of all the U.S. aid recipients to receive direct cash grant. All other recipients have their aid administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), and so it is for the Palestinian aid.
U.S. Aid to Palestinians
Of the $500 million pledged by the United States at the October 12, 1993 donors conference, only $375 million was intended as direct aid. The other $125 million was, in fact, loan guarantees (not loans) to support U.S. private investors seeking joint ventures with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The loan guarantees program is one of the better U.S. international support projects since it provides risk insurance and guarantees for U.S. investors who use commercial bank loans to put capital to work in the West Bank and Gaza. Already, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the U.S. agency that oversees the loan guarantee program, has announced that they are working with five U.S. investors who have partnerships with West Bank and Gaza businessmen. These first five joint ventures will take advantage of $90 million in loan guarantees and political risk insurance. The $90 million invested will generate over 4,000 jobs in the Palestinian territories.
Unfortunately, the story of direct U.S. aid is not so positive. While AID has issued its 1994 final report showing actual disbursements to West Bank and Gaza of $75 million, almost half of that amount has not actually been disbursed. And of the amount that has been given, two-thirds has been in the form of direct assistance toward start up costs for the Palestinian Authority.
With the exception of the one AID funded housing project (which, after six months, remains a barely started foundation), the remaining millions of AID disbursements have been to the U.S. private voluntary organizations (PVOs) and some Washington-based consultant groups to provide studies, training and technical assistance either to AID itself or to Palestinians. The problem with these “technical assistance” programs, of course, is that they do not create needed jobs or investment in Gaza and they have been designed by AID itself and awarded to U.S. contractors without any consultation with the Palestinian leadership.
For example, the $11 million technical training program to support the Palestinian private sector and small business development was rewarded to a U.S.-based PVO that has had no experience in the Middle East (they had received a previous AID contract in Russia). Not only that, but AID developed the proposal and awarded it to an American group without any discussion with PECDAR, Nabil Shaath, (Minister for Economic Development or Abu Ala’a (Minister of Economic Planning) – so much for accountability. Palestinians have complained to me that the $2.5 million AID has awarded to U.S. groups to support the U.S. “Democracy Initiative ” in the West Bank and Gaza has also been used to design programs and implement activities in the territories without any relationship whatever with existing PNA institutions.
So while the PLO must comply with rigid accountability and transparency requirements to receive aid, and must pass political compliance tests to even qualify for this assistance, these burdens fall unfairly on them and they do not directly receive the benefits of the aid for all their efforts.
Israeli Compliance With Terms of Peace
No examination has been made, nor is one even required, as to whether or not Israel has complied with its commitments to the peace process in order to continue U.S. aid. Any such review, however, would reveal a disturbing pattern of non-compliance. Most significant are Israel’s violations in the following areas:
--· Settlement building and land confiscation,
--· Continued human rights violations,
--· Violations of Palestinian rights due to the closure of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, and
--· Failure to implement the terms of the agreement itself.
Since the September 13, 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles, the government of Israel has confiscated or sealed off almost 25,000 acres of Palestinian-owned land in the West Bank and Gaza. In addition, the Rabin government has continued to build housing units in the occupied territories at a steady pace. In what Israel calls “Greater Jerusalem” – which extends as much as eight miles into the West Bank – the government has planned for the construction of 15,000 new homes (in addition to the 13,000 units started by the Likud government and now being completed by the Labor government). In the rest of the West Bank, the Laborites have planned or concluded another 4,000 new homes (in addition to the 11,500 units that were started by the Likud government which they have pledged to complete).
The Israeli government claims that the majority of the new construction is private and not government (in order to technically comply with the U.S.-Israel agreement regarding U.S. loan guarantees), but there is significant government involvement in all of this construction and, in any case, international law holds the occupying authority responsible for all such activities in areas under its control.
A number of human rights organizations have reported the continued practice by both the official occupation forces and armed groups of settlers to uproot, bulldoze or otherwise destroy Palestinian fruit trees. In just the month of October, for example, al-Haq (the Palestinian branch of the International Commission of Jurists), reported three serious instance in which settlers destroyed 558 dunums of Palestinian fruit trees. In cases such as this, Palestinians have no legal recourse.
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem also issued a report documenting Israel’s human rights record during the first year of peace. They have found that the implementation of the autonomy plan “has not put an end to the violations of human rights by Israeli authorities in the occupied territories.” The report lists ongoing violations, including:
--· unnecessary lethal use of arms,
--· house demolitions by means of massive firepower,
--· arbitrary restrictions on movement,
--· severe bureaucratic and other harassment, and
--· discrimination in law enforcement for offenses committed by Israeli citizens against Palestinians.
The frequent and sustained Israeli closures of the West Bank and Gaza and the permanent closure of Jerusalem are a special concern to the Palestinians since these acts of collective punishment create severe hardships for the entire Palestinian population and endanger Palestinian confidence in the peace process.
In the case of the closure of Gaza to both workers and goods, the Israelis argue that it is a security measure. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Rabin has admitted that no Palestinian workers with permits to work in Israel have ever been linked to any violence in Israel. Also 1,300 students from Gaza have been prevented from attending school in the West Bank as a result of the closure and yet none of these students have been linked to any violent activity.
Equally troubling has been the impact of the closures on Palestinian trade and commerce. The closure in effect blockades Gaza and Jericho from Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. The results have been devastating. Unemployment has grown to 50 percent. Exports have all but stopped and the Palestinian Gross National Product dropped by 25% compared to last May. Reductions in employment result in reductions in tax collections, thereby denying the PNA needed revenues to operate basic services. This economic uncertainty in turn leads to a decline in private investment and the hope of creating new jobs.
In addition to this issue the PLO has listed a number of areas where, seven months after the signing of the Cairo Accords, many of its important requirements remain unimplemented by the Israeli government. Among them are:
“1) The safe passage between Gaza and Jericho is inoperative. ...The [Israelis] insisted on blocking Gazans who use the passage to Jericho from entering the West Bank. This is in violation of the Crossing Points article (on page 20 of the Agreement) which considers passage from Jericho to the West Bank akin to passage within the West Bank, requiring no permit or even an official crossing point. In effect, Israel wants to separate Gaza from the West Bank, requiring Gazans to obtain the same permit it requires them to have when crossing into Israel.
“2) Palestinian political prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails and detention camps are still there despite the Cairo Agreement requirements. More than six thousand of them are still denied their freedom….
“3) The Economic Agreement is only partially implemented. Taxes and custom duties are collected by Israel. Rebates to the Palestinian authority are partial and delayed. It took six months to make Palestinian import permits acceptable at Israeli entry points. Palestinian exports to Israel face serious problems….
“4) The Cairo Agreement’s Second Annex requires Israel to submit to the PNA water consumption figures for the settlements in Gaza prior to the transfer of power to the PNA. Furthermore, it requires Israel to submit meter readings for every single well in the Settlements on a periodic basis. This has not been implemented.
“5) The same Annex requires Israel to deliver to the PNA a complete list of all the archeological artifacts it had removed from Gaza and Jericho. It has failed so far to do so.
“6) No progress his made by Israel on continuing to deliver back to the PNA areas on the Beach of the Mawassi. No progress is made on the area of Jericho to be delivered to the PNA.
“7) Four months have passed after the deadline of July 13 for the elections, redeployment in the West Bank, and deployment of the Palestinian Police. This is one of the most damaging aspects of the problems of the peace process.
“8) Implementation of the Early Empowerment Agreement signed in August is not yet complete. Israel added a new requirement to the Agreement, which is availability of donor funding for the potential shortfall in tax collection in the West Bank. No such condition exists in the Agreement.”
Any objective observer would note that Israel’s failures to comply with the terms of the peace process are greater in their severity than those alleged against the Palestinians. And yet, it remains only one of the ironies of the peace process that the burden of compliance falls exclusively on the Palestinians.
***
Jerusalem: An Example
An example of the ironies that abound in this entire question of compliance can be seen in the U.S. and Israeli positions on Jerusalem.
Due to the terms of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DOP), the sovereignty of Jerusalem is to be determined in final status negotiations between the two parties, U.S. policy toward the eastern portion of the city (occupied since 1967) has gone through a subtle but significant transformation.
U.S. policy has long considered the entire question of Jerusalem as unresolved (since this nation like every other does not place an embassy in that city), but the U.S. has consistently maintained that the eastern portion of the city, including the large swathes of land to its North, South and West, to be “occupied territory.” Since the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian DOP and the recognition of Jerusalem as a “final status” issue, it is the Palestinians who have lost in both policy and practice.
Israel has continued its closure of the entirety of the expanded and self-declared “annexed” portions of Jerusalem. Palestinians from the West Bank are then regularly denied access to the medical, religious, social, cultural and educational institutions of the eastern part of the city. Jerusalem, which was a multi-faceted center for West Bank Palestinian social life, has now become, to them, a no man’s land.
The U.S. Congress and Administration pay little attention to Israeli actions that are prejudice to the final status of Jerusalem. The closure and the expanded Jewish construction in the Palestinian areas around the city continue unabated. And while ignoring these Israeli actions, Congress has moved to forbid U.S. agencies or agents from dealing with Palestinian officials in Jerusalem – so as “not to prejudice the final status negotiations.” Even OPIC loan guarantees are not applicable to any U.S.-Palestinian joint venture to invest capital in the eastern part of the city.
Members of Congress regularly join in Israeli expressions of outrage over PLO Chairman Yasir `Arafat’s comments on the Palestinian intention to see Jerusalem as the cultural capital of a Palestinian state. But they ignore the repeated claims by Israel that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel. Prime Minister Rabin himself has on a number of occasions stated his belief that “Jerusalem” will remain united and under Israeli sovereignty.”
And in this context, it is bizarre that no one understands how odd it was for 279 Congressmen to sign a letter to President Clinton in October in which they claimed: “we remain unwavering in our belief that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital – and only Israel’s capital – and that it must remain a united city under Israeli sovereignty.” The letter goes on to state “we support the action taken by the U.S. Congress to prohibit any new offices or meetings in Jerusalem to deal with the Palestinian Authority. Jerusalem is the capital of only one country, Israel, and we urge you to implement a policy that does not in any way support a Palestinian claim to the city. ”
***
And so the questions that must be asked are who is in compliance and who is not and can the U.S. Congress (as driven as it is by pro-Israel sentiment) act as an effective and neutral arbiter on this matter?
While the PLO is expected to jump through hoops to qualify for limited U.S. assistance and support in the peace process, Israel receives unconditional aid in an amount that far exceeds the paltry Palestinian sum.
In addition to the annual Congressional appropriation of $3 billion (and hundreds of millions more in other defense-related contracts), this year Israeli received an outright add-on grant of $80 million to support Russian Jewish resettlement projects. This last amount is larger than the total U.S. appropriation for fiscal year 1995 to the Palestinians.
While U.S. aid to the Palestinians is conditional on the PLO’s compliance with “terms of the peace process” as defined by the U.S. Congress (which literally translates to commitments demanded by the pro-Israel lobby in Congress), U.S. aid to Israel is exempt from political conditions and is even exempt from any Congressional or bureaucratic oversight. In other words, the “accountability and transparency” requirements that apply to the PLO and every other U.S. aid recipient do not apply to the government of Israel.
In order to certify that the PLO has met the conditions of U.S. aid, the State Department earlier this month issued a report on PLO performance (combating terrorism, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, ending the Arab boycott of Israel, etc.). The report was generally favorable and so next week, the President will almost certainly declare that the PLO is qualified to receive its 1995 aid allotment.
What is troubling, however, is not only the fact that the burden of compliance falls exclusively and unfairly on only the Palestinians, but that the U.S. assistance once granted is so bureaucratically encumbered that the Palestinian do not really receive the full benefits of this aid.
Unlike the $3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, the $75 million to the Palestinian is not given directly to the Palestinian national authority. In fact, Israel is the only country of all the U.S. aid recipients to receive direct cash grant. All other recipients have their aid administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), and so it is for the Palestinian aid.
U.S. Aid to Palestinians
Of the $500 million pledged by the United States at the October 12, 1993 donors conference, only $375 million was intended as direct aid. The other $125 million was, in fact, loan guarantees (not loans) to support U.S. private investors seeking joint ventures with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The loan guarantees program is one of the better U.S. international support projects since it provides risk insurance and guarantees for U.S. investors who use commercial bank loans to put capital to work in the West Bank and Gaza. Already, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the U.S. agency that oversees the loan guarantee program, has announced that they are working with five U.S. investors who have partnerships with West Bank and Gaza businessmen. These first five joint ventures will take advantage of $90 million in loan guarantees and political risk insurance. The $90 million invested will generate over 4,000 jobs in the Palestinian territories.
Unfortunately, the story of direct U.S. aid is not so positive. While AID has issued its 1994 final report showing actual disbursements to West Bank and Gaza of $75 million, almost half of that amount has not actually been disbursed. And of the amount that has been given, two-thirds has been in the form of direct assistance toward start up costs for the Palestinian Authority.
With the exception of the one AID funded housing project (which, after six months, remains a barely started foundation), the remaining millions of AID disbursements have been to the U.S. private voluntary organizations (PVOs) and some Washington-based consultant groups to provide studies, training and technical assistance either to AID itself or to Palestinians. The problem with these “technical assistance” programs, of course, is that they do not create needed jobs or investment in Gaza and they have been designed by AID itself and awarded to U.S. contractors without any consultation with the Palestinian leadership.
For example, the $11 million technical training program to support the Palestinian private sector and small business development was rewarded to a U.S.-based PVO that has had no experience in the Middle East (they had received a previous AID contract in Russia). Not only that, but AID developed the proposal and awarded it to an American group without any discussion with PECDAR, Nabil Shaath, (Minister for Economic Development or Abu Ala’a (Minister of Economic Planning) – so much for accountability. Palestinians have complained to me that the $2.5 million AID has awarded to U.S. groups to support the U.S. “Democracy Initiative ” in the West Bank and Gaza has also been used to design programs and implement activities in the territories without any relationship whatever with existing PNA institutions.
So while the PLO must comply with rigid accountability and transparency requirements to receive aid, and must pass political compliance tests to even qualify for this assistance, these burdens fall unfairly on them and they do not directly receive the benefits of the aid for all their efforts.
Israeli Compliance With Terms of Peace
No examination has been made, nor is one even required, as to whether or not Israel has complied with its commitments to the peace process in order to continue U.S. aid. Any such review, however, would reveal a disturbing pattern of non-compliance. Most significant are Israel’s violations in the following areas:
--· Settlement building and land confiscation,
--· Continued human rights violations,
--· Violations of Palestinian rights due to the closure of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, and
--· Failure to implement the terms of the agreement itself.
Since the September 13, 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles, the government of Israel has confiscated or sealed off almost 25,000 acres of Palestinian-owned land in the West Bank and Gaza. In addition, the Rabin government has continued to build housing units in the occupied territories at a steady pace. In what Israel calls “Greater Jerusalem” – which extends as much as eight miles into the West Bank – the government has planned for the construction of 15,000 new homes (in addition to the 13,000 units started by the Likud government and now being completed by the Labor government). In the rest of the West Bank, the Laborites have planned or concluded another 4,000 new homes (in addition to the 11,500 units that were started by the Likud government which they have pledged to complete).
The Israeli government claims that the majority of the new construction is private and not government (in order to technically comply with the U.S.-Israel agreement regarding U.S. loan guarantees), but there is significant government involvement in all of this construction and, in any case, international law holds the occupying authority responsible for all such activities in areas under its control.
A number of human rights organizations have reported the continued practice by both the official occupation forces and armed groups of settlers to uproot, bulldoze or otherwise destroy Palestinian fruit trees. In just the month of October, for example, al-Haq (the Palestinian branch of the International Commission of Jurists), reported three serious instance in which settlers destroyed 558 dunums of Palestinian fruit trees. In cases such as this, Palestinians have no legal recourse.
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem also issued a report documenting Israel’s human rights record during the first year of peace. They have found that the implementation of the autonomy plan “has not put an end to the violations of human rights by Israeli authorities in the occupied territories.” The report lists ongoing violations, including:
--· unnecessary lethal use of arms,
--· house demolitions by means of massive firepower,
--· arbitrary restrictions on movement,
--· severe bureaucratic and other harassment, and
--· discrimination in law enforcement for offenses committed by Israeli citizens against Palestinians.
The frequent and sustained Israeli closures of the West Bank and Gaza and the permanent closure of Jerusalem are a special concern to the Palestinians since these acts of collective punishment create severe hardships for the entire Palestinian population and endanger Palestinian confidence in the peace process.
In the case of the closure of Gaza to both workers and goods, the Israelis argue that it is a security measure. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Rabin has admitted that no Palestinian workers with permits to work in Israel have ever been linked to any violence in Israel. Also 1,300 students from Gaza have been prevented from attending school in the West Bank as a result of the closure and yet none of these students have been linked to any violent activity.
Equally troubling has been the impact of the closures on Palestinian trade and commerce. The closure in effect blockades Gaza and Jericho from Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. The results have been devastating. Unemployment has grown to 50 percent. Exports have all but stopped and the Palestinian Gross National Product dropped by 25% compared to last May. Reductions in employment result in reductions in tax collections, thereby denying the PNA needed revenues to operate basic services. This economic uncertainty in turn leads to a decline in private investment and the hope of creating new jobs.
In addition to this issue the PLO has listed a number of areas where, seven months after the signing of the Cairo Accords, many of its important requirements remain unimplemented by the Israeli government. Among them are:
“1) The safe passage between Gaza and Jericho is inoperative. ...The [Israelis] insisted on blocking Gazans who use the passage to Jericho from entering the West Bank. This is in violation of the Crossing Points article (on page 20 of the Agreement) which considers passage from Jericho to the West Bank akin to passage within the West Bank, requiring no permit or even an official crossing point. In effect, Israel wants to separate Gaza from the West Bank, requiring Gazans to obtain the same permit it requires them to have when crossing into Israel.
“2) Palestinian political prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails and detention camps are still there despite the Cairo Agreement requirements. More than six thousand of them are still denied their freedom….
“3) The Economic Agreement is only partially implemented. Taxes and custom duties are collected by Israel. Rebates to the Palestinian authority are partial and delayed. It took six months to make Palestinian import permits acceptable at Israeli entry points. Palestinian exports to Israel face serious problems….
“4) The Cairo Agreement’s Second Annex requires Israel to submit to the PNA water consumption figures for the settlements in Gaza prior to the transfer of power to the PNA. Furthermore, it requires Israel to submit meter readings for every single well in the Settlements on a periodic basis. This has not been implemented.
“5) The same Annex requires Israel to deliver to the PNA a complete list of all the archeological artifacts it had removed from Gaza and Jericho. It has failed so far to do so.
“6) No progress his made by Israel on continuing to deliver back to the PNA areas on the Beach of the Mawassi. No progress is made on the area of Jericho to be delivered to the PNA.
“7) Four months have passed after the deadline of July 13 for the elections, redeployment in the West Bank, and deployment of the Palestinian Police. This is one of the most damaging aspects of the problems of the peace process.
“8) Implementation of the Early Empowerment Agreement signed in August is not yet complete. Israel added a new requirement to the Agreement, which is availability of donor funding for the potential shortfall in tax collection in the West Bank. No such condition exists in the Agreement.”
Any objective observer would note that Israel’s failures to comply with the terms of the peace process are greater in their severity than those alleged against the Palestinians. And yet, it remains only one of the ironies of the peace process that the burden of compliance falls exclusively on the Palestinians.
***
Jerusalem: An Example
An example of the ironies that abound in this entire question of compliance can be seen in the U.S. and Israeli positions on Jerusalem.
Due to the terms of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DOP), the sovereignty of Jerusalem is to be determined in final status negotiations between the two parties, U.S. policy toward the eastern portion of the city (occupied since 1967) has gone through a subtle but significant transformation.
U.S. policy has long considered the entire question of Jerusalem as unresolved (since this nation like every other does not place an embassy in that city), but the U.S. has consistently maintained that the eastern portion of the city, including the large swathes of land to its North, South and West, to be “occupied territory.” Since the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian DOP and the recognition of Jerusalem as a “final status” issue, it is the Palestinians who have lost in both policy and practice.
Israel has continued its closure of the entirety of the expanded and self-declared “annexed” portions of Jerusalem. Palestinians from the West Bank are then regularly denied access to the medical, religious, social, cultural and educational institutions of the eastern part of the city. Jerusalem, which was a multi-faceted center for West Bank Palestinian social life, has now become, to them, a no man’s land.
The U.S. Congress and Administration pay little attention to Israeli actions that are prejudice to the final status of Jerusalem. The closure and the expanded Jewish construction in the Palestinian areas around the city continue unabated. And while ignoring these Israeli actions, Congress has moved to forbid U.S. agencies or agents from dealing with Palestinian officials in Jerusalem – so as “not to prejudice the final status negotiations.” Even OPIC loan guarantees are not applicable to any U.S.-Palestinian joint venture to invest capital in the eastern part of the city.
Members of Congress regularly join in Israeli expressions of outrage over PLO Chairman Yasir `Arafat’s comments on the Palestinian intention to see Jerusalem as the cultural capital of a Palestinian state. But they ignore the repeated claims by Israel that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel. Prime Minister Rabin himself has on a number of occasions stated his belief that “Jerusalem” will remain united and under Israeli sovereignty.”
And in this context, it is bizarre that no one understands how odd it was for 279 Congressmen to sign a letter to President Clinton in October in which they claimed: “we remain unwavering in our belief that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital – and only Israel’s capital – and that it must remain a united city under Israeli sovereignty.” The letter goes on to state “we support the action taken by the U.S. Congress to prohibit any new offices or meetings in Jerusalem to deal with the Palestinian Authority. Jerusalem is the capital of only one country, Israel, and we urge you to implement a policy that does not in any way support a Palestinian claim to the city. ”
***
And so the questions that must be asked are who is in compliance and who is not and can the U.S. Congress (as driven as it is by pro-Israel sentiment) act as an effective and neutral arbiter on this matter?
19 dec 1994
A political storm is brewing in Washington, involving the peace process. The major parties to this developing struggle are the U.S. Department of State, and the pro-Labor and pro-Likud lobbies in the U.S. and their supporters in the U.S. Congress.
What has set the stage for this conflict was the December 1, 1994 issuance of a document that has become known as the “PLO Compliance Report.” In the report, the State Department reviews PLO behavior over the past six months in an effort to determine whether or not the Palestinian leadership is honoring its commitment to the Middle East peace process.
The State Department is required to submit this report to Congress under the terms of the Middle East Peace Facilitation Act of 1994. According to this Act, all U.S. economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority is conditional on the PLO’s:
a) renouncing the Arab League boycott of Israel;
b) urging the nations of the Arab League to end the boycott of Israel;
c) cooperating with efforts undertaken by the President of the United States to end the Arab League boycott of Israel;
d) condemning individual acts of terrorism and violence;
e) amending its National Covenant to eliminate all references calling for the destruction of Israel.
The 13 page State Department report covers the period from June 1, 1994 to November 30, 1994, and for the most part focuses on the PLO’s response to violence against Israelis and the PLO’s “commitment to seek a peaceful and negotiated settlement” with Israel.
While noting, what it terms, some “difficulties and failures (especially with regard to changing the “PLO’s Covenant”), the State Department report “confirms the PLO’s commitment” and notes that the organization has “abided by its commitment to renounce terrorism.” Nevertheless, the report notes that this last area (being Israel’s most central concern) presents the PLO “with its most difficult challenge” and the report concludes that the Palestinian Authority “should do more in this critical area” and that, for its part, the U.S. Administration “will continue to press the PLO to take the necessary actions to prevent acts of violence, to bring those responsible to justice and to abide by all its other commitments.”
Since the report is only mildly critical and is genuinely supportive of PLO efforts, it appears to be the intent of the State Department that the President certify the PLO as being in compliance, so that U.S. economic aid can continue. It is this unspoken subtext to the report that has caused a flare-up among pro-Israel groups.
***
It should be noted, however, that all of this discussion ignores several fundamental questions that will never be asked in Washington:
--· Why is there no legislation requiring that aid to Israel be conditional on its compliance with the terms of the peace process?
--· Is Israel in compliance with its commitments?
--· What has happened to the U.S. aid to the Palestinians? And is it worth jumping through hoops to get it?
***
The origin of the Compliance Act in question is the result of the work of the pro-Israel lobbyists and their supporters in Congress.
Because the pro-Israel lobbies have spent the past 20 years building a political powerhouse based on the war against the Palestinians, for a number of reasons the lobbies are finding it difficult to simply accept the movement toward peace in good faith and work to support the peace process. Among these reasons are:
--· They have built a national constituency among members of the Jewish community and in Congress based on a fear of Palestinians and opposition to their goals.
--· Even those who have endorsed the peace process fear losing support in the Jewish community to pro-Likud forces, who are trying to portray them as “weak on the Palestinian issue.”
--· Quite simply, their power was built on this fear of Palestinians and opposing cooperation with the Arab world, and power is never easy to surrender.
Instead of moving to remove the encumbering anti-Palestinian legislation of the past 20 years and whole-heartedly supporting U.S. aid to Palestinians, the largest pro-Israel group, AIPAC, and its supporters in Congress wrote new legislation that “conditionally” removes old sanctions against the PLO and links U.S. aid to the Palestinians to conditions that are difficult to achieve or interpret.
At this time, AIPAC is being pushed hard from the right by the very pro-Likud Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which has capitalized on latent anti Palestinian sentiment (created in some measure by AIPAC over the years) among many in the Jewish community and the knee-jerk support for such attitudes (also largely created by AIPAC) among many members of Congress.
Even before the Compliance Act was passed, the ZOA formed its own Peace Accords Monitoring Committee (PAM) in the Congress and quickly drew over 50 members to its ranks. The purpose of PAM was simply to monitor PLO compliance and pressure the Administration to force the PLO to continue to make one-sided concessions to Israel. And while both the Israeli government and the U.S. opposed the formation of PAM and the passage of the Compliance Act, AIPAC went along with both efforts out of fear of losing ground to the ZOA.
This dynamic has continued to the present day. Before the State Department released its compliance report, both the ZOA and AIPAC issued their own studies in an effort to shape the State Department’s findings at the PLO’s expense.
The AIPAC report, entitled “Problems in the PLO’s Compliance with its Commitments,” is sharply critical of the PLO performance in “meeting Israel’s security concerns” through its failure to take “Firm, effective action against…the terror of extremists…and incitement to violence against Israelis.” While nominally “pro-peace” (like the Labor government it says it supports), AIPAC attempts to walk the fine line of “supporting the peace process” and covering its rear flank against attacks from the ZOA that it is “caving in to the PLO.”
In a real sense, this is a pattern of behavior displayed by the Labor government itself. The net result is that the extreme right wing is driving the political debate and determining the political behavior of both the Labor government and its lobby in the U.S.
The ZOA report was issued on the November 28th and entitled “On the Eve of the State Department Report on PLO Compliance, the ZOA finds the PLO is not in compliance with Accords.” It is a shrill attack on 12 areas of PLO behavior, with most of the reporting based on false conclusions and disinformation. It blames the PLO for “violating its obligation”...to halt terrorist attacks by PLO groups, to refrain from hostile propaganda against Israel, to change the Covenant,” etc.
After the State Department report was released and it became clear that the U.S. was prepared to certify the PLO’s compliance, the ZOA immediately attacked the official U.S. report, terming it a “whitewash” that “ignores, minimizes and whitewashes the PLO’s numerous serious violations of the Accords.”
The ZOA’s President concludes:
“President Clinton has pledged $500 million to the PLO and he will be considering the State Department’s report as he decides whether or not to send that money to a group that has not always shown it has transformed itself from the terrorist organization it always was. We hope that the President will take into consideration Congressional opinion and the many serious flaws in the State Department’s report. As U.S. law appropriately requires, the PLO should not receive U.S. aid so long as the PLO is violating the accords, by not condemning terrorism, not punishing terrorists, not urging Palestinian Arabs to give up violence, and not changing the PLO Covenant, which calls for Israel’s destruction.”
Not to be outdone, but still seeking to walk its tightrope, AIPAC issued a statement of its own, expressing its “disappointment” with the State Department report and noting that “peace requires Arafat to change his conduct,” but the State Department “report fails to hold Arafat to a high enough standard.”
An interesting twist to this struggle between the ZOA and AIPAC for the best anti-PLO credentials, has been the fact that the Labor government immediately responded by attacking the AIPAC response as not being in the interest of peace. The Israeli Ambassador to Washington, in a conference call to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, personally urged them not to criticize the State Department report. And Israeli Foreign Ministry officials made it clear to Jewish pro-Israel lobbyists that the Israeli government sees continuing U.S. aid to Palestinians as important to maintaining the peace process.
Three days after its initial critical statement, AIPAC was forced to issue a clarification which, while not backing away from its prior criticism of the PLO, notes that AIPAC “is not opposed to the continuation” of U.S. aid to the Palestinians, since this aid is “critically needed to improve the desperate economic situation in the impoverished Gaza Strip.”
Other Jewish organizations, for example, Americans for Peace Now, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, did issue statements more favorable to the State Department report and called for a continuation of U.S. economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority.
***
The next step in this process will come on January 1, when President Clinton is required by the Compliance Act to accept or reject the State Department report and to certify (or not) the PLO as qualified for continuing U.S. aid. It is almost certain that Clinton will certify continuation of the aid. But the matter will not rest there. When the new Congress convenes in January, PAM members (under the strong influence of the ZOA, which founded the group) will continue to pressure the Administration and will most probably call for Congressional hearings on the PLO’s compliance.
Since Senator Jesse Helms, the incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senators Arlen Specter and Richard Shelby (the authors of the PLO Compliance Act) are all members of PAM, there will be pressure to convene such hearings – even over the objections of the U.S. Administration and the Israeli government.
The lessons in all of this are clear. The asymmetry of political power in Washington continues to shape the debate one Middle East issues. Influential pro-Israel groups are largely responsible for generating the political pressure on Congress and on the Administration to deal with compliance issues in a one-sided fashion.
For the peace process to be real and for the U.S. to be able to truly serve as an even-handed arbiter, there must be a constituency for a balanced peace. It is clear, by their behavior, that the major pro-Israel groups (AIPAC included, despite its statements to the contrary) are not committed to balance. They, like the leadership in Israel, are still driven by their prejudices and fear of the past. They expect Palestinians, all other Arabs and even Arab Americans to change, but have not made the same change themselves.
This does not mean that the peace process will end, but the one-sided pressure exerted by right wing groups has distorted and disfigured the peace process, to the point where it has become an unrecognizable caricature of the process observers hoped for just over a year ago.
(Next week’s article will be a look at other unasked questions: what of Israel’s compliance to its commitments under the peace process and what of U.S. aid to the Palestinians.)
What has set the stage for this conflict was the December 1, 1994 issuance of a document that has become known as the “PLO Compliance Report.” In the report, the State Department reviews PLO behavior over the past six months in an effort to determine whether or not the Palestinian leadership is honoring its commitment to the Middle East peace process.
The State Department is required to submit this report to Congress under the terms of the Middle East Peace Facilitation Act of 1994. According to this Act, all U.S. economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority is conditional on the PLO’s:
a) renouncing the Arab League boycott of Israel;
b) urging the nations of the Arab League to end the boycott of Israel;
c) cooperating with efforts undertaken by the President of the United States to end the Arab League boycott of Israel;
d) condemning individual acts of terrorism and violence;
e) amending its National Covenant to eliminate all references calling for the destruction of Israel.
The 13 page State Department report covers the period from June 1, 1994 to November 30, 1994, and for the most part focuses on the PLO’s response to violence against Israelis and the PLO’s “commitment to seek a peaceful and negotiated settlement” with Israel.
While noting, what it terms, some “difficulties and failures (especially with regard to changing the “PLO’s Covenant”), the State Department report “confirms the PLO’s commitment” and notes that the organization has “abided by its commitment to renounce terrorism.” Nevertheless, the report notes that this last area (being Israel’s most central concern) presents the PLO “with its most difficult challenge” and the report concludes that the Palestinian Authority “should do more in this critical area” and that, for its part, the U.S. Administration “will continue to press the PLO to take the necessary actions to prevent acts of violence, to bring those responsible to justice and to abide by all its other commitments.”
Since the report is only mildly critical and is genuinely supportive of PLO efforts, it appears to be the intent of the State Department that the President certify the PLO as being in compliance, so that U.S. economic aid can continue. It is this unspoken subtext to the report that has caused a flare-up among pro-Israel groups.
***
It should be noted, however, that all of this discussion ignores several fundamental questions that will never be asked in Washington:
--· Why is there no legislation requiring that aid to Israel be conditional on its compliance with the terms of the peace process?
--· Is Israel in compliance with its commitments?
--· What has happened to the U.S. aid to the Palestinians? And is it worth jumping through hoops to get it?
***
The origin of the Compliance Act in question is the result of the work of the pro-Israel lobbyists and their supporters in Congress.
Because the pro-Israel lobbies have spent the past 20 years building a political powerhouse based on the war against the Palestinians, for a number of reasons the lobbies are finding it difficult to simply accept the movement toward peace in good faith and work to support the peace process. Among these reasons are:
--· They have built a national constituency among members of the Jewish community and in Congress based on a fear of Palestinians and opposition to their goals.
--· Even those who have endorsed the peace process fear losing support in the Jewish community to pro-Likud forces, who are trying to portray them as “weak on the Palestinian issue.”
--· Quite simply, their power was built on this fear of Palestinians and opposing cooperation with the Arab world, and power is never easy to surrender.
Instead of moving to remove the encumbering anti-Palestinian legislation of the past 20 years and whole-heartedly supporting U.S. aid to Palestinians, the largest pro-Israel group, AIPAC, and its supporters in Congress wrote new legislation that “conditionally” removes old sanctions against the PLO and links U.S. aid to the Palestinians to conditions that are difficult to achieve or interpret.
At this time, AIPAC is being pushed hard from the right by the very pro-Likud Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which has capitalized on latent anti Palestinian sentiment (created in some measure by AIPAC over the years) among many in the Jewish community and the knee-jerk support for such attitudes (also largely created by AIPAC) among many members of Congress.
Even before the Compliance Act was passed, the ZOA formed its own Peace Accords Monitoring Committee (PAM) in the Congress and quickly drew over 50 members to its ranks. The purpose of PAM was simply to monitor PLO compliance and pressure the Administration to force the PLO to continue to make one-sided concessions to Israel. And while both the Israeli government and the U.S. opposed the formation of PAM and the passage of the Compliance Act, AIPAC went along with both efforts out of fear of losing ground to the ZOA.
This dynamic has continued to the present day. Before the State Department released its compliance report, both the ZOA and AIPAC issued their own studies in an effort to shape the State Department’s findings at the PLO’s expense.
The AIPAC report, entitled “Problems in the PLO’s Compliance with its Commitments,” is sharply critical of the PLO performance in “meeting Israel’s security concerns” through its failure to take “Firm, effective action against…the terror of extremists…and incitement to violence against Israelis.” While nominally “pro-peace” (like the Labor government it says it supports), AIPAC attempts to walk the fine line of “supporting the peace process” and covering its rear flank against attacks from the ZOA that it is “caving in to the PLO.”
In a real sense, this is a pattern of behavior displayed by the Labor government itself. The net result is that the extreme right wing is driving the political debate and determining the political behavior of both the Labor government and its lobby in the U.S.
The ZOA report was issued on the November 28th and entitled “On the Eve of the State Department Report on PLO Compliance, the ZOA finds the PLO is not in compliance with Accords.” It is a shrill attack on 12 areas of PLO behavior, with most of the reporting based on false conclusions and disinformation. It blames the PLO for “violating its obligation”...to halt terrorist attacks by PLO groups, to refrain from hostile propaganda against Israel, to change the Covenant,” etc.
After the State Department report was released and it became clear that the U.S. was prepared to certify the PLO’s compliance, the ZOA immediately attacked the official U.S. report, terming it a “whitewash” that “ignores, minimizes and whitewashes the PLO’s numerous serious violations of the Accords.”
The ZOA’s President concludes:
“President Clinton has pledged $500 million to the PLO and he will be considering the State Department’s report as he decides whether or not to send that money to a group that has not always shown it has transformed itself from the terrorist organization it always was. We hope that the President will take into consideration Congressional opinion and the many serious flaws in the State Department’s report. As U.S. law appropriately requires, the PLO should not receive U.S. aid so long as the PLO is violating the accords, by not condemning terrorism, not punishing terrorists, not urging Palestinian Arabs to give up violence, and not changing the PLO Covenant, which calls for Israel’s destruction.”
Not to be outdone, but still seeking to walk its tightrope, AIPAC issued a statement of its own, expressing its “disappointment” with the State Department report and noting that “peace requires Arafat to change his conduct,” but the State Department “report fails to hold Arafat to a high enough standard.”
An interesting twist to this struggle between the ZOA and AIPAC for the best anti-PLO credentials, has been the fact that the Labor government immediately responded by attacking the AIPAC response as not being in the interest of peace. The Israeli Ambassador to Washington, in a conference call to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, personally urged them not to criticize the State Department report. And Israeli Foreign Ministry officials made it clear to Jewish pro-Israel lobbyists that the Israeli government sees continuing U.S. aid to Palestinians as important to maintaining the peace process.
Three days after its initial critical statement, AIPAC was forced to issue a clarification which, while not backing away from its prior criticism of the PLO, notes that AIPAC “is not opposed to the continuation” of U.S. aid to the Palestinians, since this aid is “critically needed to improve the desperate economic situation in the impoverished Gaza Strip.”
Other Jewish organizations, for example, Americans for Peace Now, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, did issue statements more favorable to the State Department report and called for a continuation of U.S. economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority.
***
The next step in this process will come on January 1, when President Clinton is required by the Compliance Act to accept or reject the State Department report and to certify (or not) the PLO as qualified for continuing U.S. aid. It is almost certain that Clinton will certify continuation of the aid. But the matter will not rest there. When the new Congress convenes in January, PAM members (under the strong influence of the ZOA, which founded the group) will continue to pressure the Administration and will most probably call for Congressional hearings on the PLO’s compliance.
Since Senator Jesse Helms, the incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senators Arlen Specter and Richard Shelby (the authors of the PLO Compliance Act) are all members of PAM, there will be pressure to convene such hearings – even over the objections of the U.S. Administration and the Israeli government.
The lessons in all of this are clear. The asymmetry of political power in Washington continues to shape the debate one Middle East issues. Influential pro-Israel groups are largely responsible for generating the political pressure on Congress and on the Administration to deal with compliance issues in a one-sided fashion.
For the peace process to be real and for the U.S. to be able to truly serve as an even-handed arbiter, there must be a constituency for a balanced peace. It is clear, by their behavior, that the major pro-Israel groups (AIPAC included, despite its statements to the contrary) are not committed to balance. They, like the leadership in Israel, are still driven by their prejudices and fear of the past. They expect Palestinians, all other Arabs and even Arab Americans to change, but have not made the same change themselves.
This does not mean that the peace process will end, but the one-sided pressure exerted by right wing groups has distorted and disfigured the peace process, to the point where it has become an unrecognizable caricature of the process observers hoped for just over a year ago.
(Next week’s article will be a look at other unasked questions: what of Israel’s compliance to its commitments under the peace process and what of U.S. aid to the Palestinians.)
5 dec 1994
When assessing the role of the American Jewish community will play in lobbying the next Congress, surface numbers can be misleading. The contributions of pro-Israel political actions committees (PACs), for example, are way down. From a high in 1988 of $4.6 million, the total contributions have fallen to $1.2 million this year. The number of Jewish members of Congress drop this year from 10 Senators and 32 Congressmen in the last Congress to 9 Senators and 23 Congressmen in the next. And while the liberal social agenda shared by most American Jews is threatened in the hands of the new conservative-led Congress, the new Congress will also be more stridently pro-Israel (if that can be believed) than in the past. It is in this context that the Jewish community is actively debating the effects of the 1994 congressional elections on their ability to pursue their agenda in 1995-96.
Historically, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community has voted for Democrats, and this past election was no exception. While the national vote was split evenly (50%-50%) between the Democratic and Republican parties (due to the fact that several Democratic incumbents won by large margins, while many Republican victors won by narrow margins), the Jewish vote, on the other hand went 78% for the Democrats.
The American Jewish community has been aligned with the Democratic party largely because of the party’s social agenda: social liberalism, a commitment to civil rights, feminism, abortion rights, a redistributive tax policy, and the separation of church and state – all are major domestic concerns of the Jewish community. Many American Jewish leaders are now worried that progress already achieved on these issues may be rolled back and new progress made impossible by the more conservative leadership recently elected to Congress.
Indeed, the early initiatives calling for a constitutional amendment supporting prayer in the U.S. public school system has caused great concern among liberal Jews (and many liberal Protestant Christian denominations, as well). They fear that such an amendment would erode the separation between religion and the state which small religious minorities see as an important protection of their rights.
But while liberal Jews have historically led the community, there is a vocal and increasingly active minority of conservative Orthodox Jews who have become organized against this liberal agenda – and are now voting Republican and creating a deep fissure within the American Jewish community.
In the past, both the dominant liberal and minority conservative wings of the Jewish community were at least united on issues of foreign policy; but now, in the face of a Labor government in Israel that has made some peace with the Palestinians, there is even a rift on that question.
The more liberal Jewish leadership maintains that they have no problem with the Republican sweep of the November elections. They note a history of strong bipartisan support for Israel and its policies, a make brave public comments to that effect. AN AIPAC leader recently noted, “these guys are all friends of Israel.” But in private, these same liberal Jewish leaders express a fear that the newly elevated conservative Republican leadership in Washington and their conservative supporters in the Jewish community do not share their support for the Labor government of Israel or for the basic tenets of the peace process itself.
The Democrats who ruled Congress for 40 years consistently supported Israel, that is, whatever Israeli government was in power. At times, Congress would pursue the Israeli government’s agenda even when it directly challenged the policy of the U.S. Administration. Congress would take these actions at the behest of the powerful pro-Israel lobby which either supported their election campaigns or threatened to work against their reelections.
More often than not, the scene in Washington was one of Congress pushing and the Administration seeking to restrain excessive Congressional action – on Jerusalem, on restricting arms sales to Arab countries, or on denying aid to Arab countries – with successive Administrations feeling quite threatened by this Congressional pressure. It is this interplay that has often shaped the Middle East policy debate in the United States.
With the Republican takeover, this dynamic will be somewhat altered. There will not only be new players in leadership roles, but these new leaders in the House and Senate are driven by ideologies which are more stridently pro-Israel than their predecessors, though not necessarily tied to the Israeli government in power.
Some pro-Israel lobbyists (both liberal and conservative) are celebrating the diminished roles of some of Israel’s Democratic nemeses in Congress. No longer will Israeli policy be questioned by such Democratic committee chairman as Congressman Lee Hamilton (outgoing Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), Congressman David Obey (outgoing Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee), Senator Patrick Leahy (outgoing Chairman of the Senate Foreign Operations subcommittee), and House Majority Whip David Bonior. All of these Democrats were strongly opposed to Israeli settlement policies and, while not supported by the majority of their own party, they were frequently able to act as a thorn in Israel’s side.
Replacing this Democratic leadership will be Congressman Newt Gingrich (the new Speaker of the House who only last month cosponsored a letter to President Clinton that opposed Administration actions which – in accordance with the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles – have treated the status of Jerusalem as undetermined and argued instead that all of Jerusalem should remain solely under Israeli sovereignty), Senator Mitch McConnell (incoming Chairman of the Foreign Operations subcommittee who is also one of the largest recipients of pro-Israel PAC funds and holder one of the most pro-Israel voting records in the Senate), Senator Arlen Specter (incoming Chairman of the Technology and the Law subcommittee and founder of the anti-peace process “monitoring committee” in the Senate), Senator Robert Packwood (incoming Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the most pro-Israel member of either House of Congress) and Senator Jesse Helms (incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).
The two most central forces driving the Middle East policy debate in the Republican party today are the neoconservatives and Christian right wing. Both of these groups, while strongly allied to former President Reagan, were opponents of President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. These two forces, for different reasons, have a narrow Israel-centered view of the Middle East and are more strongly allied with the position of the Likud than with that of the Labor party of Prime Minister Rabin.
As a group, they will exert real pressure on the White House on a number of Middle East-related issues – and not only because they are Republicans who will be able to obstruct the foreign policy of a Democratic President, but also because they are not committed support the Labor government in Israel.
Senator Helms, for example, while questioning foreign aid in general (he likened it to poring money down “foreign rat holes”) had the following to say to Itamar Rabinovich, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. in a meeting just two weeks ago:
“If Israel hadn’t existed in the Middle East it would have had to be invented, because the United States could have found itself in sad shape. Anyone who wants to understand Israel’s importance to the United States needs to figure out how much the defense of the region would have rested in the Pentagon’s budget without it.”
In the Gingrich letter to the President, Jerusalem was described in the following way:
“Jerusalem is Israel’s capital – and only Israel’s capital – and that it must remain a united city under Israeli sovereignty. ....we support the action taken by the U.S. Congress to prohibit any new offices or official meetings in Jerusalem to deal with the Palestinian Authority. Jerusalem is the capital of only one country, Israel, and we urge you to implement a policy that does not in any way support a Palestinian claim to the city.”
And Senator Specter’s Peace Accords’ Monitoring Committee (PAM), whose creation was opposed by the Rabin government, succeeded in conditioning U.S. aid to the Palestinians and passing other legislation that attempts to tie the hands of the Administration with regard to Palestinian aid and to dealing with Palestinians in the city of Jerusalem.
Not only are Democrats temporarily down on the Hill, but the more traditional pro-Israel lobby (AIPAC) may also be negatively affected by the fall elections.
AIPAC has always played by the rules traditionally accepted by the mainstream of the American Jewish community – they support whatever Israeli government is in office. Since the start of the peace process, AIPAC has been challenged by an upstart group, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) which, in violation of the above-mentioned rule, has severely criticized the Labor government policies and pushed its allies in Congress to criticize or encumber the peace process with negative legislation.
While AIPAC has stated that they are confident that they can work with the new Congress, most analysts of the American Jewish community feel that the ZOA’s star is rising on Capitol Hill.
Already ZOA President Mort Klein has expressed his strong support for Senator Jesse Helms (Helms has joined the ZOA-sponsored PAM committee which the outgoing Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic senator Claiborn Pell, refused to join), and he is extremely pleased that two of his strongest allies, Senators Specter and Shelby (a former Democrat who recently switched to the Republican party) will be in a strong position to carry out his group’s agenda.
In short, the final assessment of the impact of the Republican takeover on the Jewish community is mixed:
--· the liberal Jewish social agenda will be threatened;
--· the liberal-conservative split within the American Jewish community will deepen;
--· the newly organized (and even radicalized) Orthodox Jewish community will become a force with which others will be forced to contend in U.S. politics;
--· American Jews will no longer be regarded as monolithically liberal Democrats;
--· pro-Israel PAC money and individual contributions to candidates, while still an important factor in elections, will not play as powerful a role as it has in the past. With neo-conservatives and Christian fundamentalist ideology is a more significant factor in their pro-Israel stance;
--· the peace process, as it is presently constructed, will face real challenges because the next Congress will not be inclined to give either the Democratic President or the Labor government of Israel an opportunity for a new ceremony on the White House lawn before 1996. Progress may still be made, but it will not be easy.
The results of the elections pose new difficulties to an already encumbered peace process.
Historically, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community has voted for Democrats, and this past election was no exception. While the national vote was split evenly (50%-50%) between the Democratic and Republican parties (due to the fact that several Democratic incumbents won by large margins, while many Republican victors won by narrow margins), the Jewish vote, on the other hand went 78% for the Democrats.
The American Jewish community has been aligned with the Democratic party largely because of the party’s social agenda: social liberalism, a commitment to civil rights, feminism, abortion rights, a redistributive tax policy, and the separation of church and state – all are major domestic concerns of the Jewish community. Many American Jewish leaders are now worried that progress already achieved on these issues may be rolled back and new progress made impossible by the more conservative leadership recently elected to Congress.
Indeed, the early initiatives calling for a constitutional amendment supporting prayer in the U.S. public school system has caused great concern among liberal Jews (and many liberal Protestant Christian denominations, as well). They fear that such an amendment would erode the separation between religion and the state which small religious minorities see as an important protection of their rights.
But while liberal Jews have historically led the community, there is a vocal and increasingly active minority of conservative Orthodox Jews who have become organized against this liberal agenda – and are now voting Republican and creating a deep fissure within the American Jewish community.
In the past, both the dominant liberal and minority conservative wings of the Jewish community were at least united on issues of foreign policy; but now, in the face of a Labor government in Israel that has made some peace with the Palestinians, there is even a rift on that question.
The more liberal Jewish leadership maintains that they have no problem with the Republican sweep of the November elections. They note a history of strong bipartisan support for Israel and its policies, a make brave public comments to that effect. AN AIPAC leader recently noted, “these guys are all friends of Israel.” But in private, these same liberal Jewish leaders express a fear that the newly elevated conservative Republican leadership in Washington and their conservative supporters in the Jewish community do not share their support for the Labor government of Israel or for the basic tenets of the peace process itself.
The Democrats who ruled Congress for 40 years consistently supported Israel, that is, whatever Israeli government was in power. At times, Congress would pursue the Israeli government’s agenda even when it directly challenged the policy of the U.S. Administration. Congress would take these actions at the behest of the powerful pro-Israel lobby which either supported their election campaigns or threatened to work against their reelections.
More often than not, the scene in Washington was one of Congress pushing and the Administration seeking to restrain excessive Congressional action – on Jerusalem, on restricting arms sales to Arab countries, or on denying aid to Arab countries – with successive Administrations feeling quite threatened by this Congressional pressure. It is this interplay that has often shaped the Middle East policy debate in the United States.
With the Republican takeover, this dynamic will be somewhat altered. There will not only be new players in leadership roles, but these new leaders in the House and Senate are driven by ideologies which are more stridently pro-Israel than their predecessors, though not necessarily tied to the Israeli government in power.
Some pro-Israel lobbyists (both liberal and conservative) are celebrating the diminished roles of some of Israel’s Democratic nemeses in Congress. No longer will Israeli policy be questioned by such Democratic committee chairman as Congressman Lee Hamilton (outgoing Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), Congressman David Obey (outgoing Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee), Senator Patrick Leahy (outgoing Chairman of the Senate Foreign Operations subcommittee), and House Majority Whip David Bonior. All of these Democrats were strongly opposed to Israeli settlement policies and, while not supported by the majority of their own party, they were frequently able to act as a thorn in Israel’s side.
Replacing this Democratic leadership will be Congressman Newt Gingrich (the new Speaker of the House who only last month cosponsored a letter to President Clinton that opposed Administration actions which – in accordance with the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles – have treated the status of Jerusalem as undetermined and argued instead that all of Jerusalem should remain solely under Israeli sovereignty), Senator Mitch McConnell (incoming Chairman of the Foreign Operations subcommittee who is also one of the largest recipients of pro-Israel PAC funds and holder one of the most pro-Israel voting records in the Senate), Senator Arlen Specter (incoming Chairman of the Technology and the Law subcommittee and founder of the anti-peace process “monitoring committee” in the Senate), Senator Robert Packwood (incoming Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the most pro-Israel member of either House of Congress) and Senator Jesse Helms (incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).
The two most central forces driving the Middle East policy debate in the Republican party today are the neoconservatives and Christian right wing. Both of these groups, while strongly allied to former President Reagan, were opponents of President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. These two forces, for different reasons, have a narrow Israel-centered view of the Middle East and are more strongly allied with the position of the Likud than with that of the Labor party of Prime Minister Rabin.
As a group, they will exert real pressure on the White House on a number of Middle East-related issues – and not only because they are Republicans who will be able to obstruct the foreign policy of a Democratic President, but also because they are not committed support the Labor government in Israel.
Senator Helms, for example, while questioning foreign aid in general (he likened it to poring money down “foreign rat holes”) had the following to say to Itamar Rabinovich, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. in a meeting just two weeks ago:
“If Israel hadn’t existed in the Middle East it would have had to be invented, because the United States could have found itself in sad shape. Anyone who wants to understand Israel’s importance to the United States needs to figure out how much the defense of the region would have rested in the Pentagon’s budget without it.”
In the Gingrich letter to the President, Jerusalem was described in the following way:
“Jerusalem is Israel’s capital – and only Israel’s capital – and that it must remain a united city under Israeli sovereignty. ....we support the action taken by the U.S. Congress to prohibit any new offices or official meetings in Jerusalem to deal with the Palestinian Authority. Jerusalem is the capital of only one country, Israel, and we urge you to implement a policy that does not in any way support a Palestinian claim to the city.”
And Senator Specter’s Peace Accords’ Monitoring Committee (PAM), whose creation was opposed by the Rabin government, succeeded in conditioning U.S. aid to the Palestinians and passing other legislation that attempts to tie the hands of the Administration with regard to Palestinian aid and to dealing with Palestinians in the city of Jerusalem.
Not only are Democrats temporarily down on the Hill, but the more traditional pro-Israel lobby (AIPAC) may also be negatively affected by the fall elections.
AIPAC has always played by the rules traditionally accepted by the mainstream of the American Jewish community – they support whatever Israeli government is in office. Since the start of the peace process, AIPAC has been challenged by an upstart group, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) which, in violation of the above-mentioned rule, has severely criticized the Labor government policies and pushed its allies in Congress to criticize or encumber the peace process with negative legislation.
While AIPAC has stated that they are confident that they can work with the new Congress, most analysts of the American Jewish community feel that the ZOA’s star is rising on Capitol Hill.
Already ZOA President Mort Klein has expressed his strong support for Senator Jesse Helms (Helms has joined the ZOA-sponsored PAM committee which the outgoing Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic senator Claiborn Pell, refused to join), and he is extremely pleased that two of his strongest allies, Senators Specter and Shelby (a former Democrat who recently switched to the Republican party) will be in a strong position to carry out his group’s agenda.
In short, the final assessment of the impact of the Republican takeover on the Jewish community is mixed:
--· the liberal Jewish social agenda will be threatened;
--· the liberal-conservative split within the American Jewish community will deepen;
--· the newly organized (and even radicalized) Orthodox Jewish community will become a force with which others will be forced to contend in U.S. politics;
--· American Jews will no longer be regarded as monolithically liberal Democrats;
--· pro-Israel PAC money and individual contributions to candidates, while still an important factor in elections, will not play as powerful a role as it has in the past. With neo-conservatives and Christian fundamentalist ideology is a more significant factor in their pro-Israel stance;
--· the peace process, as it is presently constructed, will face real challenges because the next Congress will not be inclined to give either the Democratic President or the Labor government of Israel an opportunity for a new ceremony on the White House lawn before 1996. Progress may still be made, but it will not be easy.
The results of the elections pose new difficulties to an already encumbered peace process.
21 nov 1994
The peace process, despite the great hopes that it engendered and its much celebrated achievements, is at a tragic impasse. It is an impasse rather than a collapse because some aspects of the process are irreversible. Instead of moving forward, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship has, to all appearances, entered a new stasis – and within that stasis the dynamic is a downward spiral.
And in this situation the Palestinians are the big losers, victims once again of the asymmetry of power that has marked their entire political history.
There is a great deal of irony in all of this, since it was the Palestinians signing of a Declaration of Principles with Israel in 1993 which opened the door and made possible the progress achieved thus far: the Israel-Jordan peace agreement, movement toward ending the Arab boycott of Israel, the expansion of Israel’s relations with Muslim nations from 2 to 14, and the historic Middle East economic summit in Casablanca.
And yet, with world attention focused on those developments, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship itself has deteriorated. It is as if energy has been mobilized toward constructing the 5th and 6th floors of a building whose foundations are unfinished and even crumbling. Or, to return to the original metaphor, Palestinians opened the door to a new Middle East, held it open for others but have not been permitted to enter themselves.
The centerpiece of the Israel-Palestinian Declaration of Principles was its “mutual recognition” of two peoples with equal rights. In the preamble to the agreement, Israel and the PLO agreed to:
“recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation….”
The implementation of these mutual rights was to be phased with each phase designed to create the confidence to enables the parties to move forward to the next phase.
Israelis expected that the process would create greater security and regional acceptance of their state, while Palestinians expected that the process would yield economic prosperity and implementation of their political rights to an independent state.
But upon entering into negotiations to implement the Declaration of Principles, the Palestinians discovered that Prime Minister Rabin lacked the political courage to apply “mutuality” as spelled out in the agreement. The optimism of the Palestinian negotiators was crushed as the Israelis continued to squeeze the Palestinians to accept less and less at each stage of the talks.
Nabil Shaath, for example, projected that the process would work despite the objections of a strong Palestinian opposition. He described how as peace expanded, Palestinians would receive the expanded benefits of peace. Opposition would dissipate and those who used violence to subvert the peace would be isolated by the larger community that would be invested in the fruits of peace. The strength of the Palestinian Authority and the strength of the peace process itself depended upon the ability to change Palestinian daily life and move Palestinians from a state of oppressive occupation to real freedom.
In this view, the Israeli quest for security and recognition is intrinsically linked with the Palestinian quest for prosperity and peace – they are two sides of the same coin. To the extent that Israel continues to control the process, to impose humiliating conditions on the Palestinian Authority, and to dominate daily life in the West Bank and Jerusalem – to that same extent will the Palestinian authority and the peace process itself lose legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinians. And to that same extent, Israelis will not achieve the security they long for, as Palestinian militants will continue to strike out against them and be supported by a frustrated and alienated Palestinian constituency.
Its is now fourteen months since the September 13th signing, and the fruits of peace are too few to maintain momentum for the process in a Palestinian population sill losing its rights.
--· Gaza still has 65% unemployment and open sewers. A recent outbreak of cholera threatens to further devastate an already fragile hope for change. Even the few thousand Palestinians who worked for poverty-level wages as day laborers in Israel have been repeatedly denied access to jobs – jobs made necessary by an Israeli policy of de-development of the West Bank and Gaza economies during its 27 years of occupation.
--· Israel has failed to offer even a minimum of confidence-building gestures to the Palestinians. The Israelis have refused to surrender even token amounts of confiscated lands or allow the digging of new wells. Palestinian prisoners (most of whom are political prisoners), instead of finding freedom, were either forced to sign humiliating statements or were freed to Jericho where they had neither family nor employment. And the Israelis continue to exercise control over too many areas of activity, which promotes a lack of public belief in the independence of the Palestinian Authority.
--· Israeli settlement-building continues unabated. Rabin’s Labor government, while pledging an end to all settlement construction as a condition of receiving U.S. loan guarantees, has, during the past two years, either completed or started construction on roughly 30,000 new housing units in the West Bank and Gaza and in the “annexed” area around East Jerusalem. Another 15,000 housing units are being planned. And with this construction comes new roads, expanded infrastructure and a stronger Israeli military presence – and reinforced Palestinian conviction that Israel has no plans to surrender land and is committed only to a peace it defines and controls.
--· East Jerusalem, the religious, cultural, economic and welfare center of Palestinian life has been virtually cut off from the rest of Palestinian society. In fact, Jerusalem has become a virtual no-man’s land. New legislation being pushed through the Israeli Knesset, which would prohibit any political meetings in Jerusalem with the Palestinian leadership, only adds further insult to existing injury.
--· The process leading to Palestinian elections has been repeatedly delayed by Israel’s concern over the Declaration of Principle’s linkage between elections and withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian cities. While elections are necessary for the legitimacy of the process and the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s concerns have once again won out, quite simply because they have the power to set the time and terms of the process.
--· And finally, World Bank funds – so vital for building infrastructure, creating jobs, and inspiring hope in the peace process – have simply not materialized on the scale needed to jumpstart the process of moving forward. While some problems of accountability and transparency remain, creative solutions to promote independently administered project-based fundraising were suggested, but no effort has yet been made to raise and expend the investment Gaza so desperately needs. And so, instead of being strengthened, the process was weakened.
The problem today is not merely episodic extremist violence or the dangerous signs of civil conflict. The more serious problem is that both Palestinians and Israelis have lost the hope they once had that real peace is possible.
Israelis may feel today more accepted in the broader Middle East, they can travel to Petra or Casablanca and attend conferences in other Arab capitals. But now they fear getting on a bus to go to the local market. An implied potential external threat has been replaced by a real internal threat. And Palestinians see their once-raised expectations dashed, and a once-revered leadership undermined and, at times, humiliated.
This is new stasis – an unraveling of hope and an expansion of anger and cynicism in both Israeli and Palestinian societies.
The fault must lie with the party in power. It was called a “peace of the brave,” but instead of seizing the moment after September 1993 and moving rapidly toward implementation of the agreement, Rabin allowed Israel’s right wing to drive his agenda. What Israel should have realized, but didn’t, was that its long-term security was dependent upon Palestinians achieving their rights. Instead of listening to Netanyahu (who advises Rabin to build a wall around Gaza and close it off) or Olmert (who is determined to deny any Palestinian role in Jerusalem), Rabin would do well to listen to Peres who recognizes that without economic opportunity and an accelerated peace process, the Palestinian Authority will remain weak and without sufficient legitimacy.
At each step in the process, Israel has hesitated or dictated rather than negotiated. Such actions have served only to weaken the Palestinian side; and so today the Palestinian Authority’s problem is not that extremists are committing acts of violence against Israel or challenging their authority in Gaza, but that these enemies of the peace process have greater mass support than they should – should have, that is, if the peace process were working and bearing fruit.
The question that now remains to be asked is, has there already been too much erosion for the peace process to be salvaged? Or has the region merely moved from one stage of conflict to another, without the just resolution that so many hoped for?
The solution, if there is one, applies a counterintuitive logic to the problem. For Israel to be more secure and for peace to be won, Rabin must take greater risks and surrender more rights and power to the Palestinians. Steps should be taken to rapidly implement the Declaration of Principles and invest the Palestinians in the process and in their leadership. Elections and Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian population centers should take place as soon as possible and without any more conditions being imposed.
Israel’s proposal for “early empowerment” is not enough. It is not enough for Palestinians to be reduced to administering the occupation – they must be given freedom, and only Israel can give that. And economic investment must be accelerated, with the international community adopting a sense of urgency in this regard.
Further, Israel should act to stop new settlements and close the more provocative settlements now. For only when Palestinians experience freedom, the benefits of peace and the hope that justice will be done can their support for the peace process and their leadership be restored. Only then can the Palestine National Authority act with legitimacy to establish order, and only then will Israelis achieve the security they hoped peace would bring.
And in this situation the Palestinians are the big losers, victims once again of the asymmetry of power that has marked their entire political history.
There is a great deal of irony in all of this, since it was the Palestinians signing of a Declaration of Principles with Israel in 1993 which opened the door and made possible the progress achieved thus far: the Israel-Jordan peace agreement, movement toward ending the Arab boycott of Israel, the expansion of Israel’s relations with Muslim nations from 2 to 14, and the historic Middle East economic summit in Casablanca.
And yet, with world attention focused on those developments, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship itself has deteriorated. It is as if energy has been mobilized toward constructing the 5th and 6th floors of a building whose foundations are unfinished and even crumbling. Or, to return to the original metaphor, Palestinians opened the door to a new Middle East, held it open for others but have not been permitted to enter themselves.
The centerpiece of the Israel-Palestinian Declaration of Principles was its “mutual recognition” of two peoples with equal rights. In the preamble to the agreement, Israel and the PLO agreed to:
“recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation….”
The implementation of these mutual rights was to be phased with each phase designed to create the confidence to enables the parties to move forward to the next phase.
Israelis expected that the process would create greater security and regional acceptance of their state, while Palestinians expected that the process would yield economic prosperity and implementation of their political rights to an independent state.
But upon entering into negotiations to implement the Declaration of Principles, the Palestinians discovered that Prime Minister Rabin lacked the political courage to apply “mutuality” as spelled out in the agreement. The optimism of the Palestinian negotiators was crushed as the Israelis continued to squeeze the Palestinians to accept less and less at each stage of the talks.
Nabil Shaath, for example, projected that the process would work despite the objections of a strong Palestinian opposition. He described how as peace expanded, Palestinians would receive the expanded benefits of peace. Opposition would dissipate and those who used violence to subvert the peace would be isolated by the larger community that would be invested in the fruits of peace. The strength of the Palestinian Authority and the strength of the peace process itself depended upon the ability to change Palestinian daily life and move Palestinians from a state of oppressive occupation to real freedom.
In this view, the Israeli quest for security and recognition is intrinsically linked with the Palestinian quest for prosperity and peace – they are two sides of the same coin. To the extent that Israel continues to control the process, to impose humiliating conditions on the Palestinian Authority, and to dominate daily life in the West Bank and Jerusalem – to that same extent will the Palestinian authority and the peace process itself lose legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinians. And to that same extent, Israelis will not achieve the security they long for, as Palestinian militants will continue to strike out against them and be supported by a frustrated and alienated Palestinian constituency.
Its is now fourteen months since the September 13th signing, and the fruits of peace are too few to maintain momentum for the process in a Palestinian population sill losing its rights.
--· Gaza still has 65% unemployment and open sewers. A recent outbreak of cholera threatens to further devastate an already fragile hope for change. Even the few thousand Palestinians who worked for poverty-level wages as day laborers in Israel have been repeatedly denied access to jobs – jobs made necessary by an Israeli policy of de-development of the West Bank and Gaza economies during its 27 years of occupation.
--· Israel has failed to offer even a minimum of confidence-building gestures to the Palestinians. The Israelis have refused to surrender even token amounts of confiscated lands or allow the digging of new wells. Palestinian prisoners (most of whom are political prisoners), instead of finding freedom, were either forced to sign humiliating statements or were freed to Jericho where they had neither family nor employment. And the Israelis continue to exercise control over too many areas of activity, which promotes a lack of public belief in the independence of the Palestinian Authority.
--· Israeli settlement-building continues unabated. Rabin’s Labor government, while pledging an end to all settlement construction as a condition of receiving U.S. loan guarantees, has, during the past two years, either completed or started construction on roughly 30,000 new housing units in the West Bank and Gaza and in the “annexed” area around East Jerusalem. Another 15,000 housing units are being planned. And with this construction comes new roads, expanded infrastructure and a stronger Israeli military presence – and reinforced Palestinian conviction that Israel has no plans to surrender land and is committed only to a peace it defines and controls.
--· East Jerusalem, the religious, cultural, economic and welfare center of Palestinian life has been virtually cut off from the rest of Palestinian society. In fact, Jerusalem has become a virtual no-man’s land. New legislation being pushed through the Israeli Knesset, which would prohibit any political meetings in Jerusalem with the Palestinian leadership, only adds further insult to existing injury.
--· The process leading to Palestinian elections has been repeatedly delayed by Israel’s concern over the Declaration of Principle’s linkage between elections and withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian cities. While elections are necessary for the legitimacy of the process and the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s concerns have once again won out, quite simply because they have the power to set the time and terms of the process.
--· And finally, World Bank funds – so vital for building infrastructure, creating jobs, and inspiring hope in the peace process – have simply not materialized on the scale needed to jumpstart the process of moving forward. While some problems of accountability and transparency remain, creative solutions to promote independently administered project-based fundraising were suggested, but no effort has yet been made to raise and expend the investment Gaza so desperately needs. And so, instead of being strengthened, the process was weakened.
The problem today is not merely episodic extremist violence or the dangerous signs of civil conflict. The more serious problem is that both Palestinians and Israelis have lost the hope they once had that real peace is possible.
Israelis may feel today more accepted in the broader Middle East, they can travel to Petra or Casablanca and attend conferences in other Arab capitals. But now they fear getting on a bus to go to the local market. An implied potential external threat has been replaced by a real internal threat. And Palestinians see their once-raised expectations dashed, and a once-revered leadership undermined and, at times, humiliated.
This is new stasis – an unraveling of hope and an expansion of anger and cynicism in both Israeli and Palestinian societies.
The fault must lie with the party in power. It was called a “peace of the brave,” but instead of seizing the moment after September 1993 and moving rapidly toward implementation of the agreement, Rabin allowed Israel’s right wing to drive his agenda. What Israel should have realized, but didn’t, was that its long-term security was dependent upon Palestinians achieving their rights. Instead of listening to Netanyahu (who advises Rabin to build a wall around Gaza and close it off) or Olmert (who is determined to deny any Palestinian role in Jerusalem), Rabin would do well to listen to Peres who recognizes that without economic opportunity and an accelerated peace process, the Palestinian Authority will remain weak and without sufficient legitimacy.
At each step in the process, Israel has hesitated or dictated rather than negotiated. Such actions have served only to weaken the Palestinian side; and so today the Palestinian Authority’s problem is not that extremists are committing acts of violence against Israel or challenging their authority in Gaza, but that these enemies of the peace process have greater mass support than they should – should have, that is, if the peace process were working and bearing fruit.
The question that now remains to be asked is, has there already been too much erosion for the peace process to be salvaged? Or has the region merely moved from one stage of conflict to another, without the just resolution that so many hoped for?
The solution, if there is one, applies a counterintuitive logic to the problem. For Israel to be more secure and for peace to be won, Rabin must take greater risks and surrender more rights and power to the Palestinians. Steps should be taken to rapidly implement the Declaration of Principles and invest the Palestinians in the process and in their leadership. Elections and Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian population centers should take place as soon as possible and without any more conditions being imposed.
Israel’s proposal for “early empowerment” is not enough. It is not enough for Palestinians to be reduced to administering the occupation – they must be given freedom, and only Israel can give that. And economic investment must be accelerated, with the international community adopting a sense of urgency in this regard.
Further, Israel should act to stop new settlements and close the more provocative settlements now. For only when Palestinians experience freedom, the benefits of peace and the hope that justice will be done can their support for the peace process and their leadership be restored. Only then can the Palestine National Authority act with legitimacy to establish order, and only then will Israelis achieve the security they hoped peace would bring.
9 sept 1994
It is one year after the handshake on the White House lawn and the peace process, while expanding in several significant directions, remains both fragile and threatened.
Some boldly claim an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and even offer lofty visions of a “new Middle East.” But before beginning to build too high, it is important to address the nagging problems that plague the process as its base.
The foundation of a successful and expanding process must be built in Gaza. Failure to pass this test can bring down the entire edifice of peace.
This is not to say that Gaza stands alone, or that peace can be built in Gaza or Jericho alone. They were to be but a first step in a dynamic process, the genius of which was that each step would lead to another. As each new step was taken successfully, confidence would be created to take the next step toward comprehensive and lasting peace.
The steps to be taken were carefully laid out. First, there was to be an enlargement of Palestinian rule and Israeli withdrawal from the remainder of the West Bank. At the end of two years, final status talks were to begin on the especially troublesome issues: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and final borders. What was understood was that as mutual trust grew, issues that today seem intractable would in two or three years be more easily resolved.
The problem, simply put, is that trust has not grown in large measure due to the intense opposition to the peace accords in both Israeli and Palestinian societies. As a result, Israeli and PLO leaderships are threatened. Their opponents have been able to drive the internal debate within their respective communities and force policies that undercut the leaders trying to make the peace process work.
An additional complicating factor is that the U.S. is also plagued by internal weaknesses and has not provided balanced and mutually reinforcing support needed by both leaderships. In the most basic sense, Israelis and Palestinians are in a bind.
What one party does to reinforce and strengthen its domestic position, only serves to weaken the other. And given the asymmetry of power in the equation, Israeli actions and policies are left to drive the process, further undermining PLO legitimacy and credibility.
Rabin, for example, plays a weak political hand in Israel today. His governing coalition holds only a slight edge over the opposition and recent polls suggest that Labor could lose the next 1996 elections. Israeli opponents of peace sense this fragility and are emboldened to latch on to each Palestinian miscue as justification to intensify their opposition to the sitting government’s pro-peace policy. Thus every Arafat sniffle produces a Rabin sneeze. Even more dismaying are the actions of Hamas, which severely threaten Rabin’s ability to hold public support for even the most basic elements of the agreement.
Rabin responds either by taking strong measures to reinforce his domestic political base or by trying to push Arafat to take further steps to build Israeli trust.
This much is understood by U.S. policymakers. What is not appreciated are the equally problematic pressures facing the PLO leadership. Arafat is vulnerable to opponents of peace as well. He, too, requires evidence of external support to build Palestinian confidence in the peace process. At best, this support has been limited. Selling a phased peace process to a much beleaguered constituency that expected and deserved much more is made even more difficult by Israel’s manner of implementation and the slow response from the international community to support the agreement in fact as well as word.
Arafat – having recognized Israel, accepted a phased solution and deferred major issues to later negotiations – had given all that he could to reassure Israel and the international community that he was sincere in pursuing peace. His expectation was that Gaza and later the entirety of the West Bank would be flooded with international investment to create jobs, opportunity, and hope. These, in turn, would generate trust and confidence in his leadership and ultimately in the peace process itself.
This critical assistance has not been immediately forthcoming, however, and one result is that Arafat has been ridiculed and subjected to constant attack and weakened to the point where he cannot respond to Israeli demands for more confidence-building measures without further risking his legitimacy among his own people. It is a vicious, self-feeding cycle.
The United States has not been nearly as helpful as it could have been in helping this process move along. What has been needed throughout were mutually reinforcing gestures in support of both Palestinian and Israeli leadership. Instead, the response has been measured doses of the same one-sided policies that plagued U.S. policy prior to September 13 a year ago.
No where has this been more true than in Congress, which this year passed a $3 billion aid package to Israel and added to it another $80 million for Russian Jewish refugees to Israel. As in past years, the aid will be delivered to Israel up front and in cash. Israel is the only U.S. aid recipient to receive its money without any accounting requirements or oversight.
The $80 million in U.S. aid to the Palestinians, on the other hand, is heavily encumbered by restrictive and even insulting amendments. While the Administration sought to block many of these Congressionally-driven amendments (with, it must be noted, the support of some key pro-Israel lobbyists), they could not overcome the traditional anti-Palestinian sentiment that rages in Congress.
One amendment to the Palestinian aid package stipulates that no U.S. assistance to the Palestinians can be spent to support Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem. Another requires that the PLO “amend its National Covenant to eliminate all references calling for the destruction of Israel.” Still another stipulates that aid to the Palestinian is conditional on the PLO “renouncing the Arab League boycott of Israel, urging the nations of the Arab League to end the boycott of Israel….and condemn individual acts of terrorism and violence.”
And unlike aid to Israel, U.S. assistance to the Palestinians does not go to the Palestinians. It is subject to the designs of the Agency of International Development’s (USAID) bureaucracy which commits it to projects of its own creation – which may or may not be Palestinian priorities. While the administration has not been pleased with this outcome, it has not been able to counter Congressional biases. This has further tied its hands in trying to support the peace process in a meaningful and dynamic way.
What has not changed in the United States is the inability of U.S. legislators to grasp that both Palestinians and Israelis took risks for peace and that, therefore, both require U.S. support in trying to advance the cause of peace.
Many in Congress and some in the Administration still act as if only Israel requires confidence-building gestures. Hence the demands that the PLO’s leadership take additional steps to “prove” their commitment to peace.
What is ignored, of course, is the destructive effect such measures could have. If Arafat, already faced with internal opposition, heavy-handed Israeli actions and a trickle of international aid, were to take such steps he might win friends in Congress but he would lose support and credibility among his own people. This is especially true because no corresponding demands are being made on Israel – such as halting all settlement activity or respecting in deed the agreement not to alter the status of Jerusalem.
A few concrete steps could be taken now to provide balanced support to both the PLO leadership and the Rabin government.
The flow of donor aid to the Palestinians must begin. It appears that creative ways are now being found to resolve the “accountability” issue. These were available months ago and the delay in providing assistance has only served to weaken support for peace. It is less expensive to support the peace process up front than it will be to pay the price of its failure at a later date.
What is troubling about the call for accountability and transparency and the use of these issues to stall aid to the Palestinians is the extent to which it reflects the traditional double standard in dealing with Palestinians. The standards demanded of the PLO are not required of Israel or many other states. For that matter, political and business practices within the United States rarely meet the standards being imposed on the PLO by the World Bank. This is not to say that demands for accountability are wrong, but administrative oversight cannot be created out of whole cloth. It, too, will take time. But assistance to earmarked projects with, if necessary, independent administrative oversight, must be an immediate priority. Economic development alone is not sufficient, but its absence could be fatal to lasting peace.
It must be reaffirmed that the status of Jerusalem is an issue for negotiations. Statements regarding the status of Jerusalem by either party must be allowed without external interference. Both parties claim Jerusalem as their capital and that is what the negotiations will be about. To censure Arafat for his statements while allowing continued Israeli references to Jerusalem as “the undivided capital of Israeli” is, at best, prejudicial to the outcome of these discussions.
What must be condemned are unilateral acts that violate the Madrid accords and prejudge the final status of the city. In this regard it is important to note that Jerusalem is not a “united” city. It is more accurate to say that East Jerusalem is a captive and divided city. Continued Israeli expansion of settlements, many miles east, north and south of the city, and road building activity, aim at isolating East Jerusalem and are violations of international law and the very agreement on which the peace process is built.
These Israeli practices together with the continued closure of Jerusalem to the rest of the Palestinian community are far more damaging to the peace process than any statement made by Arafat about Jerusalem’s status. The United States should be vigorous in insisting that these Israeli practices stop. While all parties agree that Jerusalem is a final status issue, the U.S. should convene immediate Israel-Palestinian discussions on the current circumstances of Jerusalem and an interim agreement should be sought to ensure compliance with the Madrid ground rules and secure the rights of all parties until final status talks begin.
A year ago, amid much fanfare, Palestinians and Israelis made an effort to reverse the psychology of two generations of war, massacre, pain and expulsion. It was not an easy step to take, but it was the right step to take. The international community, including the United States and much of the U.S. Congress, rallied behind the signing of the Declaration of Principles. But Middle East peace can occur only if it is based on mutual respect for the rights of all negotiating parties. Israeli sovereignty and security can be assured in a new Middle East, but only if the sovereignty and security of Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan also are assured. Israel can be a prosperous partner in a still visionary economically integrated Middle East, but this cannot come at the expense of Arabs and Palestinians.
It would be short-sighted at best to attempt to bypass the Palestinian component of Middle East peace or to see a future Middle East based on hegemony. A lasting peace can only be established on the basis of mutual respect and fairness.
If the peace process continues to stumble along as it now is – without international or U.S. support, with Israel dominating and opponents doing all they can to derail negotiations – then the peaceful outcome all of us hoped for a year ago will be jeopardized. The region might wind up with peace on paper, but the 46-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict will have been replaced by an even more volatile conflict between the impoverished and dispossessed and those governments that agreed to a “paper” rather than a real and lasting peace.
Some boldly claim an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and even offer lofty visions of a “new Middle East.” But before beginning to build too high, it is important to address the nagging problems that plague the process as its base.
The foundation of a successful and expanding process must be built in Gaza. Failure to pass this test can bring down the entire edifice of peace.
This is not to say that Gaza stands alone, or that peace can be built in Gaza or Jericho alone. They were to be but a first step in a dynamic process, the genius of which was that each step would lead to another. As each new step was taken successfully, confidence would be created to take the next step toward comprehensive and lasting peace.
The steps to be taken were carefully laid out. First, there was to be an enlargement of Palestinian rule and Israeli withdrawal from the remainder of the West Bank. At the end of two years, final status talks were to begin on the especially troublesome issues: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and final borders. What was understood was that as mutual trust grew, issues that today seem intractable would in two or three years be more easily resolved.
The problem, simply put, is that trust has not grown in large measure due to the intense opposition to the peace accords in both Israeli and Palestinian societies. As a result, Israeli and PLO leaderships are threatened. Their opponents have been able to drive the internal debate within their respective communities and force policies that undercut the leaders trying to make the peace process work.
An additional complicating factor is that the U.S. is also plagued by internal weaknesses and has not provided balanced and mutually reinforcing support needed by both leaderships. In the most basic sense, Israelis and Palestinians are in a bind.
What one party does to reinforce and strengthen its domestic position, only serves to weaken the other. And given the asymmetry of power in the equation, Israeli actions and policies are left to drive the process, further undermining PLO legitimacy and credibility.
Rabin, for example, plays a weak political hand in Israel today. His governing coalition holds only a slight edge over the opposition and recent polls suggest that Labor could lose the next 1996 elections. Israeli opponents of peace sense this fragility and are emboldened to latch on to each Palestinian miscue as justification to intensify their opposition to the sitting government’s pro-peace policy. Thus every Arafat sniffle produces a Rabin sneeze. Even more dismaying are the actions of Hamas, which severely threaten Rabin’s ability to hold public support for even the most basic elements of the agreement.
Rabin responds either by taking strong measures to reinforce his domestic political base or by trying to push Arafat to take further steps to build Israeli trust.
This much is understood by U.S. policymakers. What is not appreciated are the equally problematic pressures facing the PLO leadership. Arafat is vulnerable to opponents of peace as well. He, too, requires evidence of external support to build Palestinian confidence in the peace process. At best, this support has been limited. Selling a phased peace process to a much beleaguered constituency that expected and deserved much more is made even more difficult by Israel’s manner of implementation and the slow response from the international community to support the agreement in fact as well as word.
Arafat – having recognized Israel, accepted a phased solution and deferred major issues to later negotiations – had given all that he could to reassure Israel and the international community that he was sincere in pursuing peace. His expectation was that Gaza and later the entirety of the West Bank would be flooded with international investment to create jobs, opportunity, and hope. These, in turn, would generate trust and confidence in his leadership and ultimately in the peace process itself.
This critical assistance has not been immediately forthcoming, however, and one result is that Arafat has been ridiculed and subjected to constant attack and weakened to the point where he cannot respond to Israeli demands for more confidence-building measures without further risking his legitimacy among his own people. It is a vicious, self-feeding cycle.
The United States has not been nearly as helpful as it could have been in helping this process move along. What has been needed throughout were mutually reinforcing gestures in support of both Palestinian and Israeli leadership. Instead, the response has been measured doses of the same one-sided policies that plagued U.S. policy prior to September 13 a year ago.
No where has this been more true than in Congress, which this year passed a $3 billion aid package to Israel and added to it another $80 million for Russian Jewish refugees to Israel. As in past years, the aid will be delivered to Israel up front and in cash. Israel is the only U.S. aid recipient to receive its money without any accounting requirements or oversight.
The $80 million in U.S. aid to the Palestinians, on the other hand, is heavily encumbered by restrictive and even insulting amendments. While the Administration sought to block many of these Congressionally-driven amendments (with, it must be noted, the support of some key pro-Israel lobbyists), they could not overcome the traditional anti-Palestinian sentiment that rages in Congress.
One amendment to the Palestinian aid package stipulates that no U.S. assistance to the Palestinians can be spent to support Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem. Another requires that the PLO “amend its National Covenant to eliminate all references calling for the destruction of Israel.” Still another stipulates that aid to the Palestinian is conditional on the PLO “renouncing the Arab League boycott of Israel, urging the nations of the Arab League to end the boycott of Israel….and condemn individual acts of terrorism and violence.”
And unlike aid to Israel, U.S. assistance to the Palestinians does not go to the Palestinians. It is subject to the designs of the Agency of International Development’s (USAID) bureaucracy which commits it to projects of its own creation – which may or may not be Palestinian priorities. While the administration has not been pleased with this outcome, it has not been able to counter Congressional biases. This has further tied its hands in trying to support the peace process in a meaningful and dynamic way.
What has not changed in the United States is the inability of U.S. legislators to grasp that both Palestinians and Israelis took risks for peace and that, therefore, both require U.S. support in trying to advance the cause of peace.
Many in Congress and some in the Administration still act as if only Israel requires confidence-building gestures. Hence the demands that the PLO’s leadership take additional steps to “prove” their commitment to peace.
What is ignored, of course, is the destructive effect such measures could have. If Arafat, already faced with internal opposition, heavy-handed Israeli actions and a trickle of international aid, were to take such steps he might win friends in Congress but he would lose support and credibility among his own people. This is especially true because no corresponding demands are being made on Israel – such as halting all settlement activity or respecting in deed the agreement not to alter the status of Jerusalem.
A few concrete steps could be taken now to provide balanced support to both the PLO leadership and the Rabin government.
The flow of donor aid to the Palestinians must begin. It appears that creative ways are now being found to resolve the “accountability” issue. These were available months ago and the delay in providing assistance has only served to weaken support for peace. It is less expensive to support the peace process up front than it will be to pay the price of its failure at a later date.
What is troubling about the call for accountability and transparency and the use of these issues to stall aid to the Palestinians is the extent to which it reflects the traditional double standard in dealing with Palestinians. The standards demanded of the PLO are not required of Israel or many other states. For that matter, political and business practices within the United States rarely meet the standards being imposed on the PLO by the World Bank. This is not to say that demands for accountability are wrong, but administrative oversight cannot be created out of whole cloth. It, too, will take time. But assistance to earmarked projects with, if necessary, independent administrative oversight, must be an immediate priority. Economic development alone is not sufficient, but its absence could be fatal to lasting peace.
It must be reaffirmed that the status of Jerusalem is an issue for negotiations. Statements regarding the status of Jerusalem by either party must be allowed without external interference. Both parties claim Jerusalem as their capital and that is what the negotiations will be about. To censure Arafat for his statements while allowing continued Israeli references to Jerusalem as “the undivided capital of Israeli” is, at best, prejudicial to the outcome of these discussions.
What must be condemned are unilateral acts that violate the Madrid accords and prejudge the final status of the city. In this regard it is important to note that Jerusalem is not a “united” city. It is more accurate to say that East Jerusalem is a captive and divided city. Continued Israeli expansion of settlements, many miles east, north and south of the city, and road building activity, aim at isolating East Jerusalem and are violations of international law and the very agreement on which the peace process is built.
These Israeli practices together with the continued closure of Jerusalem to the rest of the Palestinian community are far more damaging to the peace process than any statement made by Arafat about Jerusalem’s status. The United States should be vigorous in insisting that these Israeli practices stop. While all parties agree that Jerusalem is a final status issue, the U.S. should convene immediate Israel-Palestinian discussions on the current circumstances of Jerusalem and an interim agreement should be sought to ensure compliance with the Madrid ground rules and secure the rights of all parties until final status talks begin.
A year ago, amid much fanfare, Palestinians and Israelis made an effort to reverse the psychology of two generations of war, massacre, pain and expulsion. It was not an easy step to take, but it was the right step to take. The international community, including the United States and much of the U.S. Congress, rallied behind the signing of the Declaration of Principles. But Middle East peace can occur only if it is based on mutual respect for the rights of all negotiating parties. Israeli sovereignty and security can be assured in a new Middle East, but only if the sovereignty and security of Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan also are assured. Israel can be a prosperous partner in a still visionary economically integrated Middle East, but this cannot come at the expense of Arabs and Palestinians.
It would be short-sighted at best to attempt to bypass the Palestinian component of Middle East peace or to see a future Middle East based on hegemony. A lasting peace can only be established on the basis of mutual respect and fairness.
If the peace process continues to stumble along as it now is – without international or U.S. support, with Israel dominating and opponents doing all they can to derail negotiations – then the peaceful outcome all of us hoped for a year ago will be jeopardized. The region might wind up with peace on paper, but the 46-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict will have been replaced by an even more volatile conflict between the impoverished and dispossessed and those governments that agreed to a “paper” rather than a real and lasting peace.
23 may 1994
What Should Be Done Next
Palestinian police have entered Gaza and Jericho to the jubilant welcome of Palestinian residents. The transfer of authority having taken place, the first phase of Palestinian self rule is set to begin.
The Palestinian National Authority faces difficult responsibilities in the days and months ahead, and it must design and implement major projects to repair the damage incurred under 27 years of harsh and brutal occupation. World Bank and AID projects have been proposed for major infrastructural developments in housing, road building, electrification, sanitation, etc. A master plan must be shaped that will prioritize projects and set timetables for their implementation.
But while such three to five year plans are being developed, there is a need to address some short-term needs as well. One’s vision must not be so broad or so focused on the future that immediate needs are ignored.
Unemployment in Gaza is staggeringly high, the physical environment is a mess, and for thousands of young people the only organized activities have been demonstrating and throwing stones at the Israeli military.
Resolving needs such as these will not wait for major infrastructural projects to be developed. Immediate steps must be taken to bring the unemployment problem down to a manageable level, improve the quality of life, get people invested in nation-building, and organize and direct youthful energy. Without such steps, the region will not become stable enough to allow for a peaceful transition to self rule.
There is an oft-stated aversion to public sector job creation; and most development agencies cite the well-worn mantra of “sustainable development” as the criteria for project approval. While it is true that private sector development is the key to long-term economic growth, the environment must be hospitable for such activity.
So as the long-term projects are being developed and ground is being broken for infrastructure work, and while the foreign private sector capital seeks out long-term investment opportunities in the territories, let me propose some immediate and admittedly humble public sector and public-private sector cooperative projects that would contribute to solving short-term problems and creating a more stable and hospitable environment in Gaza and Jericho.
1) The Creation of a Gaza Environmental Corps
Both the problem of unemployment and the need to clean the surface environment of Gaza could be tackled by the creation of a Gaza Environmental Corps (GEC). This entity could function somewhat like the U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the 1930’s – an emergency public works job creation program. The CCC was designed primarily to offset the massive unemployment left in the wake of the great depression, but also worked well to tackle the very serious environmental degradation in the American Midwest. But the rate of unemployment in Gaza is higher than in the U.S. at the peak of the depression, and the environmental problems are more serious.
By recruiting up to 2,000 young Palestinians, the GEC would absorb a significant number of the unemployed. It would provide them with uniforms and training to organize environmental cleanup, waste disposal, and other small clean-up projects throughout the Gaza Strip.
In addition to gainful employment (with the multiplier effect that would have on the local economy) and a cleaner, more hospitable area, this GEC would enable the residents of Gaza to restore a pride in their land and some immediate sense of improvement in their environment.
A program like the GEC must from the outset be defined as a short-term project to be replaced by whatever public works entity is created by the Palestinian National Authority. It can be assumed that within six months construction and other major infrastructure projects could be underway which will create more needed jobs.
2) Gaza-West Bank Soccer League
One of the major challenges facing the Palestinian leadership and Palestinian society in general is the absence of organized youth activities in Gaza and the West Bank. For many young people the activity of the intifada filled a void. And even now, for many, gathering in groups and throwing stones at Israeli settlers and soldiers remains their only outlet for youthful energy.
As the occupation slowly recedes, the need for organized youth activity will become even more apparent. One Palestinian academic noted, “Our children need to be given a chance to be children again. They need to go back to school and back to play.”
One of the best ways to provide that opportunity for the children of the West Bank and Gaza is to create a national West Bank-Gaza soccer league. Such an organized youth program would operate in every town and village and provide leagues and teams for different age groups. The teams would compete on their local level and in inter-community matches as well.
A proposal has been developed to provide fields, uniforms, shoes and balls for eight such community-based leagues, which would create an organized recreational program for up to 6,000 young people.
3) Creation of a Micro-Investment Fund
While major investment projects for the West Bank and Gaza have been designed by international agencies and foreign investors, the Palestinian economy as it now exists is comprised primarily of very small establishments. Of the 3,688 industrial enterprises in the West Bank and Gaza, 60% employ fewer than four workers, and only 7.5% employ more than 10 workers.
As small as they may be, these establishments are creative and dynamic and make a significant contribution to the economy of the territories. They have been able to adapt to a harsh occupation and not only succeed, but in many instances to diversify and grow. It is important, then, that as plans are developed to expand the Palestinian economy, the strength of these small-scale enterprises not be ignored. Failing to support these businesses would be detrimental not only to the economy of the West Bank and Gaza, but to the social fabric of Palestinian society as well. If Palestinians were to lose their small business sector, such a loss would negatively affect the individual entrepreneurs and initiative so important at any stage in development.
Not all of those small businesses can or will grow, but those that can require access to relatively small amounts of capital to purchase raw materials, take on additional employees, improve their product or gain access to new markets.
The local craft industry is a case in point. Long recognized as an important component of the Palestinian economy as well as in the social and cultural fabric of Palestinian society, the craft industry has fallen on hard times. In 1967 there were 3,000 individuals employed in the commercial sector of the craft industry making items from olive wood, mother of pearl, glass, etc. Today there are reportedly less than 300 so employed.
It is expected that with stability and peace there will be an increase in tourism. This, along with the new opportunities for Palestinians to export their products, will provide expanded markets for the craft industry.
To enable growth, to meet these new opportunities, and to meet the expected increased demand for their products, the small workshops that produce handicrafts need access to small amounts of capital to purchase the materials required to increase production and to bring workers back into the craft.
A micro-investment fund that would provide small, low-interest loans (or no-interest loans with payback based on the sale of the final product) would greatly enhance the prospects for this significant sector of the economy (and an important vehicle for the preservation of Palestinian history and culture) to expand and prosper.
Such a revolving micro-investment fund would play a critical role in assisting all export-related industries in Gaza and the West Bank, including the agricultural sector, where it has been estimated that a revolving fund of four million dollars could help support the export of over $25 million in agricultural exports annually.
***
Projects such as these are not intended to replace the larger and more dramatic high-impact undertakings that are envisioned by the World Bank, the Palestinian National Authority and individual Palestinian entrepreneurs. But ground-breaking for those projects is still months away – and the needs in Gaza and the West Bank are immediate.
Implementing short-term, low-cost and small-scale projects will help address realities on the ground while those larger projects are being planned, making it possible to bring the fruits of peace more quickly to thousands of Palestinians in the newly autonomous areas of Gaza and Jericho. Such projects will have an immediate impact in improving the environment, helping to create the stable and hospitable situation needed for major investors to operate in the area with confidence.
Providing opportunities for the indigenous private sector to grow will also contribute to preserving the structure of Palestinian society and give the Palestinians of Gaza and Jericho a direct personal investment in ensuring the success of the nation-building now underway.
Palestinian police have entered Gaza and Jericho to the jubilant welcome of Palestinian residents. The transfer of authority having taken place, the first phase of Palestinian self rule is set to begin.
The Palestinian National Authority faces difficult responsibilities in the days and months ahead, and it must design and implement major projects to repair the damage incurred under 27 years of harsh and brutal occupation. World Bank and AID projects have been proposed for major infrastructural developments in housing, road building, electrification, sanitation, etc. A master plan must be shaped that will prioritize projects and set timetables for their implementation.
But while such three to five year plans are being developed, there is a need to address some short-term needs as well. One’s vision must not be so broad or so focused on the future that immediate needs are ignored.
Unemployment in Gaza is staggeringly high, the physical environment is a mess, and for thousands of young people the only organized activities have been demonstrating and throwing stones at the Israeli military.
Resolving needs such as these will not wait for major infrastructural projects to be developed. Immediate steps must be taken to bring the unemployment problem down to a manageable level, improve the quality of life, get people invested in nation-building, and organize and direct youthful energy. Without such steps, the region will not become stable enough to allow for a peaceful transition to self rule.
There is an oft-stated aversion to public sector job creation; and most development agencies cite the well-worn mantra of “sustainable development” as the criteria for project approval. While it is true that private sector development is the key to long-term economic growth, the environment must be hospitable for such activity.
So as the long-term projects are being developed and ground is being broken for infrastructure work, and while the foreign private sector capital seeks out long-term investment opportunities in the territories, let me propose some immediate and admittedly humble public sector and public-private sector cooperative projects that would contribute to solving short-term problems and creating a more stable and hospitable environment in Gaza and Jericho.
1) The Creation of a Gaza Environmental Corps
Both the problem of unemployment and the need to clean the surface environment of Gaza could be tackled by the creation of a Gaza Environmental Corps (GEC). This entity could function somewhat like the U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the 1930’s – an emergency public works job creation program. The CCC was designed primarily to offset the massive unemployment left in the wake of the great depression, but also worked well to tackle the very serious environmental degradation in the American Midwest. But the rate of unemployment in Gaza is higher than in the U.S. at the peak of the depression, and the environmental problems are more serious.
By recruiting up to 2,000 young Palestinians, the GEC would absorb a significant number of the unemployed. It would provide them with uniforms and training to organize environmental cleanup, waste disposal, and other small clean-up projects throughout the Gaza Strip.
In addition to gainful employment (with the multiplier effect that would have on the local economy) and a cleaner, more hospitable area, this GEC would enable the residents of Gaza to restore a pride in their land and some immediate sense of improvement in their environment.
A program like the GEC must from the outset be defined as a short-term project to be replaced by whatever public works entity is created by the Palestinian National Authority. It can be assumed that within six months construction and other major infrastructure projects could be underway which will create more needed jobs.
2) Gaza-West Bank Soccer League
One of the major challenges facing the Palestinian leadership and Palestinian society in general is the absence of organized youth activities in Gaza and the West Bank. For many young people the activity of the intifada filled a void. And even now, for many, gathering in groups and throwing stones at Israeli settlers and soldiers remains their only outlet for youthful energy.
As the occupation slowly recedes, the need for organized youth activity will become even more apparent. One Palestinian academic noted, “Our children need to be given a chance to be children again. They need to go back to school and back to play.”
One of the best ways to provide that opportunity for the children of the West Bank and Gaza is to create a national West Bank-Gaza soccer league. Such an organized youth program would operate in every town and village and provide leagues and teams for different age groups. The teams would compete on their local level and in inter-community matches as well.
A proposal has been developed to provide fields, uniforms, shoes and balls for eight such community-based leagues, which would create an organized recreational program for up to 6,000 young people.
3) Creation of a Micro-Investment Fund
While major investment projects for the West Bank and Gaza have been designed by international agencies and foreign investors, the Palestinian economy as it now exists is comprised primarily of very small establishments. Of the 3,688 industrial enterprises in the West Bank and Gaza, 60% employ fewer than four workers, and only 7.5% employ more than 10 workers.
As small as they may be, these establishments are creative and dynamic and make a significant contribution to the economy of the territories. They have been able to adapt to a harsh occupation and not only succeed, but in many instances to diversify and grow. It is important, then, that as plans are developed to expand the Palestinian economy, the strength of these small-scale enterprises not be ignored. Failing to support these businesses would be detrimental not only to the economy of the West Bank and Gaza, but to the social fabric of Palestinian society as well. If Palestinians were to lose their small business sector, such a loss would negatively affect the individual entrepreneurs and initiative so important at any stage in development.
Not all of those small businesses can or will grow, but those that can require access to relatively small amounts of capital to purchase raw materials, take on additional employees, improve their product or gain access to new markets.
The local craft industry is a case in point. Long recognized as an important component of the Palestinian economy as well as in the social and cultural fabric of Palestinian society, the craft industry has fallen on hard times. In 1967 there were 3,000 individuals employed in the commercial sector of the craft industry making items from olive wood, mother of pearl, glass, etc. Today there are reportedly less than 300 so employed.
It is expected that with stability and peace there will be an increase in tourism. This, along with the new opportunities for Palestinians to export their products, will provide expanded markets for the craft industry.
To enable growth, to meet these new opportunities, and to meet the expected increased demand for their products, the small workshops that produce handicrafts need access to small amounts of capital to purchase the materials required to increase production and to bring workers back into the craft.
A micro-investment fund that would provide small, low-interest loans (or no-interest loans with payback based on the sale of the final product) would greatly enhance the prospects for this significant sector of the economy (and an important vehicle for the preservation of Palestinian history and culture) to expand and prosper.
Such a revolving micro-investment fund would play a critical role in assisting all export-related industries in Gaza and the West Bank, including the agricultural sector, where it has been estimated that a revolving fund of four million dollars could help support the export of over $25 million in agricultural exports annually.
***
Projects such as these are not intended to replace the larger and more dramatic high-impact undertakings that are envisioned by the World Bank, the Palestinian National Authority and individual Palestinian entrepreneurs. But ground-breaking for those projects is still months away – and the needs in Gaza and the West Bank are immediate.
Implementing short-term, low-cost and small-scale projects will help address realities on the ground while those larger projects are being planned, making it possible to bring the fruits of peace more quickly to thousands of Palestinians in the newly autonomous areas of Gaza and Jericho. Such projects will have an immediate impact in improving the environment, helping to create the stable and hospitable situation needed for major investors to operate in the area with confidence.
Providing opportunities for the indigenous private sector to grow will also contribute to preserving the structure of Palestinian society and give the Palestinians of Gaza and Jericho a direct personal investment in ensuring the success of the nation-building now underway.
16 may 1994
For at least the past two decades the mainstream of the U.S. Jewish community operated as a disciplined political force. They were largely unified in their political goals and well-coordinated in their tactics.
The three pillars that formed the base around which the major Jewish groups built their consensus were:
--· opposition to arms sales to Arab countries;
--· support for U.S. aid to Israel;
--· opposition to the PLO or any recognition of Palestinian national rights.
But events of the past four years have weakened those pillars and are threatening the consensus that forged U.S. Jewish political unity. The U.S.-Arab coalition that fought the Gulf War, the constraints on the U.S. budget, and now the Israel-PLO peace accord have all combined to create a real crisis for the leadership of the Jewish organizations. In some cases there is disarray, in other instances turmoil.
In recent months signs of this internal discord have appeared repeatedly over such issues as President Clinton’s nomination of Strobe Talbott as Undersecretary of State, the decision of the Clinton Administration of to support a UN Resolution condemning the Hebron massacre, and the Israel-PLO peace agreement.
There are a number of factors which account for each of these and other instances of discord within the American Jewish community. They are in part a reflection of the Labor-Likud split in Israel, but there is a domestic power struggle underway as well.
A principle factor in the current difficulties has been the reemergence of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) as a political power within the Jewish community. All but dead only a few years ago, the ZOA has been given a new lease on life with the election of Morton Klein, a wealthy Philadelphia businessman, as its President.
The ZOA is, in fact, an affiliate of the Likud in the World Zionist Congress. But that alone doesn’t account for its recent troublemaking. Klein, it appears, is not supporting the peace accords. He also has aspirations of being a domestic political force in Jewish American politics. So it is not surprising that Klein and the ZOA have begun to attack the Israeli government, the U.S. Administration, and the peace agreement.
What is disturbing is that their attacks have won support for the right-wing group from a number of members of Congress and several Jewish organizations. But their initial success has come at some cost. While many mainstream Jewish groups were hesitant to challenge the ZOA at first, some are now voicing their displeasure at Klein’s tactics as are leading figures in Israel’s Labor government.
Part of the difficulty that many Jewish leaders have in attacking Klein and his group is that the issues that the ZOA is raising have been central for so many years to pro-Israel thinking in the U.S. “It is,” as one liberal Jewish leader said recently, “difficult for the community to adjust its thinking overnight. Even if Rabin is working with `Arafat, how do we now start lobbying for foreign aid to the PLO?”
So when Klein attacks the Clinton Administration for the Talbott nomination (because of Talbott’s past negative comments about Israel) or its support for a UN Resolution (because of the resolution’s mention of Jerusalem as “occupied”) – he finds support from some other Jewish groups and from members of Congress who are eager to support causes favorable to pro-Israel Jewish contributors.
What complicates the picture is that in both cases the most hard-line pro-Israel group in the U.S., AIPAC, has taken the opposite position on mentioned above. AIPAC took these stands because they were in line with the positions of the government of Israel. Rabin’s government supported the nomination of Strobe Talbott and did not strenuously object to the UN Resolution as a necessary trade-off in the move toward peace.
AIPAC’s Board of Directors, as previously reported in this column, are deeply divided between traditional Washington professionals and liberals on the one side, and right-wing big-money contributors on the other. At their recent convention the AIPAC Board split on the question of U.S. support for the UN vote. Rabin’s and Clinton’s interventions were sufficient to win the group’s support for the U.S. stance. But when AIPAC President Steve Grossman, a pro-Labor liberal, announced the organizations’ decision to support the U.S. stance, he was heavily booed by the membership in attendance.
Another more recent example of the ZOA’s counter-peace strategy was in evidence in the past few weeks when a group of Congressmen, at the urging of Klein, announced the formation of a Peace Accords Monitoring Group (PAM). The purpose of PAM, according to a press release issued by its chairman, Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), will be to:
“focus on assuring that the PLO lives up to its commitments, particularly in light of the fact that the United States plans to channel $500 million in aid to the West Bank and Gaza over the next five years. Members of the PAM Group will work in Congress and through the media to call attention to both PLO violations and compliance in regard to commitments made to Israel by Yasir `Arafat.
”`Aid from the United States must not be used to build the foundation of a terrorist haven. The PLO leadership has to understand this from the outset and take specific steps to prove their deeds will match their words,’ Engel said.”
The State Department is outraged at this effort to meddle in the peace process, as are leaders in the Labor government. But the ZOA, with its big-money supporters and its ability to play into the fears of many in the Jewish community, have now secured 15 members of Congress (with more expected to join) to become members of PAM.
At a recent closed-door meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Israeli Ambassador to Washington Itamar Rabinovich, criticized such efforts which, he held, destroy the unity and discipline of the Jewish community and which meddle in the affairs of the Israeli government.
Klein did not attend the meeting. Nor would it have made a difference if he had attended since, as several Jewish commentators noted, it is precisely the intention of the ZOA to destroy the unity of the Jewish community (if that means unity in support of the peace process) and to meddle in the affairs of the Labor-led government of Israel.
At this point, several observations can be made:
AIPAC is no longer the sole pro-Israel voice in Washington. Many members of Congress would, in the past, only act on a resolution if AIPAC gave them the signal to do so. But now that AIPAC has at least come out on the record in support of the peace process, other groups like the ZOA, which reflect the fears of some in the American Jewish community and have the ability to direct organized money in the political process, have attained the ability to get members of Congress to do their bidding. This attack from the right has, in turn, weakened AIPAC’s influence and forces the lobby to be even more cautious in its support for the peace process.
So, for the foreseeable future, it can be expected that Congress and pro-Israel forces in Washington will continue to make life difficult for the PLO and the peace process. In doing so, they will not only be running afoul of the wishes of the State Department, but even the wishes of the government of Israel.
Organized Jewish dissent against the policies of the government of Israel is not an entirely new phenomenon. During the period when Likud led the government of Israel, Americans for Peace Now regularly opposed the settlement policy (even to the point of supporting George Bush’s decision to withhold the loan guarantees in 1991). But opposition from the left was never as strong as this new opposition from the right and the growing movement of Jewish opponents to the Labor government present a real problem to supporters of peace.
Many in the Jewish community place blame for this on the Labor Party itself. They note how effective Likud was during the past 12 years in courting the American Jewish leadership and how unconcerned Labor seems to be making an effort to win them back.
So while Jewish dissent against the government of Israel is not new, it is novel that the organized dissent is so powerful and influential (and monied). This has inhibited some Jewish groups from being more outspoken in support of peace.
While the American Jewish Committee recently visited the Palestine Information Office in Washington and Americans for Peace Now recently sponsored a press conference with the National Association of Arab Americans, the President of Americans for Peace Now recently noted, “While several American Jewish groups have a general stance supporting the peace process, they have not put their resources behind that stance like they have done with other issues, like foreign aid and arms sales.”
***
While Arab Americans are struggling with the issues of peace and how to respond to the new circumstances created by the peace process, it is important to see that the same debate is also taking place within the Jewish community. Playing on old fears and muttering old slogans is always easier to do than creating new realities. In politics, fear is a more effective organizing force than hope.
What is clear, however, is that for peace to work, a constituency for peace must develop. In its absence and in the absence of an aggressive campaign by leaders who support peace, those who seek to take advantage of old fears will find an open playing field on which to play, and on which they will win support.
This is the challenge facing not only Arab Americans but also Jewish Americans. Since the power of the Jewish community is at this point greater than ours and since, correspondingly, so is their ability to disrupt or even stymie the peace process, their responsibility to support it is that much greater as well.
The three pillars that formed the base around which the major Jewish groups built their consensus were:
--· opposition to arms sales to Arab countries;
--· support for U.S. aid to Israel;
--· opposition to the PLO or any recognition of Palestinian national rights.
But events of the past four years have weakened those pillars and are threatening the consensus that forged U.S. Jewish political unity. The U.S.-Arab coalition that fought the Gulf War, the constraints on the U.S. budget, and now the Israel-PLO peace accord have all combined to create a real crisis for the leadership of the Jewish organizations. In some cases there is disarray, in other instances turmoil.
In recent months signs of this internal discord have appeared repeatedly over such issues as President Clinton’s nomination of Strobe Talbott as Undersecretary of State, the decision of the Clinton Administration of to support a UN Resolution condemning the Hebron massacre, and the Israel-PLO peace agreement.
There are a number of factors which account for each of these and other instances of discord within the American Jewish community. They are in part a reflection of the Labor-Likud split in Israel, but there is a domestic power struggle underway as well.
A principle factor in the current difficulties has been the reemergence of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) as a political power within the Jewish community. All but dead only a few years ago, the ZOA has been given a new lease on life with the election of Morton Klein, a wealthy Philadelphia businessman, as its President.
The ZOA is, in fact, an affiliate of the Likud in the World Zionist Congress. But that alone doesn’t account for its recent troublemaking. Klein, it appears, is not supporting the peace accords. He also has aspirations of being a domestic political force in Jewish American politics. So it is not surprising that Klein and the ZOA have begun to attack the Israeli government, the U.S. Administration, and the peace agreement.
What is disturbing is that their attacks have won support for the right-wing group from a number of members of Congress and several Jewish organizations. But their initial success has come at some cost. While many mainstream Jewish groups were hesitant to challenge the ZOA at first, some are now voicing their displeasure at Klein’s tactics as are leading figures in Israel’s Labor government.
Part of the difficulty that many Jewish leaders have in attacking Klein and his group is that the issues that the ZOA is raising have been central for so many years to pro-Israel thinking in the U.S. “It is,” as one liberal Jewish leader said recently, “difficult for the community to adjust its thinking overnight. Even if Rabin is working with `Arafat, how do we now start lobbying for foreign aid to the PLO?”
So when Klein attacks the Clinton Administration for the Talbott nomination (because of Talbott’s past negative comments about Israel) or its support for a UN Resolution (because of the resolution’s mention of Jerusalem as “occupied”) – he finds support from some other Jewish groups and from members of Congress who are eager to support causes favorable to pro-Israel Jewish contributors.
What complicates the picture is that in both cases the most hard-line pro-Israel group in the U.S., AIPAC, has taken the opposite position on mentioned above. AIPAC took these stands because they were in line with the positions of the government of Israel. Rabin’s government supported the nomination of Strobe Talbott and did not strenuously object to the UN Resolution as a necessary trade-off in the move toward peace.
AIPAC’s Board of Directors, as previously reported in this column, are deeply divided between traditional Washington professionals and liberals on the one side, and right-wing big-money contributors on the other. At their recent convention the AIPAC Board split on the question of U.S. support for the UN vote. Rabin’s and Clinton’s interventions were sufficient to win the group’s support for the U.S. stance. But when AIPAC President Steve Grossman, a pro-Labor liberal, announced the organizations’ decision to support the U.S. stance, he was heavily booed by the membership in attendance.
Another more recent example of the ZOA’s counter-peace strategy was in evidence in the past few weeks when a group of Congressmen, at the urging of Klein, announced the formation of a Peace Accords Monitoring Group (PAM). The purpose of PAM, according to a press release issued by its chairman, Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), will be to:
“focus on assuring that the PLO lives up to its commitments, particularly in light of the fact that the United States plans to channel $500 million in aid to the West Bank and Gaza over the next five years. Members of the PAM Group will work in Congress and through the media to call attention to both PLO violations and compliance in regard to commitments made to Israel by Yasir `Arafat.
”`Aid from the United States must not be used to build the foundation of a terrorist haven. The PLO leadership has to understand this from the outset and take specific steps to prove their deeds will match their words,’ Engel said.”
The State Department is outraged at this effort to meddle in the peace process, as are leaders in the Labor government. But the ZOA, with its big-money supporters and its ability to play into the fears of many in the Jewish community, have now secured 15 members of Congress (with more expected to join) to become members of PAM.
At a recent closed-door meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Israeli Ambassador to Washington Itamar Rabinovich, criticized such efforts which, he held, destroy the unity and discipline of the Jewish community and which meddle in the affairs of the Israeli government.
Klein did not attend the meeting. Nor would it have made a difference if he had attended since, as several Jewish commentators noted, it is precisely the intention of the ZOA to destroy the unity of the Jewish community (if that means unity in support of the peace process) and to meddle in the affairs of the Labor-led government of Israel.
At this point, several observations can be made:
AIPAC is no longer the sole pro-Israel voice in Washington. Many members of Congress would, in the past, only act on a resolution if AIPAC gave them the signal to do so. But now that AIPAC has at least come out on the record in support of the peace process, other groups like the ZOA, which reflect the fears of some in the American Jewish community and have the ability to direct organized money in the political process, have attained the ability to get members of Congress to do their bidding. This attack from the right has, in turn, weakened AIPAC’s influence and forces the lobby to be even more cautious in its support for the peace process.
So, for the foreseeable future, it can be expected that Congress and pro-Israel forces in Washington will continue to make life difficult for the PLO and the peace process. In doing so, they will not only be running afoul of the wishes of the State Department, but even the wishes of the government of Israel.
Organized Jewish dissent against the policies of the government of Israel is not an entirely new phenomenon. During the period when Likud led the government of Israel, Americans for Peace Now regularly opposed the settlement policy (even to the point of supporting George Bush’s decision to withhold the loan guarantees in 1991). But opposition from the left was never as strong as this new opposition from the right and the growing movement of Jewish opponents to the Labor government present a real problem to supporters of peace.
Many in the Jewish community place blame for this on the Labor Party itself. They note how effective Likud was during the past 12 years in courting the American Jewish leadership and how unconcerned Labor seems to be making an effort to win them back.
So while Jewish dissent against the government of Israel is not new, it is novel that the organized dissent is so powerful and influential (and monied). This has inhibited some Jewish groups from being more outspoken in support of peace.
While the American Jewish Committee recently visited the Palestine Information Office in Washington and Americans for Peace Now recently sponsored a press conference with the National Association of Arab Americans, the President of Americans for Peace Now recently noted, “While several American Jewish groups have a general stance supporting the peace process, they have not put their resources behind that stance like they have done with other issues, like foreign aid and arms sales.”
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While Arab Americans are struggling with the issues of peace and how to respond to the new circumstances created by the peace process, it is important to see that the same debate is also taking place within the Jewish community. Playing on old fears and muttering old slogans is always easier to do than creating new realities. In politics, fear is a more effective organizing force than hope.
What is clear, however, is that for peace to work, a constituency for peace must develop. In its absence and in the absence of an aggressive campaign by leaders who support peace, those who seek to take advantage of old fears will find an open playing field on which to play, and on which they will win support.
This is the challenge facing not only Arab Americans but also Jewish Americans. Since the power of the Jewish community is at this point greater than ours and since, correspondingly, so is their ability to disrupt or even stymie the peace process, their responsibility to support it is that much greater as well.
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